But what unmitigated roughness it was in reality -this campaign in the Sierras of California and Nevada !-how merciless and invariable was the gruff order of the commandant to "turn out" on the frozen mornings, almost before the sun himself had turned out of his bath in the Atlantic, and while he had yet nearly the whole breadth of the continent to bend himself over; how tantalizing and unsatisfactory was the mess of bacon and bread set forth from day to day, with no other apology or credential than the fact that it was 'army rations;" how dreary the marches occasionally were when the roads and trails were loaded with dust, or worse, with mud; and how irresistibly charming the cigar and the outlook which we are now enjoying were in prospective !

The illusions of retrospect and prospectiveness aside, however, the indisputable fact remains that a Government surveyor's life in the far West is one of almost incredible severity. Cameron, in the African desert, had a more comfortable outfit than we had. An oil-cloth spread on the ground for our table, chairs and tables being dispensed with; a small shelter or "dog" tent for a covering in stormy weather, and the sky itself for a canopy in fine; a sponge, a tooth-brush, and a soap-box, rolled up in the blankets for toilet service, with possibly, in some cases, a few inches of looking-glass and a pocketcomb added; the imperative necessity of doing everything for one's self, from the grooming of one's mule to the making of one's bed; the transposition of all ordinary conditions, and the subversion of one's independence to a sharp system of military discipline these are some of the hardships which the hundreds of young men who importune Lieutenant Wheeler for positions on his survey might expect should their applications meet with a favorable

response.

Per contra are the enjoyments, of which I have already mentioned a few-the invigoration of outdoor life, the anti-dyspeptic atmosphere, and the freedom from conventional restraints. The satisfaction of sprawling under a pine-tree after supper, with no clothes to spoil, and no ceremonies to observewith a brave day's work done, and a sound night's sleep ahead to a certainty-is compensation for much misery. There are not many chances for sport; and unless the game intrudes itself in the neighborhood of camp, or across the trail, one may carry a carbine and a shot-gun on his saddle for weeks without finding an opportunity to use either. The professional zoologist who accompanies the party usually has a monopoly of the hunting expeditions; and when

one small trout has been the result of an hour's an

gling by a brook or lake side, the same individual has inconsiderately bottled it in alcohol for the Smithsonian, to the great dissatisfaction of a mess surfeited with unimaginable grease. Occasionally the game is abundant, and then, if the cook knows his business, we fare better. But the principal recompense for the hardships is the opportunity afforded for intimate communication with Nature.

Last year one of Lieutenant Wheeler's parties had an area to survey which included the most im

portant of the Alpine lakes in the mountainous boundary of Nevada and California-among others being the largest of all, Lake Tahoe, which is embosomed at a height of over six thousand feet among a snowclad chain of sharply-accentuated peaks. A little passenger-steamer, named the Governor Stanford, makes the round of the lake daily in summer-a distance of about sixty miles-and the tourists who patronize her imagine, after thus skimming its surface, that they have seen Tahoe. What utter fatuity!

We were encamped upon its shores for nearly two months, in a mellow September and in a threatening October. We followed all its many indentations, now building our camp-fires near a grassy flat, upon which teal, mallard, and canvas-backs, were plentiful; then on the edge of a cliff, crowded by the lusty pines; then on one of the neighboring peaks, from which the panorama of the lake and its frame of evergreens was complete; and, finally, on a strip of really golden sand, interwoven with a mosaic of agates and carnelians.

Each day-the wet days, which played andantes on the roofs of our tents; the hazy days, when the air seemed to be surcharged with fine particles of gold; and the clear days, when atmosphere and space together were annihilated-every day revealed a new charm; but the charms were not measured by the days, nor even by the hours; the changes of light from the warming amber of morning to the transcendent strength of noon, and from the mild ardor of four o'clock to the fever of sunset, wrought transformations in color and sometimes in form with such variety that Nature herself seemed to be transformed into a teller of stories more poetic and fertile than the dark author of the "Arabian Nights."

A terrible clamor is often turned against artists because this or that point in the mathematical topography of their landscapes does not coincide with the critic's personal idea of it. "It is not true," cries Sir Fretful, because the artist has seen the object portrayed in a different light, and possibly from another point of view than that from which he has seen it. Let us force art into the smallest corner of literality, however, and never say a word about the relative meritoriousness of the man who paints like Turner and the man who paints like a photographer-the fact remains that Nature herself varies, and that fact was never before so strongly impressed upon us as it was by the countless possibilities of dissimilar interpretation shown in the protean revelations of Lake Tahoe.

From an outfitting camp at Carson we crossed the eastern divide of the Sierras, and made our sec ond camp at Glenbrook, which is the largest of the six settlements on the shore of the lake, the others being named Rowland's, Tallac, McKinney's, Tahoe City, and Hot Springs. Glenbrook also fixes itself in one's memory as a temperance town, the only one, except Greeley, Colorado, that I remember finding west of the one hundredth meridian; but immediately outside the municipal limits of Glenbrook is Spooner's Ranch, to which the lumbermen ride over

seems to have fastened for eternity; and, standing upon the foot-hills, we hear the sibilant grind of the saw-mills, the crash of axes, and the dull reverberations of the blast. Following one of the many devious wagon-roads-one out of use, for instancewe come to a great gap, where a deserted cabin and a curious litter of chips and shavings represent a forest sacrificed; following another road still in use, we discover the lumbermen at work carrying the havoc farther.

On one side of Lake Tahoe a steam railway several miles long is used exclusively in the transportation of logs to the shore; the logs are towed in immense rafts across the water to Glenbrook, where they pass through the saw-mills; and thence another steam railway, also used exclusively in the lumber service, extends to the summit of the divide. Down the eastern slope of the mountains, leading to the Carson River, flumes twenty and thirty miles long are carried over valleys and ravines on high trestlework bridges, and the wood is floated through them over another stage of its journey toward the mines.

One morning as I was riding through the Truckee Cañon, a great wave and a cloud of spray leaped from the river into the air some distance in front of me. I went a few paces farther, when, by the merest chance, my eye caught what was intended to be a sign the lid of a baking-powder box tacked to a pine-stump, and inscribed with dubious letters, "Look out for the logs!" In which direction the logs were to be looked out for was not intimated, and I paused a moment in uncertainty as to whether security depended on my standing still or advancing. Suddenly my mule shied round, and a tremendous pine-log, eighty or one hundred feet long and about five feet in diameter, shot down the almost perpendicular wall of the cañon into the river, raising another wave and an avalanche of spray.

This was to me a new phase of the lumber industry. A wide, strong, V-shaped trough, bound with ribbons of iron which had been worn to a silvery brightness by the friction, was laid down the precipice; and out of sight on the plateau above some men were felling the trees, which they conveyed to the river in the expeditious manner aforesaid.

On another morning a runaway mule caused us a wild chase over a range of hills wholly cleared of trees and dotted with forlorn cabins, which had been successively abandoned as the lumbermen had moved from camp to camp. While the Comstock lode continues to yield its enormous treasure, the denudation will continue, and whoever knows how beautiful the shores of Lake Tahoe are must regret that they have not been reserved, like the Yellowstone and Yosemite valleys, as a national park.

The pines are dominant, and cover a good deal of space with their melancholy mantle; but the most beautiful of all trees is the quaking aspen, which is as truly heaven's own green as a midsummer sky is heaven's own blue. With a small, oval, tremulous leaf, and a silver-gray bark, it is not unlike the cottonwood of the river-bottoms; its boughs are as elastic as cane, and switch the horseman mercilessly as he presses among them, and at the tenderest touch of the wind the boughs and leaves shake and rustle in the greatest perturbation, so that the whole tree seems to be dissolving in a shower of emeralds.

The green of the willow is not so vivid, and, next to the luxuriant aspen, it appears to be frosted with white, but it is light in comparison with the ponderous firs and pines, which look forbiddingly on the small oases of arborescent vegetation that edge their gloomy precincts. Then there are two shrubs which occur in company, and which remind us of an erubescent country-girl and a pallid old man-the manzanita, with its bunches of ruby berries, thick, olive, smooth-surfaced leaves, and polished, redbrown stalk; and the white-thorn that clings to the earth in ghostly leaves and branches, and that presents an obstacle in its toughness quite out of proportion to its size. The oaks are small and pliant, and are not numerous. Sometimes, when the wall of the lake is a perpendicular cliff, as at Emerald Bay, and a level margin of swamp extends from the rock to the water, a soft undergrowth is found, and grasses, vines, and shrubs, spring out of the oozy soil with a profuseness not usual in so cold a zone as that of the Sierras.

ter.

There are several peaks of important altitude around the lake, the largest being Job's or Freel's, in the southeast corner, and the dazzling reflections of their snows extend in white pathways over the waBut there is one in the southwest corner, not imposingly high, which, in grandeur of color and form, surpasses all the others, and which indelibly impressed itself on the minds of some members of our party, who had been up and down the Rocky Mountains from the Black Hills to Mount Taylor, as the most ideally picturesque of all the peaks they had seen. It is a basaltic pyramid, recalling, by a

transverse fissure on its face which retains the snow all the year round, the Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado. Its own color is olivine, but a variety of shrubs and lichens have given it a dozen other tints and more positive hues. I shall never forget how it appeared to me one stormy afternoon while our camp lay almost under its shadow. A mist lowered, and dragged with it a curtain of the leaden gray that had gathered in every direction overhead, and as it was settling the filigree of snow on the dark rock looked like the figures in a lace. But as the misty folds were drawn closer, every vestige of the massive basaltic peak seemed to dissolve in a pale monotone, and the boundary of the lake slowly disappeared peak by peak, until all I could see from the grove of pines in which I stood was an apparently limitless sea dim

ness.

when I again looked out the weather was clearing,

and the sun streamed in broad, coppery shafts through the clefts in the western mountains. Some snow had fallen on the peak, and in contrast with this brilliant whiteness were a few roseate shreds of cloud. It was an unusual combination of color. The mountains in the north were dark and chilly, their outlines metamorphosed in a stratum of vapor; and those on the eastern side of the lake were purple, and the purple was changing to a ruddier hue as the sun sank farther down into the west. A rift in the cloud opened a sea of deep blue environed by a shore of desolate gray, and floods of an uncommon yellow light, with a tinge of red in it, struck through the cañon leading from the west.

Tallac Peak, as this mountain is called, descends apparently into Lake Tahoe, but in reality descends into another lake-the Lake of the Fallen Leaf-which is about one hundred and twenty feet higher than the former, and about seven miles in circumference. The intervening land is half swamp and half chaparral, except near the borders of the lakes, where it is densely wooded.

The Governor Stanford calls at Tallac Landing daily in summer, and a good carriage-road leads thence to Gillmore's Soda Springs, which are at the foot of the Peak. There are settlements at the Springs and at the steamboat-landing, including at the latter place the hostelry of "Yank" Clements, a celebrity in the neighborhood, who is the original of Mr. Clarence King's clever sketch of "The Newtys of Pike."

Yank emigrated from the Green Mountains to Nevada when Lake Tahoe was scarcely more familiar to geographers than the Victoria N'yanza, and delights in recounting to visitors his early experiences, which he does with many amusing peculiarities of phrase and gesture. "I civilized the Indians, sir;

yes, sir, and taught 'em Christianity! When I came here, sir, a man's life wasn't worth shucks, sir; when they didn't kill, they stole, the dog-gorned cusses ! I taught 'em to be honest, sir. The first son of a gun I found stealing, sir, I tied him up to a tree and whipped like -! Yes, sir!" With tremendous volubility he delivers each sentence, and

then draws back with arched eyebrows to observe the effect on the hearer. He is a man of great foresight and prodigious plans. He took me by the arm one day, and pointed mysteriously to a giant pinetree in front of his house. "See that, sir? I'm going to build a grotto in them highest branches;

DONNER LAKE.

outlook on the lake, sir! A fish-pond with a little Coopid jerkin' water down here; a billiard-table and a pe-an-er in the house. I don't fancy pe-aners much; there's too much tum-tum about 'em. Give me a fiddle; but we're goin' to have one-yes, sir! Nicest place on the lake, sir!" He invariably winds up with this declaration, and no one can go