arises, monstrous and awful in its proportions; spurning the very earth that crumbles at its very base as it towers to heaven.  The vapors of the air cleave to its massive front.  The passing cloud is caught and torn in the grand carvings of its capitals.  Gaze upon it in the solemnity of its sunlit surface.  Impressive, impassive, magnetic; having a pulse and the organs of life almost; terrible as the forehead of a god.  The full splendor of the noonday can not belittle it, night can not compass it.  The moon is paler in its presence and wastes her lamp, the stars are hidden and lost over and beyond it.  Across the face of it is borne forever the shadowy semblance of a swift and flying figure.  Despair and desperation are in the nervous energy depicted in this marvelous medallion.  Surely, the Indian may look with a degree of reverence upon that picture, painted by the morning light, fading in the meridian day, and gone altogether by evening.  A grand etching of colossal proportions, representing the great chief Tutochanula in his mysterious flight.  The Wandering Jew might look upon it and behold his traditional beard and flowing robes blown here by the winds in the rapidity of his desperate haste.  It is the last one sees of the valley, as it is the last any have seen of Tutochanula.  He fled into the west, cycles ago, and I follow him now into the west, nest-building, and getting into the shadow and resting after the door of the mountain is passed, and my soul no longer beats impetuously against those stormy walls.

With uncovered head, having nothing between me and Saturn, wiser, I trust, for my intercourse with these masters, purer in heart and holier for my prolonged vigil, with careful and reverential steps I pass out of Yosemite shadows.

AN AFFAIR OF THE MISTY CITY

I.

WHAT THE MOON SHONE ON

She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered vaguely through folds of scurrying fog.  She shone upon a silent street that ran up a moderate hill between far-scattered corporation gas-lamps—­a street that having reached the hill top seemed to saunter leisurely across a height which had once been the most aristocratic quarter of the Misty City; the quarter was still pathetically respectable, and for three squares at least its handsome residences stared destiny in the face and stood in the midst of flower-bordered lawns, unmindful of decay.  Its fountains no longer played; even its once pampered children had grown up, and the young of the present generation were of a different cast; but the street seemed not to heed these changes; indeed it was growing a little careless of itself and needed replanking.  Was it a realization of this fact, I wonder, that caused it on a sudden to run violently down a steep place into the Bay, as if it were possessed of Devils?  Well it might be, for the human scum of the town gathered about the base of the hill, and the nights there were unutterably iniquitous.