i88oj In San Francisco 



he passed away long before my own visit to Vailima 

 to reach which (as he wrote to J. M. Barrie) 

 "one must take the boat at San Francisco, then 

 my place is the second on the left." 



We did, however, make the acquaintance of 

 John Muir, a young Scot, a graduate of Wisconsin, 

 who had lived for some time in Indianapolis where 

 he had been an intimate friend of our friend, Cath- 

 erine Merrill. Coming afterward to California, he 

 established himself in the Yosemite Valley while 

 there were still very few who knew anything of the 

 grandeur and glory of that incomparable gorge. 

 When we met him he had recently emerged from 

 several years of hermithood, to be received with 

 marked appreciation as a result of his delightful 

 essays on the High Sierra. He had also recently 

 married, and had acquired a large ranch near 

 Martinez, where he spent the greater part of his 

 later life. Simple-hearted and enthusiastic, pos- 

 sessed of a finely attuned mind, he impressed his 

 personality strongly and without effort upon others. 

 James Bryce, his countryman by blood, seems to 

 me much the same type of man. When Bryce was 

 British Ambassador at Washington, he visited Cali- 

 fornia and became acquainted with Muir, whom he 

 cordially admired. 



During our stay in San Francisco we met the "Joe" 

 leaders in the State University at Berkeley, especially LeConte 

 the president, John L. Le Conte, and his brilliant 

 and devoted brother, Joseph, who occupied the 

 chair of Natural History, and of whom I shall have 

 more to say hereafter. Naturally, also, we were 

 closely associated with the workers in the Academy 

 of Sciences, which then occupied a basement on the 



C 



