120 
who “never saw a glacier in the life,” 
was the glacial origin of the Yosemite 
and kindred gorges. On one occasion, 
when my companion was a colleague in- 
terested in mechanical subjects, the con- 
versation turned all upon inventions, 
and Muir brought out the remnants of 
the celebrated machine for facilitating 
early rising, described in his autobio- 
graphical volume. I remember that we 
had that day propelled our bicycles the 
ninety odd miles from Stanford Univer- 
sity to the Alhambra Valley, and the 
exhausted flesh quenching the spirit, 
I was obliged to interrupt our host early 
in the wee sma’ hours. I have no doubt 
he would have talked all night and would 
in the morning have been as fresh as 
Socrates after the Symposium. Last 
August, I chanced early in the conversa- 
tion to ask him why the prairies of the 
Middle West were treeless, since it is 
proved that trees flourish there. To 
answer that question he took an hour or 
more, talking freely with great wealth 
of detail and illustration, but without 
diffuseness. He liked also to give long 
accounts of his great journey round the 
world, when he visited the Himalaya, 
Australia, Africa, Chili, all apparently 
with the guiding purpose of studying 
certain kinds of trees. 
Perhaps the secret of his pleasure in 
narrating episodes of his life is to be 
found in the illusion of living over again, 
feeling the thrill of past emotion, sensing 
As he 
revisited in the light of vivid memory 
beautiful 
the flow of spent springs of joy. 
landscapes and memorable 
places, he carried along with him the 
sympathetic listener, who received much 
of the delight and profit of travel with- 
out expense, without fatigue, and with- 
out that sense of wasted time which the 
traveler suffers in the dreary intervals of 
waiting and transit. What was told was 
so interesting in subject and manner that 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
one did not think until afterward of the 
wonderful qualities of the teller — his 
alertness and flexibility of thought, his 
photographic memory, his wit and poetic 
imagination, his selfless regard for what- 
ever seemed true to him — his scorn, too, 
for the man who, having knowledge of 
the truth, stoops for a mean end to flatter 
the public with the falsehood for which 
poor human beings chiefly crave. De- 
spite his fullness of talk and the unusual 
remoteness of his interests from those 
which, unhappily, chiefly claim our solici- 
tude, I never found him either tedious or 
garrulous. Simple and almost childlike 
as he seemed, the hearer felt, upon reflec- 
tion, that in this simplicity was the most 
cunning refinement of art. I used to 
fancy that he used conversation as a 
means of shaping his material and trying 
out his effects for composition. One 
was struck with the masterly way in 
which he handled long and complicated 
sentences, whose members would fall into 
line with the precision of a well-trained 
military company after the confusion 
of a sudden change of face. Finally, 
his vocabulary was choice and arresting; 
to slang he never needed to descend to 
produce a telling effect; his talk had 
none of the cheap devices by which we 
Americans are especially prone to seem 
witty at no expense to ourselves. He 
was indeed saturated with the homely 
proverbial wisdom of Scotland and with 
the wit and satire of Burns, and loved 
to lighten his discourse with them; but 
he never stooped to any hackneyed or 
vulgar phrase. 
In the high Sierra there are trails which 
lead along the axis of the range, sweep- 
ing in great curves far back toward the 
river-heads in order to avoid the deeper 
gorges, in places climbing nearly level 
with the snow-line up where the hardy 
pines crouch on _ all-fours —nay, all- 
twenties, all-hundreds — as if to provide 
