FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



hours* duration, with a single tremendous thun- 

 der-clap in the midst, which drove three young 

 fellows into the hotel-office breathless with a tale 

 of how the lightning had played right about their 

 heads till almost they gave themselves up for dead 

 men ; and when the clouds broke away little by lit- 

 tle shortly before sunset, the shifting views of the 

 canon, the falls, and the mountain summits near 

 and far, were such as put one or two amateur 

 photographers fairly beside themselves, and drove 

 the rest of us to silence or to rapturous exclama- 

 tion according as the powers had made us of the 

 quiet or the noisy kind. Whatever we poor mor- 

 tals made of it, it was a wondrous show. 



Thrice I went to the top of Sentinel Dome 

 (eighty-one hundred feet), an easy jaunt from the 

 hotel, though just at this time, while attempting 

 it in treacherous weather, with the trail, if there 

 be one, buried under the winter snow, a young 

 tourist became bewildered and lost his life — van- 

 ished utterly, as if the earth had swallowed him. 

 The prospect from the summit is magnificent, if 

 inferior, as I think it is, to that from the hotel 

 piazza ; and the place itself is good to stand on : 

 one of those symmetrical, broadly rounded, naked 

 granite domes, so highly characteristic of the 

 Sierras, and of which so many are to be seen 

 from any point upon the Valley rim. Some 

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