298 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



swells of the Sierra Xevada, and entered a country 

 less luxuriantly fertile than the Stockton Yalley, and 

 met with numerous monuments of the old " placer " 

 diggings in the shape of " flumes," or wooden aque- 

 ducts for bringing water to the mines, and flats where 

 thickly-massed boulders of granite and quartz, un- 

 covered by the miners' work, told of streams which 

 ran there in times gone by, and brought down the 

 golden gravel discovered in the ancient bed. As 

 night closed in we passed through the town of 

 Sonora, and six miles more brought us to Columbia, 

 where we stayed the night at a rough hotel, kept by 

 a Welshman named Morgan. 



As the stage did not run beyond this, we hired a 

 buggy and pair and drove over to " Murphy's," a 

 mining town thirteen miles distant, and thencefor- 

 ward through a picturesque hilly country, where 

 grew in scattered clusters many species of pine, the 

 arbutus, and white jessamine, with evergreen oaks, 

 whose boughs bore numerous branches of mistletoe. 

 The road wound higher and higher up the slopes of the 

 Sierra Nevada, and at dusk we reached the valley of 

 the Mammoth Tree Grove, 4000 feet above the sea. 

 The weather continued fine and the sky cloudless, 

 but at this height the evening air was sharp and 

 frosty, and a thin carpet of snow covered the ground. 

 After a short drive through a forest of lofty pines, 

 we came in sight of the hotel ; and 100 yards in 

 front of it, guarding on each side the entrance to 



