ON FOOT IN THE YOSEMITE 



lights and shadows favored me to an extraordi- 

 nary degree, and I realized anew how fond I am, 

 and have been ever since a winter on the Arizona 

 Desert, with the Santa Catalina Mountains always 

 before me, of what I am accustomed to call, affec- 

 tionately, "illuminated grays." At such hours 

 Cloud's Rest and Half Dome, which from this 

 point seem to close the Valley, were of a ravish- 

 ingly lustrous, silvery whiteness, set in fine relief 

 by contrast with the dark vegetation-clad slope 

 that ran, or seemed to run, from Sentinel Dome 

 down to the valley-level. This distant luminous 

 gray is the chief beauty of bare granite ; and a 

 very great beauty it is. I believe it would be 

 impossible for me ever to weary of it, more than 

 of the beauty of level green meadows (or brown 

 meadows, either), or of a deciduous New Hamp- 

 shire forest looked upon from above. 



I alluded to myself just now as an old Califor- 

 nian, and as far as my standing in the Yosemite 

 was concerned I might have said, without jesting, 

 that before I had been there three weeks I had 

 come to be regarded as one of its oldest inhabi- 

 tants ; and this (which was the painful part of it) 

 in a double sense. Again and again I overheard 

 the guides speak of "that old man." "I meet 

 that old man everywhere," one of them would 

 say. (They took it for granted, apparently, that, 

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