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Sierra Club Bulletin 



through all his studies of causation, and the keynote of his phil- 

 osophy was intelligent and benevolent design. His wonder grew 

 with his wisdom. Writing for the first time to a young friend, 

 he expressed the hope that she would ''find that going to the 

 mountains is going home, and that Christ's Sermon on the 

 Mount is on every mount." 



It was late in May, 1889, that I first met him. I had gone to 

 San Francisco to organize the series of papers afterward pub- 

 lished in the Century Magazine under the title of "The Gold- 

 hunters of California," and promptly upon my arrival he came 

 to see me. It was at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I was 

 dressing for dinner and was obliged to ask him to come up to 

 my room. He was a long time in doing so and I feared he had 

 lost his way. I can remember, as if it were yesterday, hearing 

 him call down the corridor, "Johnson, Johnson ! where are you ? 

 I can't get the hang of these artificial canons," and before he 

 had made any of the conventional greetings or inquiries, he ad- 

 ded : "Up in the Sierra, all along the gorges, the glaciers have 

 put up natural sign-posts, and you can't miss your way, but 

 here — there's nothing to tell you where to go." 



With all his Scotch wit and his democratic feeling, Muir bore 

 himself with dignity in every company. He readily adjusted 

 himself to any environment. In the High Sierra he was indeed 

 a voice crying in the wilderness : moreover, he looked like John 

 the Baptist as portrayed in bronze by Donatello and others of 

 the Renaissance sculptors — spare of frame, hardy, keen of eye 

 and visage, and on the march eager of movement. It was diffi- 

 cult for an untrained walker to keep up with him as he leaped 

 from rock to rock as surely as a mountain goat, or skimmed the 

 surface of the ground, a trick of easy locomotion learned from 

 the Indians. If he ever became tired nobody knew it, and yet, 

 though he delighted in badinage at the expense of the "tender- 

 foot," he was as sympathetic as a mother. I remember a scram- 

 ble we had in the upper Tuolumne Canon which afforded him 

 great fun at my expense. The detritus of the wall of the gorge 

 lay in a confused mass of rocks, varying in size from a market 

 basket to a dwelling house, the interstices overgrown with a 

 most deceptive shrub, the soft leaves of which concealed its iron 

 trunk and branches. Across such a Dantean formation Muir 



