244 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we 

 feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friend- 

 ly mountaineers." A friend that he especially loves to hold 

 communion with is the Douglas squirrel. "How he scolds, and 

 what faces he makes; all eyes, teeth, and whiskers! If he were 

 not so comically small he would indeed be a dreadful fellow." 



An unusual insight into the beauties of the common things of 

 the wayside is not the least of the book's charm. The tracery 

 of leaf shadows on rock surfaces, the "sun-sifted arches" of the 

 trees, the flow of clear streams, the firelight glow on forest walls, 

 above all the unending wonder of the cloud scenery, those 

 "mountains of the sky" whose daily gathering and dispersal he 

 never fails to mark, — all these are noted with as true a percep- 

 tion of their beauty and significance as are the rarer glories of 

 the summit peaks. 



Forty years have wrought no change in Mr. Muir's enthusiasm 

 for the Sierra. To those of us who have been privileged to 

 journey with him through his best-loved mountains the story 

 of his "first summer" will bring back many a radiant day of 

 those later summers he has shared with us, days whose wonders 

 he has helped us read, — "days in whose light everything seems 

 equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God." 



M. R. P. 



"The Wilderness of One of the most noteworthy books of the 

 THE Upper Yukon."* year is "The Wilderness of the Upper 

 Yukon," by Charles Sheldon. Though the 

 author calls it "A Hunter's Explorations for Wild Sheep," it is 

 very much more than a mere record of hunting exploits. We 

 quote from Theodore Roosevelt's editorial on Mr. Sheldon's 

 work in the issue of December 9th of The Outlook. Mr. Roose- 

 velt says: "... to the hardihood and prowess of the old-time 

 hunter Mr. Sheldon adds the capacity of a first-class field natural- 

 ist, and also, what is just as important, the power of literary ex- 

 pression. Such a man can do for the lives of the wild creatures 

 of the wooded and mountainous wilderness what John Muir has 

 done for the physical features of the wilderness. . . . Mr. Sheldon 

 is not only a first-class hunter and naturalist but passionately 

 devoted to all that is beautiful in nature, and he has the Hterary 

 taste and abihty* to etch his landscapes into his narratives, so that 

 they give to the reader something of the feeling that he must have 

 had when he saw them Mr. Sheldon hunted in the tre- 

 mendous Northern wilderness of snow-field and torrent . . . and 



*The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon. By Charles Sheldon. Charles 

 Scribner's Sons, New York. 191 1- 354 pages. Price, $3-00 net. 



