A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high, and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them, hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and deep within the cañons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a conscious distillation on the melting air. [Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO] The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun, between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green, is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size. Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is induced by vast proportions. As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire. VIII THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY