This was the country of which Bret Harte wrote. Overlooking the valley, where nestled the homes of twelve families, stood that strange sentinel—Mount Shasta—snowcapped, but inside, a seething mass of fire and lava causing bubbling springs to burst forth in many places, and one at the top so hot that an egg dropped in it would be perfectly boiled. Out of her sides (no paltry spring forming its source) rushed the McCloud River, full born, as Minerva leaped out of the brain of Jove. Here we were fifty miles from the Oregon border, and no way to get there but by sea. One day while looking down the side of Shasta through the vast cathedral of trees, I saw, about a hundred yards off, what looked like a rabbit. It proved to be a man on horseback, a half a mile away. A red-headed woodpecker, which is about the size of a robin in the East, is as large as a pigeon in the north of California. All nature is in scale, so that one does not realize the immense size of the trees and mountains. We mowed a field of timothy, and it was so tall that I constantly lost sight of the head of the man who went before me. The stems were as large around as my thumb. The northwest slope of Shasta looked like a great big beautiful lawn, and I had planned to go up and make a sketch from there some day. What I had thought to be soft grass proved, on close inspection, to be brush, fifteen or twenty feet tall and so interlaced that a deer could walk on it in summer. One loses one’s sense of proportion completely. Even the snowfall, not to be outdone by the other elements of nature, was prodigious in its generosity. One winter I made a notch upon a tree, and the next spring, when the snow had melted away, it was so far above my head that I could not touch it—a matter of eighteen feet or more. The health of the community at Strawberry Valley was greatly benefited by the numberless springs that gushed out of the sides of the slope, bringing cold water of the first purity. Some of these formed streams which ran under the houses, and if a busy housewife had neglected to prepare anything for dinner, all she needed to do was to open a trap in the floor, put in a colander with some meal scattered on the surface, and pull up one or two flapping trout ready to clap into the frying pan.