I leave this morning. Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away. The heart leaps with emotion: everything is momentous in a quiet life. This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk. Its threshold will soon be cushioned with snow; let us hasten on. If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply: Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness. Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground glass. Go in spring and autumn, if possible. I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been. You can enter and go out at this portal. Passing seaward, to the left, out of the gray and groping mists a form, arises, monstrous and awful in its proportions; spurning the very earth that crumbles at its very base as it towers to heaven. The vapors of the air cleave to its massive front. The passing cloud is caught and torn in the grand carvings of its capitals. Gaze upon it in the solemnity of its sunlit surface. Impressive, impassive, magnetic; having a pulse and the organs of life almost; terrible as the forehead of a god. The full splendor of the noonday can not belittle it, night can not compass it. The moon is paler in its presence and wastes her lamp, the stars are hidden and lost over and beyond it. Across the face of it is borne forever the shadowy semblance of a swift and flying figure. Despair and desperation are in the nervous energy depicted in this marvelous medallion. Surely, the Indian may look with a degree of reverence upon that picture, painted by the morning light, fading in the meridian day, and gone altogether by evening. A grand etching of colossal proportions, representing the great chief Tutochanula in his mysterious flight. The Wandering Jew might look upon it and behold his traditional beard and flowing robes blown here by the winds in the rapidity of his desperate haste. It is the last one sees of the valley, as it is the last any have seen of Tutochanula. He fled into the west, cycles ago, and I follow him now into the west, nest-building, and getting into the shadow and resting after the door of the mountain is passed, and my soul no longer beats impetuously against those stormy walls. With uncovered head, having nothing between me and Saturn, wiser, I trust, for my intercourse with these masters, purer in heart and holier for my prolonged vigil, with careful and reverential steps I pass out of Yosemite shadows. AN AFFAIR OF THE MISTY CITY I. WHAT THE MOON SHONE ON