I am most cordially, Your friend, JOHN MUIR. La Grange, November 15, 1869. DEAR FRIENDS MRS. AND DR. CARR:-- I thank you most heartily for the very kind invitation you send me. I could enjoy a blink of rest in your new home with a relish that only those can know who have suffered solitary banishment for so many years, but I must return to the mountains, to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and to-morrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there. The plains here are green already and the upper mountains have the pearly whiteness of their first snows. Farewell. I will bring you some cones in the spring. I hope that you enjoy your labor in your new sphere. My love to all your family, and I am Yours most cordially, JOHN MUIR. Yosemite, December 6th, 1869. I am feasting in the Lord’s mountain house, and what pen may write my blessings? I am going to dwell here all winter magnificently “Snowbound”? Just think of the grandeur of the mountain winter in the Yosemite! Would that you could enjoy it also! I read your word in pencil upon the bridge below the Nevada, and I thank you for it most devoutly. No one or all the Lord’s blessings can enable me to exist without a friend indeed. There is no snow in the valley. The ground is covered with the brown and yellow leaves of the oak and maple, and their crisping and rustling makes one think of the groves of Madison. I have been wandering about among the falls and rapids, studying the grand instruments of slopes and curves and echoing caves upon which those divine harmonies are played. Only a thin flossy veil sways and bends over Yosemite now, and Pohono is a web of waving mist. New songs are sung, forming parts of the one grand anthem composed and written “in the beginning.” Most of the flowers are dead. Only a few are blooming in summer nooks on the north side rocks. You remember that delightful fernery by the ladders. Well, I discovered a garden meeting of adiantum far more delicate and luxuriant than those of the ladders. They are in a cover or coverlet between the upper and lower Yosemite Falls. They are the most delicate and graceful plant creatures I ever beheld, waving themselves in lines of the most refined of heaven’s beauty to the music of the water. The motion of purple dulses in pools left by the tide on the sea-coast of Scotland was the only memory that was stirred by these spiritual ferns. You speak of dying and going to the woods; I am dead and gone to heaven. An Indian comes to the valley once a month upon snowshoes. He brings the mail, and so I shall hope to hear from you. Address to Yosemite, via Big Oak Flat, care of Mr. Hutchings. Yosemite, April 5, 1870.