I said that I was going to stop here until morning and pray a whole blessed night with the falls and the moon, but I am too wet and must go down. An hour or two ago I went out somehow on a little seam that extends along the wall behind the falls. I suppose I was in a trance, but I can positively say that I was in the body for it is sorely battered and wetted. As I was gazing past the thin edge of the fall and away through beneath the column to the brow of the rock, some heavy splashes of water struck me, driven hard against the wall. Suddenly I was darkened; down came a section of the outside tissue composed of spent comets. I crouched low, holding my breath, and, anchored to some angular flakes of rocks, took my baptism with moderately good faith. When I dared to look up after the swaying column admitted light, I pounced behind a piece of ice which was wedged tight in the wall, and I no longer feared being washed off, and steady moonbeams slanting past the arching meteors gave me confidence to escape to this snug place where McChesney and I slept one night, where I had a fire to dry my socks. This rock shelf extending behind the falls is about five hundred feet above the base of the fall on the perpendicular rock-face. How little do we know of ourselves, of our profoundest attractions and repulsions, of our spiritual affinities! How interesting does man become, considered in his relations to the spirit of this rock and water! How significant does every atom of our world become amid the influences of those beings unseen, spiritual, angelic mountaineers that so throng these pure mansions of crystal foam and purple granite! I cannot refrain from speaking to this little bush at my side and to the spray-drops that come to my paper and to the individual sands of the slope I am sitting upon. Ruskin says that the idea of foulness is essentially connected with what he calls dead unorganized matter. How cordially I disbelieve him to-night! and were he to dwell awhile among the powers of these mountains, he would forget all dictionary differences between the clean and the unclean and he would lose all memory and meaning of the diabolical, sin-begotten term, _foulness_. Well, I must go down. I am disregarding all of the Doctor’s physiology in sitting here in this universal moisture. Farewell to you and to all the beings about us! I shall have a glorious walk down the mountains in this thin white light, over the open brows grayed with Selaginella and through the thick black shadow caves in the live oaks all stuck full of snowy lances of moonlight. New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, July 6th, 1872. Yours of Tuesday evening telling of our Doggetts and Ned and Merrill Moores has come, and so has the lamp and book. I have not yet tried the lamp, but it is splendid in shape and shines grand as gold. The Lyell is just what I wanted.