soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them. Would that I knew what good prayers I could say or good deeds I could do, so that ravens would bring me bread and venison for the next two years! Then would I get some tough gray clothes the color of granite, so no one could see or find me [words missing] would I reproduce the ancient ice-rivers and [words missing] and dwell with them. I go again to my lessons to-morrow morning. Some snow fell, and bye-and-bye I must tell you about it. If poor good Melancholia Cowper had been here yesterday morning, here is just what he would have sung:-- The rocks have been washed, just washed in a shower Which winds in their faces conveyed. The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their brows Or lay on their beautiful heads. But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees above And down on the pine trees below, For the rain that came laving and washing in love Was followed, alas, by a snow. Which, being unmetaphored and prosed into sense, means that yesterday morning a strong southeast wind, cooled among the highest snows of the Sierra, drove back the warm northwest winds from the hot San Joaquin plains and burning foothill woods, and piled up a jagged cloud addition to our valley walls. Soon those white clouds began to darken and to reach out long filmy edges which, uniting over the valley, made a close, dark ceiling. Then came rain, unsteady at first, now a heavy gush, then a sprinkling halt, as if the clouds so long out of practice had forgotten something, but after half an hour of experimental pouring and sprinkling there came an earnest, steady, well-controlled rain. On the mountain the rain soon turned to snow and some half-melted flakes reached the bottom of the valley. This morning Starr King and Tissiack and all the upper valley are white. [1873.] [Beginning of letter missing.] I had a grand ramble in the deep snow outside the valley and discovered one beautiful truth concerning snow-structure and three concerning the forms of forest trees.