Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual. I wish, my dear, dear friends, that you could share this divine day with me here. The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come. Yosemite Valley, October 7th, 1874. I expected to have been among the foot-hill drift long ago, but the mountains fairly seized me, and, ere I knew, I was up the Merced Cañon, where we were last year, past Shadow and Merced lakes and our soda springs, etc. I returned last night. Had a glorious storm and a thousand sacred beauties that seemed yet more and more divine. I camped four nights at Shadow Lake, at the old place in the pine thickets. I have ousel tales to tell. I was alone, and during the whole excursion, or period rather, was in a kind of calm, uncurable ecstasy. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. How glorious my studies seem, and how simple! I found out a noble truth concerning the Merced moraines that escaped me hitherto. Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing. My feet have recovered their cunning. I feel myself again. Tell Keith the colors are coming to the groves. I leave Yosemite for over the mountains to Mono [?] and Lake Tahoe in a week, thence anywhere,--Shastaward, etc. I think I may be at Brownsville, Yuba County, where I may get a letter from you. I promised to call on Emily Pelton there. Farewell. JOHN MUIR. Sissons Station, November 1st, 1874. Here is icy Shasta fifteen miles away yet at the very door. It is all close wrapt in clean young snow down to the very base, one mass of white from the dense black forest girdle at an elevation of five or six thousand feet to the very summit. The extent of its individuality is perfectly wonderful. When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone, and weary, yet all my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since. Stone was to have accompanied me, but has failed of course. The last storm was severe, and all the mountains shake their heads and say impossible, etc., but you know I will meet all its icy snows lovingly.