After a couple of miles’ advance my feet felt like lumps of ice. I examined my boots. The leather was frozen hard and stiff. The pain was too great for endurance. I made my way back to the house, found Hays and Welch at breakfast, removed my boots and stockings, and saw three waxy-looking toes, the right big one included. They were frozen. The heat of the fire produced additional twinges, like boring with red-hot knitting-needles. I wrapped some thicknesses of flannel around both boots, put them on again, and made another start. Eureka Valley soon disappeared behind me. I never saw it again, and probably never shall. But its picture is indelibly graven on my memory. We lived in the gem of the locality. All the landscape gardening skill in the world could produce nothing to equal it. A clear crystal stream ran by the door. The grove was a natural park, level as a floor, with pines all about, 150 feet high. We had a cascade and little miniature mountains of rock, with oak and pines springing from their crevices. No tame tree could be coaxed to grow as did these wild ones of the mountains. Some were independent of soil altogether, and flourished vigorously rooted in rocky fissures. We had the tiniest of meadows concealed behind these little mountains of our domain. Other grassy plateaus were perched sixty or eighty feet over our heads on the mountain. Nor was this all at once revealed. It required half a day to get over all the labyrinth of meadow, mount, and dale within half a mile of our house. All this was set in a gigantic frame--the dark green, thickly-wooded mountain-sides running up 2,000 feet above our heads, while to the eastward through the narrow gorge rose bare peaks twenty and thirty miles away, from whose tops, on sunshiny, breezy mornings, the snow could be seen driving in immense vapor-like clouds and tinged a roseate hue. People who visit the Yosemite have seen but one of the thousand pictures set in the Sierras.