The Hermit’s Cabin is a charcoal-lined circular chamber with a very fine domed ceiling. It affords a spacious room in which some denizen of the mountains could dwell in princely comfort and contentment. Wild beasts may have made it their forest lair in the past, and the Indian may have flaked his arrowheads within it while waiting for a storm to pass. It is not altogether improbable that some failing miner may have used it for his hermitage, seeking solace in the vast, silent bowers of shade about him and submerging himself in the immense peacefulness of the Grove—wandering, rambling at will, pausing to drink at a spring, or anon to examine a flower, or to warm himself in the sun, bewildered yet charmed by the fascination of it all; a dreamer seeming to hear the laughter and voices of dear ones at home, but in reality listening to the songs of birds. But there are Sequoias even more fire-tortured than these. The Telescope Tree is an erect, burnt-out, tubular trunk 220 feet high. Its heartwood is completely gone. Tourists may enter it and look up through its chimney-like cylinder to the blue sky above. Internally, its appearance is that of a tree from which life has gone forever, while externally it appears to be a perfectly sound tree. Of course, its top is a ruin. But one up-turned limb remains. This abounds in the spirit of intense life, for its bossy patches of deep blue-green foliage still bear cones whose seeds perpetuate the endless cycle of the royal race. Thus this tree—hardly more than a mere barkcovered shell, clings to life with a Roman tenacity—the epitome of vitality. Pluto’s Chimney is yet more of a ruin. It is nothing but a huge old stub of a tree, blackened and burned inside and out. So forbidding and fearsome is its interior aspect that some call it the “Devil’s Dungeon.” But for all its dismal repellence, it, too, has its story to tell. Like a battle-scarred veteran, its blackened body tells mutely of a mighty struggle bravely waged against the forest fiend. The sun lights its gloomy circular vault and sheds a troop of bright sunbeams upon its dead walls as though to bless them and warm them back to life. Even winter’s clouds sift snow in its burnt-out shell as though to cool its fire-ravaged sides.