Dr. Strenzel gave his ranch to his daughter and her husband when they were married. Muir cultivated the fruit trees, the grape vines and grain fields with such skill and diligence that he reaped a goodly fortune. He drove hard Scotch bargains with marketmen--this great-hearted lover of Mother Nature. But the money he earned was for his family, not himself. Says one who knew him well, "He wanted little that money can buy." Of his friend Edward H. Harriman Muir once remarked, "He's not as rich as I am. He has a hundred millions. I have all I want." While his crops were ripening, this dramatist of the out-of-doors would take himself to the mountains, abide on the flowery uplands, study the ways of birds and squirrels, of Big Trees and cataracts and glaciers. In 1879 he went to Alaska. During his explorations he discovered Glacier Bay and the immense ice field now known to the world as Muir Glacier. For several years he made his summer home in the Yosemite Valley, acquainting himself with its botanical and geological features and making notes for future books. An appeal issued in his name in 1890 led to the creation of the Yosemite Valley and surrounding forests as a national reserve. Muir has been called the pioneer of our system of national parks. In the cause of science he traveled to Siberia, South America, Africa and India. "Tall, lean, craggy,"--a great tree of a man himself, he knew the forests of the world. John Muir, "grandest character in Nature literature," died at the age of seventy-six on the day before Christmas, 1914. He was the author of several rare volumes of essays and reminiscences, most of which were published after he had reached the age of seventy. "To read Muir," says a critic of American literature, "is to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who cries 'Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!'" Yet, "Look at that little muggins of a fir cone!" the interpreter of titanic symbols would exclaim, lovingly stroking a brown trophy of his beloved woods. Said a companion of Muir's during a scientific expedition, "Flakes of snow and crumbs of granite were to him real life." His study of the Water Ouzel is called the "finest bird biography in existence." He loved also to tell of the Douglas squirrel, "whose musical, piney gossip," wrote he, "is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate." [Illustration: FROM A BUST BY C.S. PIETRO IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK JOHN BURROUGHS BY COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM] _AMERICAN NATURALISTS_ _John Burroughs_ FIVE