In the stillness the camp’s awakening movements rose upon the morning air with curious distinctness. Through the blue shadows in which it swam the tall chimneys soared aloft, sending their feathers of smoke up to the new day. It lay in its hollow like a picture, all transparent washes of amethyst and gray, overlaid by clear mountain shadows. The world was in this waiting stage of flushed sky and shaded earth when the superintendent’s wife pushed open the door of her house and with the cautious tread of one who fears to wake a sleeper, stepped out on the balcony. With her hand on the rail she stood, deeply inhaling the freshness of the hour. The superintendent’s house, a one-story cottage, painted white, and skirted by a broad balcony, stood on an eminence above the camp. From its front steps she looked down on the slant of many roofs, the car tracks, and the red wagon roads that wound along the slopes. Raising her eyes, they swept the ramparts of the everlasting hills, and looking higher still, her face met the radiance of the dawn. She stepped off the balcony with the same cautious tread, and along the beaten footpath that led through the patch of garden in front of the house. Beyond this the path wound through a growth of chaparral to where the pines ascended the slopes in climbing files. As she approached she saw the sky barred with their trunks, arrow-straight and bare of branches to a great height. Farther on she could see the long dim aisles, held in the cloistral silence of the California forest, shot through with the golden glimmer of sunrise. The joy of the morning was in her heart, and she walked forward with a light step, humming to herself. Two months before she had come here, a bride from San Francisco, weak from illness, pale, hollow-eyed, a shadow of her former self. She had only crept about at first, swung for hours on the balcony in her hammock, or sat under the trees looking down on the hive of men, where her husband worked among his laborers. As her mother had grown back to the fullness of life in the healing breath of the mountains, so Mariposa slowly regained her old beauty, with an added touch of subtlety, and found her old beliefs returned to her with a new significance.