with him, is "Bright" Gillespie, who has been driving between Raymond and Wawona for the past twelve years. He resembles Tom Gordon in person, and is as compact as an underweight athlete. "Bright" is considered one of the most gallant fellows on the road, and is as reliable as he is gallant. One night after he had been driving sixty days on a stretch, from six in the morning until five in the evening, Henry Washburn said to him: "See here, Gillespie, you had better take a day or two off for a rest." "But what will I do?" replied the driver. "What will you do? Why nothing!"

"Great Scott! That would kill me." But "Bright" was pressed to "lay off and rest," and he did so with a vengeance, for I saw him breaking in a new team of leaders during the forenoon and sprinkling all the afternoon; and that night one of the coaches with eleven passengers being an hour or more late, Gillespie went out with an empty coach and fresh horses to be used if necessary. Two miles out he met the delayed vehicle, which had been kept back by the breaking of the brake-block. And that's the way "Bright" Gillespie took a day's

rest.

Bryant, one of the Raymond and Wawona Knights of the lash, is a decided favorite, as the word is often passed along: "Be sure and get a seat with Bryant." Well, Bryant is jolly, and don't mind having a good-looking girl beside him. The same may be said of Wren, who is sturdy and safe under all circumstances.

C. J. Fobes and Henry Hedges are the whips of the Limited, or "Cannon Ball," as it is sometimes called, and drive the fastest mail coaches in California, accomplishing 68 miles in about ten hours daily, as there are often parties that want to go through from the Yosemite Valley to San Francisco in a single day, or vice versa. These two men are considered equal to

the most renowned known in the Sierra.

drivers ever

Although Billy Coffman is one of the crack drivers of the Sierras, having driven out of Wawona either to the Big Trees or the Valley for twenty-five years, his fame rests more substantially on the fact that he is partial to the genus old maid; or, as Wordsworth termed a number of his female friends: "Maidens withering on the stalk." This secret became known away back in back in the early eighties, and spinsters from the north, the south, the east and the west, often make a second trip to the Trees in order to sit on the box with the philosopher Coffman. One day, during che summer of 1900, a spinster from Providence, R. I., over whose head many flights of seventeen-year locusts had passed, said to him:

"I suppose some of your comrades accuse you of foolishness sometimes?"

"Oh, that depends," replied Billy. "I mean when you take the part of certain unmarried young

ladies?"

"Yes; but I never mind that. Carlyle, you know, declared that foolishness finds a large place in the census returns."

"But you are partial to old maids, are you not? That is, you have a high regard for young ladies who have waited discreetly until after their girlhood before accepting offers of marriage?"

"Many persons," continued the veteran Knight of the Lash, "rudely and thoughtlessly use the term old. maid with an implied slur, as though there was something derogatory in it; but such people forget that Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Phoebe Cary and many others who never married, including Jennie Flood and Helen Gould and a Queen of England, have adorned positions of the first importance in social and public life, and written their names

high in the history of science, literature and philanthropy."

And he gave her any quantity of just such entertainment for eight straight miles.

In the good old days spoken of, the stage drivers sometimes indulged in playing jokes on travelers whom they had sized up as able to stand a little joshing, and many a good scare that has never been reported, has been given a tenderfoot.

Thus, when General Grant went into the Yosemite Valley, accompanied by Mrs. Grant, Miss Jennie Flood, Ulysses Grant, Jr., John Russell Young, Miss Flora Sharon (now Lady Hesketh), Miss Dora Miller (now Mrs. Lieutenant Richardson Clover), and the writer; it had been customary for a long time. for one of the Yosemite Valley stage drivers and the grocery store post-master at Fresno Flat, upon the arrival of the stage at that point, to indulge in dialogues such as would startle and sometimes terrorize passengers, their particular victims generally being English globe-trotters and Yankee spinsters. So when the stage arrived at Fresno Flat, the long, lank post-master made his appearance at the grocery store door and shouted:

"Did you forget them tools again, pard?"

"No," was the response of the driver.

"I'll bet you forgot that can of giant powder?"

"No; that's under the front seatI'll get it presently."

And such a break as was made from the vicinity of that vehicle beggars description-some going one

way and some another. Only one person remained and he at once took out a cigar, struck a match on the end of the front seat, lighted his Havana and threw the burning remainder into the body of the wagon. The hair upon the head of that funny postmaster actually stood on end, and he just strugglingly gasped out; "I say, pard, who in the world is that idiot smoking?"

S.

"Why, that's General Grant." "What! General Ulysses Grant! Well, I'll be teetotally damned!"

And into his store he rushed and was not seen afterward. Had he known that the driver had posted the General, who had ridden next to him on the way up, he might have never forgiven him.

Once Tom Gordon had, as traveler between Wawona and Raymond, a German Baron who made himself exceedingly offensive in many ways. "Do you know what we do in Germany when we want a driver to hurry up his team? I'll tell you. We good crack with a whip." Well" reget behind him and give him a good crack with a whip. plied Gordon, at last, "every time that was done up here in the mountains there would be a dead baron and no inquest would be held." Once afterward the German said, "You don't see a real baron every day up here in the mountains," "Real Barons!" exclaimed the driver; "Why there are real barons currying horses all the way from Grub Gulch to Chinquapin."

President Roosevelt was driven from Raymond to the Big Trees by Gillespie, and from the Yosemite to Raymond by Tom Gordon, above named.

ONLY during two months in

O the year does nature lift the

ermine coverlet from one of her choicest nurslings, lying in the Wasatch Range.

The owners of a bungalow in this Arcadian vale, people who care for nature in her wilder moods, wrote to me: "Come up to our shrine and rest." I abandoned the wheel of labor and the furnace of the lower levels; turned my face westward and upward.

This valley is not easily reached, for no engine has ever penetrated it. Only the lovers of wild things have taken the trouble to intrude, and steep themselves in its beauty. For them it is the dawn of rest; for them the clear, sharp light sparkles; for them the wild flowers riot everywhere in acres of radiant color. With them, the lakes, willful chameleon things, coquette, tantalize, and duplicate a world of beauty in their pellucid wells. Unfathomed Lake Mary is a veritable sorceress, a gem of the richest hunter's green, and clear as crystal.

"Deeper than the depths of water stilled at even"

wrote Rossetti of the Blessed Damozel's eyes. If he had ever seen Mary's Lake he would have realized what a transcendent description he had accomplished.

One early dawn Tom, Dorothy, his wife, and I, mounted three coalblack horses, and riding up and over the rim of the valley, we wandered out of our Paradise to see a place called the Hot Pots. We took a well-known trail, and rode down, down, down, and reached the place about noon. Our theory of the Hot

Pots may not be scientific, but it is this: that they are natural hot springs, but so impregnated with minerals that in overflowing they have deposited layer upon layer around their edges, forming domeshaped or truncated conical cups. The ground echoed echoed under our horses' feet as if hollow and sounded uncanny and spooky to us. The largest Pot has been tapped. and a bath-house attached, and a hotel attached to the bath-house. We had a swim in the tank and a dinner and nap at the little hotel, and were ready to start for home between two and three o'clock.

There was another trail to Arcadia other than the one we had come over on, so we thought we would rather try a new route, as there was one, than go home the same way we had come. But the afternoon was well on its way before we found out that we must go up Marble Mountain, turn to the right, hit the trail, and follow it a few miles, and there was a sheepherder's cabin to stop in if anybody wanted to.

We began to climb and wind. about the hills; sometimes we looked down dizzy steeps, then looked up towering walls. Tom was of those who never give up an undertaking. We had started home this way-we must go on. We found Marble Mountain, but not the trail-only a rift between two mountain tops and a cascade dashing down. Tom declared we must follow this to its source. It was like riding a horse up-stairs.

We did not go far when boulders, boulders so big no horse could ever get over them, choked the ravine. They were a barrier to further pro

gress in that direction; there was nothing to do but follow the example of the famous King of France: "March up the hill and down again." We led the horses down. Mine seemed the victim of magic-to have grown to twice the size I thought him. He just loomed above me, and seemed possessed to occupy the same space I did, at the same time, which they say cannot be done. But I doubted, while I was sliding and skating and turning somersaults, to keep him from trying it. Flushed, hot and out of breath, we were at last back where we started.

An opening away up and ahead of us was the one resource left. It was good and steep, so steep, indeed, we rested our horses every few feet by turning them across the path. In this way we caught the last flushes of color in the west and saw the silver thread of moon swing into space.

Clouds were gathering fast, and the sky was clouded over by the time we rode around a shoulder of rock and onto a natural stage, quite level and somewhat semi-circular in shape, and here ended the trail. It ended at the doorless opening of an old, dilapidated, deserted miners' cabin. Three-fourths of the way around, this platform was bordered by a straight, deep gorge, several hundred feet deep, and across the chasm rose a mighty, perpendicular cliff. I felt as if I were in the bot-. tom of a well. Some Cyclop had taken a stupendous bite out of its side, and we had ridden into the hole.

But one side of this well was not vertical, although its tilt was steeper than anything else we had tried, and no horse had ever scaled it, as far as we could see. What should we do? Others had gone over before now. It looked possible and-we tried it.

It was a bare hillside, with very few bushes or big rocks, but a great many loose stones. I slid from my

horse at the first intimation of ascent, and even Tom preferred his own legs; but Dorothy rashly asserted that she was going to ride up, she was so tired. We had not covered more than three or four yards when I discovered that she was on foot also, and wore the air of a person never intending to ride again.

On account of the danger from the loose stones, but one person at a time could move forward, and we had to keep ahead of our horses, to be out of danger if one of them should slip.

The hill was so steep that progress was slow-only three or four feet at a time made in zig-zags almost horizontal. The horses proved more aggravating to pull up hill than down. Short as our mountain skirts were we tripped on them so often and the horses stepped so much farther at a time than we did that it gave us the feeling that they were gaining on us. Then they had to have all the rein that they might select their own foothold, and the foothold was never where it was expected to be, so it proved an exhaustive and bewildering scramble for us. I was panting for breath, and waiting while Dorothy and her steed were engrossed in some extraordinary maneuver, and as she finally crept under him, and leaned against the everlasting hill, she gasped:

"If there is any way to know which is going to be the upper side of a horse, I should like to know it." I laughed, but like experience with their sleight-of-leg performances, made me sympathetic. A shout forward told us to stay where we were until called, for it looked worse ahead, and man and horse disappeared behind a great wedge of rock. We

were glad for a respite to breathe, as we clung by hoof, tooth and nail. Presently a muffled voice called to come on, and to come carefully, the last being superfluous advice. I moved cautiously along the