on the world at our feet. Words utterly fail to convey the faintest idea of the grandeur of the scene which bursts on our startled vision. I have ascended mountains higher than this, but never beheld such a scene as that below me, as I stood looking down, as upon a map, upon the vast country spread out on every side. The view was unbroken from the mountains to the sea, and what a scene! The sun was high in the heavens; it was nine o'clock, and the whole landscape was bathed in his glory. Turning naturally eastward at first, we see in the far distance the whole vast range of the Sierra Nevada; mountain piled on mountain, stretching to the limits of the vision north and south, with summits white with snow, glistening in the rays of the summer sun, beneath which the dwellers in the valleys are sweating at their toil. Northward the black buttes of Marysville, far away in Yuba county, bound the view. Southward you look away over the billowy hills and fresh smiling valleys to the mountains of the Coast Range, old Loma Prieta, a hundred miles or more away in Santa Cruz, being the last object distinguishable. Westward the ranges of Las Trampas and Alameda, and over them, the high peak of Tamalpais to the northward of the Golden Gate. Far away to the northwest, where Napa, Lake, and Sonoma counties meet, is dimly discernible the summit of Mount St. Helens. A white mist is on the western horizon, but, even as we gaze, the curtain unrolls and lifts from the scene, and we see the city of the Pacific, proud San Francisco, the Golden Gate, and the blue
