friends the needful prudence. They are content thenceforth to take the "longest way round," which is the surest way to the object of their desires. After two or three hours of clambering, we reach the line of perpetual snow.
Just below it is a belt of cedars, with tops so flat that we walk out on them a distance of twenty feet, either side their trunks. Early in their struggle for existence their tops have been broken off by the wind, and the weight of many winters' snows has retarded their upright growth, until the result of a century of aspiration is a ludicrously short stump, and immensely long and broad limbs. In this region we find a few stunted "mountain mahogany" trees; but we are quite above the pines.
Above this, in the snow, or rather in the thin layer of soil deposited in places among the rocks where the sun's action prevents the snow from accumulating, are several varieties of flowering plants with which we are familiar; the blossoms, however, are but the miniature copies of their valley kindred. So fragile, of such delicate hues are they, that a feeling of tenderness is inspired by their lonely position on this bleak summit; and we ask ourselves: For whose eye has all this beauty been spread, age after age, where human footsteps never come? Let those who believe every thing terrestrial "was made for man," search those places of earth where only God is, and study their adornments.
The view from the peak of our mountain is one long to be remembered. To the north of us stretches the Cascade Range, with its wilderness of mountains, from six to eight thousand feet in height, overtopped by Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood. To the south, the same wilderness of mountains is seen over the tops of
