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6 trees one of the tallest, whose toughened fiber? he knows well he climbs with the ease of a squirrel to its slender top
100 ft form ground and then for hours he clings with fi illegible braced muscle? like a bobolink on a seed while the swaying
top with the tops of the other trees in the group flap and swish, bending swirling round round in indescribable combinations
of vertical and horizontal curves. The motion is exhilarating and not less so the scene he beholds - (See his book) One is
reminded of the story of Schiller in his youth climbing a tree in a thunderstorm - etc At another time Mr. Muir mounts a high
ridge in the midst of a fierce storm, when it was in full bloom, and the wind-driven rain filled the air like a vast waterfall.
Such things he does partly for the grandeur of the scene, the music the delicious fragrance wrought brought by the winds -
which are, he says, an advertisements of all they touch; - and in part for a study of elemental forces, when the heavens are
bowed and come down to wrestle with the earth and sea. 7 4 He sets out now to scale Mt. Ritter, 13,300 feet in height,
its summit untrodden by men, - girt about by steeply inclined glaciers, canons diacritic of tremendous depth. He is alone,
has not even his blanket to protect him against the cold. After s urmoun? ting many man-defying obstacles, as if driven by
fate, we see him on the second at an elevation of 12,800 feet, at the foot of a sheer drop in the bed of the avalanche channel
which he has been tracing. It seems to bar further progress. There is no other way, however, to the mountain-top. He will
not go back wait for a more convenient season. The rock is but 45 or 50 feet high. Its face is somewhat roughened by fissures
projections. He begins to scale it, picking his holds with utmost caution. He is about halfway to the top - and lo a dead
stop see him flattened against the wall with arms outspread, unable to move hand or foot up or down. He must fall. - (There
a reading of your own account.) Tennyson's Fragment s? on the Eagle 02841