regulate the Lake within a range of six feet vertically,
this being well within the limits of fluctuations which have
occurred during the past 40 years when the Lake has been
partially controlled by means of the old logging dam, and
during which period the navigation and resort interests have
taken the place of the lumber business in the commercial
aspects of the Lake.

The records show that during these 40 years the Lake has
fluctuated to the extent of a little more than eight feet
between low and high water marks.
The landowners around the Lake are principally interested in
its esthetic qualities as a basis for the commercial interests
involved in the tourist traffic and summer resort business.
These interests would naturally desire the Lake to be held at
a fixed level.

Likewise the navigation interests which operate a large
number of boats of various sizes would be best pleased with a
stationary level of the Lake, in order that their wharves and
boat routes might be built and maintained for a single level
of the water.

On the other hand the natural conditions and the use of water
for power and irrigation, which are among the older vested
rights, require the Lake to be used to some extent as a
storage reservoir, which implies a fluctuating level.

The whole problem is to reconcile these various interests so
as to derive the greatest possible economic advantages while
maintaining the great beauties of the Lake for those whose
interests lie mainly in that direction.

There has been suspicion on the part of some of the riparian
owners that either the power company or the Government, or
both, have been entertaining ulterior motives with the purpose
of drawing down the Lake to unprecedented levels and of
extracting from the Lake an amount of water greater than the
average annual inflow. It may be stated once for all that
there has never been such a purpose and that all calculations
of the available water in the Lake have been based upon a long
record of seasonable fluctuations which prove that the average
annual outflow from the Lake is about 300,000 acre feet.

All plans have contemplated the use of _only_ this average
amount of water annually.

The Lake has an area of 193 square miles. The elevation of its
high-water mark has been at 6231.3, whereas its low-water mark
is recorded at elevation 6223.1 above sea level.

Should the Government be successful in acquiring the outlet
property from the power company by the condemnation suit now
in court, it is proposed to operate the gates of the dam at
all times so as to maintain the Lake at the highest level
consistent with the maintenance of a desirable shore-line and the
conservation of water for the public utilities. It is proposed
never to draw the Lake below the previous low-water mark or to
allow it to rise as high as the previous high-water mark, at
which low and high limits damage in some degree was done to one
or another's interests at the Lake.

The regulation proposed by the Government provides for
recognition and protection of all rights in and to the waters
and shores of Lake Tahoe, including the rights of the general
public and of the lovers of natural beauty everywhere, and it
is believed that the charms, as well as the utilities, of this
paragon of lakes can more safely be entrusted to a permanent
government agency than to any single private interest.

A few additions to Mr. Cole's lucid statement will help the general
reader to a fuller comprehension of the difficulty as between the
States of Nevada and California. It will be recalled that Lake Tahoe
has an area of about 193 square miles, of which 78 square miles are in
the counties of Washoe, Ormsby and Douglas, Nevada, the remaining 115
square miles being in Placer and El Dorado Counties, California.

Because of this fact, that nearly two-thirds of the superficial area
of the Lake is in California, the people of California claim that they
have the natural and inherent right to control, even to determining of
its disposal at least nearly two-thirds of the water of the Lake.

The situation, however, is further complicated by the fact that the
only outlet to the Lake is in California near Tahoe City, in Placer
County, into the Truckee River, which meanders for some miles in a
northeasterly course until it leaves California, enters Nevada, passes
through the important city of Reno, and finally empties into Pyramid
Lake, which practically has no outlet.

In response to the claim of California, the people of Nevada, in which
it appears they are backed up by the U.S. Reclamation Service, contend
that Nature has already determined whither the overflow waters of
Lake Tahoe shall go. That, while they do not wish in the slightest
to restrict the proper use of the waters of the Truckee River by the
dwellers upon that river, they insist that no one else is entitled
to their use, and that every drop of superfluous water, legally and
morally, belongs to them, to be used as they deem proper.

In accordance with this conception of their rights the Nevada
legislature passed the following act, which was approved, March 6,
1913:

That for the purpose of aiding the Truckee-Carson reclamation
project now being carried out by the Reclamation Service
of the United States of America, under the Act of Congress
approved June 17, 1902 (32 Stat. p. 384), known as the
Reclamation Act, and acts amendatory thereof or supplementary
thereto, consent is hereby given to the use by the United
States of America of Lake Tahoe, situated partly in the State
of California and partly in the State of Nevada, and the
waters, bed, shores and capability of use for reservoir
purposes thereof, in such manner and to such extent as the
United States of America through its lawful agencies shall
think proper for such purpose, and as fully as the State of
Nevada could use the same, provided, however, that the consent
hereby given is without prejudice to any existing rights that
persons or corporations may have in Lake Tahoe or the Truckee
River.

At the present time (winter of 1914-15) the matter is in the
courts awaiting adjudication, which it is to be hoped, while being
satisfactory to all parties to the suit, will fully conserve for the
scenic enjoyment of the world all the charms for which Tahoe has been
so long and so justly famous.




APPENDIX


CHAPTER A

MARK TWAIN AT LAKE TAHOE


Early in the 'sixties the immortal Mark made his mark at Lake Tahoe.
In his _Roughing It_, he devotes Chapters XXII and XXIII to the
subject. With the kind consent of his publishers, Harper Bros, of New
York, the following extracts are presented.

Later, when in Italy, he described Lake Como and compared it with
Tahoe in _Innocents Abroad_, and while his prejudices against the
Indians led him to belittle the Indian name--Tahoe--and in so doing to
make several errors of statement, the descriptions are excellent and
the interested reader is referred to them as being well worthy his
attention.

Chapter XXII, _Roughing It_.--We had heard a world of
talk about the marvelous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally
curiosity drove us thither to see it. Three or four members of
the Brigade[1] had been there and located some timber lands
on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their
camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders
and took an ax apiece and started--for we intended to
take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We
were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go on
horseback. We were told that the distance was eleven miles.
We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled
laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and
looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side,
crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or
four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again.
No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a
couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us.
Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed
vigor and determination. We plodded on, two or three hours
longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of
blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the
level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snowclad mountain
peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher
still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty
or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it
lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly
photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely
be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.

[Footnote 1: The "Brigade" to which the distinguished humorist here
refers was a company of fourteen camp-followers of the Governor
of Nevada, who boarded at the same house as Mark, that of Mrs.
O'Flannigan. They had joined the Governor's retinue "by their own
election at New York and San Francisco, and came along, feeling that
in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could
not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might
reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the
'Irish Brigade,' though there were only four or five Irishmen among
them."]

... After supper as the darkness closed down and the stars
came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked
meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and
our pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand
between two large bowlders and soon fell asleep.... The wind
rose just as we were losing consciousness, and we were lulled
to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that Lake shore in the night, but we
had plenty of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved
a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original
positions, and got up at once thoroughly refreshed, free from
soreness, and brim full of friskiness. There is no end of
wholesome medicine in such an experience. That morning
we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day
before--sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and
people will go to "water cures" and "movement cures" and to
foreign lands for health.
to Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an
Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite
like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest
mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in
the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And
why shouldn't it be?--It is the same the angels breathe.
I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered
together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand
by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or
never rains there in the summer time.

... Next morning while smoking the pipe of peace after
breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of
the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down
among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free.
We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the
water till every little detail of forest, precipice, and
pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the
enchanter complete. Then to "business."

That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north
shore. There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray,
sometimes white. This gives the marvelous transparency of the
water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the Lake. We
usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from the shore, and
then lay down on the thwarts in the sun, and let the boat
drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It
interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the
luxurious rest and indolence brought. The shore all along was
indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by
narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep
mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose up like
a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly
wooded with tall pines.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only
twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly
distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where
it was even _eighty_ feet deep. Every little pebble was
distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand.
Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite bowlder, as large as
a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently,
and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently
it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the
impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat
would float on, and the bowlder descend again, and then we
could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must have
been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through
the transparency of these great depths, the water was not
_merely_ transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All
objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not
only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they
would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of
atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below
us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft
in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions
"balloon-voyages."

We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a
week. We could see trout by the thousand winging about in the
emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but
they would not bite--they could see the line too plainly,
perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we wanted, and
rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his
nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off
with an annoyed manner, and shift his position.[1]

[Footnote 1: These extracts are made from Mark Twain's copyrighted
works by especial arrangement with his publishers, Harper & Bros.,
New York.]




CHAPTER B

MARK TWAIN AND THE FOREST RANGERS


In a quarterly magazine published solely for the Rangers of the Tahoe
Reserve, one of the Rangers thus "newspaperizes" Mark's experiences
in two different sketches, one as it was in 1861 "before" the
establishment of the Reserve, and the other as it would be "now."


AS IT WAS IN 1861

_Extract from January Harper's_.--Mark Twain heard that
the timber around Lake Bigler (Tahoe) promised vast wealth
which could be had for the asking. He decided to locate a
timber claim on its shores. He went to the Lake with a young
Ohio lad, staked out a timber claim, and made a semblance of
fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the
law. They did not sleep in the house, of which Mark Twain
says: "It never occurred to us for one thing, and besides, it
was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not
wish to strain it."

They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the Lake and
one day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them,
fired the Forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation.
His picture of the superb night spectacle--the mighty mountain
conflagration--is splendidly vivid.

"The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the
standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in
fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the
air. Then we could turn from the scene to the Lake and see
every branch and leaf, and cataract of flame upon its banks
perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. The
mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our
solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one
within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive."

AS IT WOULD BE NOW

_Press Dispatch_,--_August_ 15, 1912.

MARK TWAIN FIRES FOREST! ! !

NOTED HUMORIST CHARGED BY FOREST OFFICERS WITH CRIMINAL
CARELESSNESS

Mark Twain and a friend from Ohio, who have been camping on
Lake Tahoe, are responsible for a Forest fire which burned
over about 200 acres before it was checked by Forest
officers. The fire was sighted at 6 o'clock P.M. by one of the
cooeperative patrolmen of the Crown Columbia Paper Company, who
at once telephoned to the tender of the Launch 'Ranger' for
help. Within an hour the launch was on the scene with a dozen
men picked up at Tahoe City, and by 10 o'clock the fire was
practically under control.

Twain and his friend were found spell-bound by the Rangers, at
the impressiveness of the fire. After fighting it for several
hours, however, its grandeur palled upon them, and at the
present time they are considerably exercised inasmuch as
it was ascertained that the fire was a result of their
carelessness in leaving a camp-fire to burn unattended. It is
extremely likely that the well-known humorist will find the
penalty attendant to his carelessness, no "joking" matter.

To which I take the liberty of adding the following:

SUBSEQUENT PROCEEDINGS

From the _Nevada City Bulletin_, Sept. 6, 1912.

Samuel L. Clemens (popularly known as Mark Twain), together with
Silas Snozzlebottom, of Columbus, Ohio, was to-day arraigned
before Justice Brown, of the Superior Court, charged with having
caused a destructive fire by leaving his campfire unattended. The
eminent humorist and author was evidently unaware of the
seriousness of his offense for he positively refused to engage an
attorney to defend him. When called upon to plead he began to
explain that while he confessed to lighting the fire, and leaving
it unattended, he wished the Judge to realize that it was the act
of God in sending the wind that spread the flames that caused the
destructive fire which ensued. The Judge agreed with him, and
then grimly said it was a similar act of God which impelled him
to levy a fine of $500.00 and one month in jail for leaving his
campfire subject to the influence of the wind. The humorist began
to smile "on the left," and expressed an earnest desire to argue
the matter out with the Judge, but with a curt "Next Case!" Mark
was dismissed in charge of an officer and retired "smiling a
sickly smile," and though he did not "curl up on the floor," it
is evident that the subsequent proceedings interested him no
more.




CHAPTER C

THOMAS STARR KING AT LAKE TAHOE


In 1863 Thomas Starr King, perhaps the most noted and broadly honored
divine ever known on the Pacific Coast, visited Lake Tahoe, and on
his return to San Francisco preached a sermon, entitled: "Living
Water from Lake Tahoe." Its descriptions are so felicitous that I am
gratified to be able to quote them from Dr. King's volume of Sermons
_Christianity and Humanity_, with the kind permission of the
publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston, Mass.

LIVING WATER FROM LAKE TAHOE

When one is climbing from the west, by the smooth and
excellent road, the last slope of the Sierra ridge, he
expects, from the summit of the pass, which is more than seven
thousand feet above the sea, higher than the famous pass of
the Splugen, or the little St. Bernard, to look off and down
upon an immense expanse. He expects, or, if he had not learned
beforehand, he would anticipate with eagerness, that he should
be able to see mountain summits beneath him, and beyond these,
valleys and ridges alternating till the hills subside into
the eastern plains. How different the facts that await the
eye from the western summit, and what a surprise! We find, on
gaining what seems to be the ridge, that the Sierra range
for more than a hundred miles has a double line of jagged
pinnacles, twelve or fifteen miles apart, with a trench or
trough between, along a portion of the way, that is nearly
fifteen hundred feet deep if we measure from the pass which
the stages traverse, which is nearly three thousand feet deep
if the plummet is dropped from the highest points of the snowy
spires.
Down into this trench we look, and opposite upon the eastern
wall and crests, as we ride out to the eastern edge of the
western summit. In a stretch of forty miles the chasm of it
bursts into view at once, half of which is a plain sprinkled
with groves of pine, and the other half an expanse of level
blue that mocks the azure into which its guardian towers
soar. This is Lake Tahoe, an Indian name which signifies "High
Water." We descend steadily by the winding mountain-road, more
than three miles to the plain, by which we drive to the shore
of the Lake; but it is truly Tahoe, "High Water." For we stand
more than a mile, I believe more than six thousand feet above
the sea, when we have gone down from the pass to its sparkling
beach. It has about the same altitude as the Lake of Mount
Cenis (6280 feet) in Switzerland, and there is only one sheet
of water in Europe that can claim a greater elevation (Lake
Po de Vanasque, 7271 feet). There are several, however, that
surpass it in the great mountain-chains of the Andes and of
Hindustan. The Andes support a lake at 12,000 feet above
the sea, and one of the slopes of the Himalaya, in Thibet,
encloses and upholds a cup of crystal water 15,600 feet above
the level of the Indian Ocean, covering an area, too, of 250
square miles. I had supposed, however, that within the
immense limits of the American Republic, or north of us on the
continent, there is no sheet of water that competes with Tahoe
in altitude and interest. But in Mariposa County of our State
there are two lakes, both small,--one 8300 feet, and the other
11,000 feet,--on the Sierra above the line of the sea.

To a wearied frame and tired mind what refreshment there is in
the neighborhood of this lake! The air is singularly searching
and strengthening. The noble pines, not obstructed by
underbrush, enrich the slightest breeze with aroma and music.
Grand peaks rise around, on which the eye can admire the
sternness of everlasting crags and the equal permanence
of delicate and feathery snow. Then there is the sense of
seclusion from the haunts and cares of men, of being upheld
on the immense billow of the Sierra, at an elevation near the
line of perpetual snow, yet finding the air genial, and the
loneliness clothed with the charm of feeling the sense of the
mystery of the mountain heights,
the part of a chain that link the two polar seas, and of the
mystery of the water poured into the granite bowl, whose rim
is chased with the splendor of perpetual frost, and whose
bounty, flowing into the Truckee stream, finds no outlet into
the ocean, but sinks again into the land.

Everything is charming in the surroundings of the mountain
Lake; but as soon as one walks to the beach of it, and surveys
its expanse, it is the color, or rather the colors, spread out
before the eye, which holds it with greatest fascination.
I was able to stay eight days in all, amidst that calm
and cheer, yet the hues of the water seemed to become more
surprising with each hour. The Lake, according to recent
measurement, is about twenty-one miles in length, by twelve or
thirteen in breadth. There is no island visible to break
its sweep, which seems to be much larger than the figures
indicate. And the whole of the vast surface, the boundaries of
which are taken in easily at once by the range of the eye, is
a mass of pure splendor. When the day is calm, there is a ring
of the Lake, extending more than a mile from shore, which is
brilliantly green. Within this ring the vast center of the
expanse is of a deep, yet soft and singularly tinted blue.
Hues cannot be more sharply contrasted than are these
permanent colors. They do not shade into each other; they lie
as clearly defined as the course of glowing gems in the wall
of the New Jerusalem. It is precisely as if we were looking
upon an immense floor of lapis lazuli set within a ring of
flaming emerald.

The cause of this contrast is the sudden change in the depth
of the water at a certain distance from shore. For a mile or
so the basin shelves gradually, and then suddenly plunges
off into unknown depths. The center of the Lake must be a
tremendous pit. A very short distance from where the water is
green and so transparent that the clean stones can be seen on
the bottom a hundred feet below, the blue water has been
found to be fourteen hundred feet deep; and in other portions
soundings cannot be obtained with a greater extent of line.

What a savage chasm the lake-bed must be! Empty the water from
it and it is pure and unrelieved desolation. And the sovereign
loveliness of the water that fills it is its color. The very
savageness of the rent and fissure is made the condition
of the purest charm. The Lake does not feed a permanent river.
We cannot trace any issue of it to the ocean. It is not, that
we know, a well-spring to supply any large district with
water for ordinary use. It seems to exist for beauty. And its
peculiar beauty has its root in the peculiar harshness and
wildness of the deeps it hides.

Brethren, this question of color in nature, broadly studied,
leads us quickly to contemplate and adore the love of God. If
God were the Almighty chiefly,--if he desired to impress us
most with his omnipotence and infinitude, and make us bow with
dread before him, how easily the world could have been made
more somber, how easily our senses could have been created to
receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, how easily
the mountains might have been made to breathe terror from
their cliffs and walls, how easily the general effect of
extended landscapes might have been monotonous and gloomy! If
religion is, as it has so often been conceived to be,
hostile to the natural good and joy which the heart seeks
instinctively,--if sadness, if melancholy, be the soul of
its inspiration, and misery for myriads the burden of its
prophecy,--I do not believe that the vast deeps of space above
us would have been tinted with tender azure, hiding their
awfulness; I do not believe that storms would break away into
rainbows, and that the clouds of sunset would display the
whole gamut of sensuous splendor; I do not believe that the
ocean would wear such joy for the eye over its awful abysses;
I do not believe that the mountains would crown the complete,
the general loveliness of the globe.

The eloquent preacher then continues to draw other lessons from the
Lake, but, unfortunately, our space is too limited to allow quotation
in full. The following, however, are short excerpts which suggest the
richness of the fuller expression:

The color of the Lake is a word from this natural Gospel. It
covers the chasms and wounds of the earth with splendor. It is
what the name of the lovely New Hampshire lake, Winnepesaukee
indicates, "The Smile of the Great Spirit."

And this color is connected with purity. The green ring
of the Lake is so brilliant, the blue enclosed by it is so
deep and tender, because there is no foulness in the water.
The edge of the waves along all the beach is clean. The
granite sand, too, often dotted with smooth-washed jaspers and
garnets and opaline quartz, is especially bright and spotless.
In fact, the Lake seems to be conscious, and to have an
instinct against contamination. Several streams pour their
burden from the mountains into it; but the impurities which
they bring down seem to be thrown back from the lip of the
larger bowl, and form bars of sediment just before they can
reach its sacred hem. Dip from its white-edged ripples, or
from its calm heart, or from the foam that breaks over its
blue when the wind rouses it to frolic, and you dip what is
fit for a baptismal font,--you dip purity itself.

*       *       *       *       *

The purity of nature is the expression of joy, and it is a
revelation to us that the Creator's holiness is not repellent
and severe. God tries to win you by his Spirit, which clothes
the world with beauty, to trust him, to give up your evil that
you may find deeper communion with him, and to recognize the
charm of goodness which alone is harmony with the cheer and
the purity of the outward world.

I must speak of another lesson, connected with religion,
that was suggested to me on the borders of Lake Tahoe. It is
bordered by groves of noble pines. Two of the days that I was
permitted to enjoy there were Sundays. On one of them I passed
several hours of the afternoon in listening, alone, to the
murmur of the pines, while the waves were gently beating the
shore with their restlessness. If the beauty and purity of the
Lake were in harmony with the deepest religion of the Bible,
certainly the voice of the pines was also in chord with it.

*       *       *       *       *

I read under the pines of Lake Tahoe, on that Sunday
afternoon, some pages from a recent English work that raises
the question of inspiration. Is the Bible the word of God,
or the words of men? It is neither. It is the word of God
breathed through the words of men, inextricably intertwined
with them as the tone of the wind with the quality of the
tree. We must go to the Bible as to a grove of evergreens, not
asking for cold, clear truth, but for sacred influence, for
revival to the devout sentiment, for the
breath of the Holy Ghost, not as it wanders in pure space, but
as it sweeps through cedars and pines.

*       *       *       *       *

In my Sunday musing by the shore of our Lake, I raised the
question,--Who were looking upon the waters of Tahoe when
Jesus walked by the beach of Gennesareth? Did men look upon
it then? And if so were they above the savage level, and could
they appreciate its beauty? And before the time of Christ,
before the date of Adam, however far back we may be obliged
to place our ancestor, for what purpose was this luxuriance
of color, this pomp of garniture? How few human eyes have yet
rested upon it in calmness, to drink in its loveliness! There
are spots near the point of the shore where the hotel stands,
to which not more than a few score intelligent visitors
have yet been introduced. Such a nook I was taken to by a
cultivated friend. We sailed ten miles on the water to the
mouth of a mountain stream that pours foaming into its
green expanse. We left the boat, followed this stream by its
downward leaps through uninvaded nature for more than a mile,
and found that it flows from a smaller lake, not more than
three miles in circuit, which lies directly at the base of
two tremendous peaks of the Sierra, white with immense and
perpetual snow-fields. The same ring of vivid green, the same
center of soft deep blue, was visible in this smaller mountain
bowl, and it is fed by a glorious cataract, supported by
those snow-fields, which pours down in thundering foam, at one
point, in a leap of a hundred feet to die in that brilliant
color, guarded by those cold, dumb crags.

Never since the creation has a particle of that water turned a
wheel, or fed a fountain for human thirst, or served any form
of mortal use. Perhaps the eyes of not a hundred intelligent
spirits on the earth have yet looked upon that scene. Has
there been any waste of its wild and lonely beauty? Has Tahoe
been wasted because so few appreciative souls have studied
and enjoyed it? If not a human glance had yet fallen upon it,
would its charms of color and surroundings be wasted charms?

*       *       *       *       *

Where we discern beauty and yet seclusion, loveliness and yet
no human use, we can follow up the created charm to
yet the mind of the Creator, and think of it as realizing a
conception or a dream by him. He delights in his works. To the
bounds of space their glory is present as one vision to his
eye. And it is our sovereign privilege that we are called to
the possibility of sympathy with his joy. The universe is
the home of God. He has lined its walls with beauty. He has
invited us into his palace. He offers to us the glory of
sympathy with his mind. By love of nature, by joy in the
communion with its beauty, by growing insight into the wonders
of color, form, and purpose, we enter into fellowship with the
Creative art. We go into harmony with God. By dullness of eye
and deadness of heart to natural beauty, we keep away from
sympathy with God, who is the fountain of loveliness as well
as the fountain of love. But the inmost harmony with the
Infinite we find only through love, and the reception of his
love. Then we are prepared to see the world aright, to find
the deepest joy in its pure beauty, and to wait for the hour
of translation to the glories of the interior and deeper
world.




CHAPTER D

JOSEPH LECONTE AT LAKE TAHOE


Joseph LeConte, from whom LeConte Lake is named, the best-beloved
professor of the University of California, and its most noted
geologist, in the year 1870 started out with a group of students of
his geology classes, and made a series of _Ramblings in the High
Sierras_. These were privately printed in 1875, and from a copy
given to me many years ago by the distinguished author, I make the
following extracts on Lake Tahoe:

_August_ 20, (1870). I am cook to-day. I therefore got
up at daybreak and prepared breakfast while the rest enjoyed
their morning snooze. After breakfast we hired a sail-boat,
partly to fish, but mainly to enjoy a sail on this beautiful
Lake.

Oh! the exquisite beauty of this Lake--its clear waters,
emerald-green, and the deepest ultramarine blue; its pure
shores, rocky or cleanest gravel, so clean that the chafing of
the waves does not stain in the least the bright clearness of
the waters; the high granite mountains, with serried peaks,
which stand close around its very shore to guard its crystal
purity,--this Lake, not _among_, but _on_, the
mountains, lifted six thousand feet towards the deep-blue
overarching sky, whose image it reflects! We tried to fish for
trout, but partly because the speed of the sail-boat could
not be controlled, and partly because we enjoyed the scene far
more than the fishing, we were unsuccessful, and soon gave
it up. We sailed some six or eight miles, and landed in a
beautiful cove on the Nevada side. Shall we go in swimming?
Newspapers in San Francisco say there is something peculiar
in the waters of this high mountain Lake. It is so light, they
say, that logs of timber sink immediately, and bodies
of drowned animals never rise; that it is impossible to swim
in it; that, essaying to do so, many good swimmers have
been drowned. These facts are well attested by newspaper
scientists, and therefore not doubted by newspaper readers.
Since leaving Oakland, I have been often asked by the young
men the scientific explanation of so singular a fact. I have
uniformly answered, "We will try scientific experiments when
we arrive there." That time had come. "Now then, boys," I
cried, "for the scientific experiment I promised you!" I
immediately plunged in head-foremost and struck out boldly. I
then threw myself on my back, and lay on the surface with
ray limbs extended and motionless for ten minutes, breathing
quietly the while. All the good swimmers quickly followed. It
is as easy to swim and float in this as in any other water.
Lightness from diminished atmospheric pressure? Nonsense! In
an almost incompressible liquid like water, the diminished
density produced by diminished pressure would be more than
counterbalanced by increased density produced by cold.

After our swim, we again launched our boat, and sailed out
into the very middle of the Lake. The wind had become very