The want of appreciable life remarked by so many travelers in the Sierra forests is never felt at this time of year. Banish all the humming insects and the birds and quadrupeds, leaving only Sir Douglass, and the most solitary of our so-called solitudes would still throb with ardent life. But if you should go impatiently even into the most populous of the groves on purpose to meet him, and walk about looking up among the branches, you will see very little of him. You should lie down at the foot of one of the trees and he will come. For, in the midst of the ordinary forest sounds, the fallings of burrs, piping of quails, the screams of the Clark crow, and the rustling of deer and bears among the chaparral, he is quick to detect your strange footsteps, and will hasten to make a good, close inspection of you as soon as you are still. First, you may hear him sounding a few notes of curious inquiry, but more likely the first intimation of his approach will be the prickly sounds of his feet as he descends the tree overhead, just before he makes his savage onrush to frighten you and proclaim your presence to every other squirrel and bird in the neighborhood. If you are now capable of remaining perfectly motionless, he will make a nearer and nearer approach, and probably set your flesh a-tingle by frisking across your body. Once, while seated at the foot of a Williamson spruce in one of the most inaccessible of the San Joaquin Yosemites engaged in sketching, a reckless fellow came up behind me, passed under my bended arm, and jumped on my paper. And while an old friend of mind was reading one warm afternoon out in the shade of his cabin, one of his Douglass neighbors jumped from the gable upon his head, then with admirable assurance ran down over his shoulder and on to the book he held in his hand.

Our Douglass enjoys a large social circle. For besides his numerous relatives, Sciurus fossor, Tamias quadrivitatus, T. Townsendii, Spermophilus Beecheyi, S. Douglassii, he maintains intimate relations with the nut

above the level of the sea. The gray sciurus ranges but little higher than this. The little striped tamias alone is associated with him everywhere.

In the lower and middle zones, where they all meet, they are tolerably harmonious a happy family, though very amusing skirmishes may occasionally be witnessed. Wherever the ancient glaciers that once loaded the range spread forest soil, there you find our wee hero, most abundant where depth of soil and genial climate have given rise to a corresponding luxuriance in the trees, but following every kind of growth up the curving moraines to the edge of the highest glacial fountains.

Though I cannot of course expect all my readers to sympathize fully in my admiration of this little animal, few I hope will think this sketch of his life too long. I cannot begin to tell here how much he has cheered my lonely wanderings during all the years I have been pursuing my studies in these glorious wilds; or how much unmistakable humanity I have found in him. Take this for example: One calm, creamy, Indian summer morning, when the nuts were ripe, I was camped in the upper pine-woods of the south fork of the San Joaquin, where the squirrels seemed to be about as plentiful as the ripe burrs. They were taking an early breakfast before going to their regular harvest work. While I was busy with my own breakfast I heard the thudding fall of two or three heavy cones from a yellow pine near me, and stole noiselessly forward within about twenty feet of the base of it to observe. In a few moments down came the Douglass. The breakfast-burrs he had cut off had rolled on the gently sloping ground into a clump of ceanothus bushes, but he seemed to know exactly where they were, for he found them at once, apparently without searching for them. They were more than twice as heavy as himself, but after turning them into the right position for getting a good hold with his long sickleteeth he managed to drag them up to the foot of the tree he had cut them from, moving backward. Then seating himself comfortably, he held them on end, bottom

up, and demolished them with easy rapidity. A good deal of nibbling had to be done before he got anything to eat, because the lower scales are barren, but when he had patiently worked his way up to the fertile ones he found two sweet nuts at the base of each, shaped like trimmed hams, and purple spotted like birds' eggs. And notwithstanding these cones were dripping with soft balsam, and covered with prickles, and so strongly put together that a boy would be puzzled to cut them open with a jackknife, he accomplished his meal with easy dignity and cleanliness, making less effort apparently than a man would in eating soft cookery from a plate.

Breakfast done, I thought I would whistle a tune for him before he went to work, curious to see how he would be affected by it. He had not seen me all this while; but the instant I began he darted up the tree nearest to him, and came out on a small dead limb opposite me, and composed himself to listen. I sang and whistled more than a dozen tunes, and as the music changed his eyes sparkled, and he turned his head quickly from side to side, but made no other response. Other squirrels, hearing the strange sounds, came around on all sides, chipmunks also, and birds. One of the birds, a handsome, specklebreasted thrush, seemed even more interested than the squirrels. After listening for a while on one of the lower dead sprays of a pine, he came swooping forward within a few feet

VOL. XVII.-21.

of my face, where he remained fluttering in the air for half a minute or so, sustaining himself with whirring wing-beats, like a humming-bird in front of a flower, while I could look into his eyes and see his innocent wonder.

By this time my performance must have lasted nearly half an hour. I sang or whistled "Bonnie Doon," "Lass o' Gowrie," "O'er the Water to Charlie," "Bonnie Woods o' Cragie Lee," etc., all of which seemed to be listened to with bright interest, my first Douglass sitting patiently through it all, with his telling eyes fixed upon me until I ventured to give the" Old Hundredth," when he screamed his Indian name, Pillillooeet, turned tail, and darted with ludicrous haste up the tree out of sight, his voice and actions in the case leaving a somewhat profane impression, as if he had said, "I'll be hanged if you get me to hear anything so solemn and unpiney." This acted as a signal for the general dispersal of the whole hairy tribe, though the birds seemed willing to wait further developments, music being naturally more in their line.

No one who makes the acquaintance of our forester will fail to admire him; but he is far too self-reliant and warlike ever to be taken for a darling.

I have no idea how long he lives. The young seem to sprout from knot-holes,perfect from the first, and as enduring as their own trees. It is difficult, indeed, to

OUR ancestors named this the New World. They grouped their cabins upon its shores, believing themselves to be the first who had planted colonies within its primeval forests. After several hundred years' possession, we discover that successive and unnumbered civilizations had, possibly, flourished and decayed upon this continent before Columbus crossed the sea. Archæologists have examined fortifications in the prairies, have unearthed cities in the valleys, found sacrificial altars on the bluffs, and burial mounds by the water-courses, showing that the so-called New World is the mausoleum of a prehistoric race, the cemetery of lost tribes, whose crumbling habitations are their only head

stones.

Of late, blown over the plains, come stories of strange newly discovered cities of the far south-west; picturesque piles of masonry, of an age unknown to tradition. These ruins mark an era among antiquarians. The mysterious mound-builders fade into comparative insignificance before the grander and more ancient cliff-dwellers, whose castles lift their towers amid the sands of Arizona and crown the terraced slopes of the Rio Mancos and the Hovenweep [pronounced Hov'-enweep].

A ruin, accidentally discovered by A. D. Wilson of the Hayden Survey several years ago, while he was pursuing his labors as chief of the topographical corps in Southern Colorado, is described to me by Mr. Wilson

as a stone building, about the size of the Patent-Office. It stood upon the bank of the Animas, in the San Juan country, and contained perhaps five hundred rooms. The roof and portions of the walls had fallen, but the part standing indicated a height of four stories. A number of the rooms were fairly preserved, had small loop-hole windows, but no outer doors. The building had doubtless been entered originally by means of ladders resting on niches, and drawn in after the occupants. The floors were of cedar, each log as large around as a man's head, the spaces filled neatly by smaller poles and twigs, covered by a carpet of cedar-bark. The ends of the timber were bruised and frayed, as if severed by a dull instrument; in the vicinity were stone hatchets, and saws made of sand-stone slivers about two feet long, worn to a smooth edge. A few hundred yards from the mammoth building was a second large house in ruins, and between the two strongholds rows of small dwellings, built of cobble-stones laid in adobe, and arranged along streets, after the style of the village of to-day. The smaller houses were in a more advanced state of ruin, on account of the round stones being more readily disintegrated by the elements than the heavy masonry. The streets and houses of this deserted town are overgrown by juniper and piñon, the latter a dwarf wide-spreading pine which bears beneath the scales of its cones delicious and nutritious nuts. From the size of the dead, as well as the living, trees, and from their position on the heaps of crumbling stone, Mr. Wilson concludes that a great period of time has elapsed since the buildings fell. How many hundred years they stood after desertion before yielding to the inroads of time cannot be certainly known.

The presence of sound wood in the houses does not set aside their antiquity. In the dry, pure air of Southern Colorado, wood fairly protected will last for centuries. In Asia cedar-wood has been kept a thousand years, and in Egypt cedar is known to have been in perfect preservation two thousand years after it left the forest. The cedars throughout the territories of the southwest do not rot, even in the groves. They die, and stand erect, solid and sapless. The winds and whirling sands carve the dead trees into forms of fantastic beauty, drill holes through the trunks, and play at hideand-go-seek in the perforated limbs until, after ages of resistance, they literally blow away in atoms of fine, clean dust.

On the Rio San Juan, about twenty-five miles distant from the city of the Animas, Mr. Wilson discovered the following evening a similar pile, looming solemnly in the twilight near their camping-place. The scene as described was weird in the extreme. As the moon arose, the shadows of the phantom buildings were thrown darkly across the silvery plain. The blaze of camp-fires, the tiny tents, the negro cook, the men in buckskin hunting garb, and the picketed mules, made a strange picture of the summer's night, with background of moonlit desert and crumbling ruins, on whose ramparts towered dead, gaunt cedars, lifting their bleached skeletons like sheeted ghosts within the silent watchtowers of the murky past.

In the summer of 1874, a division of the Hayden Survey, specially detailed for the work, under the direction of W. H. Jackson, started to find, and investigate thoroughly, the ancient cities of the south-west. They have brought back the first authentic and official information ever received upon the subject. They report the ruins found by Mr. Wilson to be on the northern edge of an immense settlement, which once extended its dense population far down into New Mexico. The area covered is several thousand square miles, and embraces the adjoining corners of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, the most southerly ruins showing much the finer specimens of architecture. The region is remote from civilization, and the nearest railroad point between two and three hundred miles distant. From Fort Garland, the way leads across a trackless desert, dotted by sage-bush and stunted grease-wood, and enlivened by rattlesnakes, horned toads and tarantulas. In patches, the alkali rests on the sand in fleecy flakes, like new-fallen snow, and over all the sun beats down in tropical fury. The streams formed on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains have cut long cañoned valleys through nearly horizontal beds in the southern part of the desert, and have gashed the underlying rock to a depth sometimes of many thousand feet. The river-beds are for the most part dry, except when in spring the snows come from the mountains in a brief, cool flood, which, disappearing, leaves only pasty, brackish dregs in the pockets of the rocks. Very rarely there are found living springs trickling down the cañon-side, marked by the mosses and leaflets that even in deserts find out and dwell beside the tiniest rill.

Bounded by the Rio Mancos, the La Plata and the Rio San Juan, is a triangle