Muir Wild Quotes

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity

I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can".

There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties

Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.

I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong.

Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.

O corse of the Locked Tomb," you extemporized wildly. "Beloved dead, hear your handmaiden. I loved you with my whole rotten, contemptible heart―I loved you to the exclusion of aught else―let me live long enough to die at your feet." Then you went under to make war on Hell.

I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I hadn ever before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, "A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake" feeling sure I was going to learn something.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.

Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own conscious certainty that t his was the cure I needed. Hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificent rock piles -- a fine lesson; and all Nature's wildness tells the same story -- the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort -- each and all are the orderly beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.

This is Nature's own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is so well defended.

Wherever we go in the mountains, or indeed in any of God's wild fields, we find more than we seek.

It destroyed some cavern of your reverence to watch Augustine punch the Prince Undying on the arm, and to watch the Prince Undying gamely cuff him back. Part of your brain temporarily calcified into atheism. You had not thought it would be like this. From the day the letter arrived in Drearburh, you’d thought that your Lyctoral days would be spent in prayer, training, and the beauty of necromantic mysteries. You did not think any part of it would be spent honestly quite drunk, wearing a piece of material no larger than a towel, and with Ianthe Tridentarius’s fingers idly caressing the hair at the nape of your neck. For a moment, you wondered wildly if you had hit your head quite hard entering the shuttle out of Drearburh, and had hallucinated everything subsequent.

learn to live like the wild animals,

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.

When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness...

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth, Dazed with the tall and echoing passages, The swift recoils, so many I almost feared I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner, Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal After the straw ceased rustling and the bull Lay dead upon the straw and I remained… I could not live if this were not illusion. It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another. For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle, While down below the little ships sailed by… That was the real world; I have touched it once, And now shall know it always. But the lie, The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads That run and run and never reach an end, Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there But that my soul has birdwings to fly free. Oh these deceits are strong almost as life. Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth, And woke far on. I did not know the place.

The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It’s open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen. Travel by kayak and canoe.

The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you–Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejune!--but that would not have been the wild and confident fuck-you of the Ninth House. The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.

I was bypassing the High Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

I explored the literature of tree-climbing, not extensive, but so exciting. John Muir had swarmed up a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce during a Californian windstorm, and looked out over a forest, 'the whole mass of which was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire!' Italo Calvino had written his The Baron in the Trees, Italian editionmagical novel, The Baron in the Trees, whose young hero, Cosimo, in an adolescent huff, climbs a tree on his father's forested estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again. He keeps his impetuous word, and ends up living and even marrying in the canopy, moving for miles between olive, cherry, elm, and holm oak. There were the boys in B.B.'s Brendan Chase, who go feral in an English forest rather than return to boarding-school, and climb a 'Scotch pine' in order to reach a honey buzzard's nest scrimmed with beech leaves. And of course there was the realm of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin: Pooh floating on his sky-blue balloon up to the oak-top bee's nest, in order to poach some honey; Christopher ready with his pop-gun to shoot Pooh's balloon down once the honey had been poached....

So this is the Sierras, eh?” he said, looking out over the dark lake. “All that time growing up I never made it up here before.” “It’s the Range of Light,” I said, passing the joint back to him. “That’s what John Muir called it. I can see why. I’ve never seen light like I have out here. All the sunsets and sunrises against the mountains.” “You’re on a spirit walk, aren’t you?” Paco said, staring into the fire. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could call it that.” “That’s what it is,” he said, looking at me intensely. He stood. “I’ve got something I want to give you.” He went to the back of the truck and returned with a T-shirt. He handed it to me and I held it up. On the front was a giant picture of Bob Marley, his dreadlocks surrounded by images of electric guitars and pre-Columbian effigies in profile. On the back was a picture of Haile Selassie, the man Rastafarians thought was God incarnate, rimmed by a red and green and gold swirl. “That is a sacred shirt,” Paco said as I studied it by the firelight. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.” I nodded, silenced by emotion and the half-drunk

The belief that nature is an Other, a separate realm defiled by the unnatural mark of humans, is a denial of our own wild being. Emerging as they do from the evolved mental capacities of primates manipulating their environment, the concrete sidewalk, the spew of liquids from a paint factory, and the city documents that plan Denver’s growth are as natural as the patter of cottonwood leaves, the call of the young dipper to its kind, and the cliff swallow’s nest. Whether all these natural phenomena are wise, beautiful, just or good are different questions. Such puzzles are best resolved by beings who understand themselves to be nature. Muir said he walked “with” nature, and many conservation groups continue that narrative. Educators warn that if we spend too long on the wrong side of the divide, we’ll develop a pathology, the disorder of nature deficit. We can extend Muir’s thought and understand that we walk “within.” Nature needs no home; it is home. We can have no deficit of nature; we are nature, even when we are unaware of this nature. With the understanding that humans belong in this world, discernment of the beautiful and good can emerge from human minds networked within the community of life, not human minds peering in from the outside.

The Hotel dining-room, like most of the others I was to find in the Highlands, had its walls covered with pictures of all sorts of wild game, living or in the various postures of death that are produced by sport. Between these pictures the walls were alert with the stuffed heads of deer, furnished with antlers of every degree of magnificence. A friend of mine has a theory that these pictures of dying birds and wounded beasts are intended to whet the diner's appetite, and perhaps they did in the more lusty age of Victoria; but I found they had the opposite effect on me, and had to keep my eyes from straying too often to them. In one particular hotel this idea was carried out with such thoroughness that the walls of its dining room looked like a shambles, they presented such an overwhelming array of bleeding birds, beasts and fishes. To find these abominations on the walls of Highland hotels, among a people of such delicacy in other things, is peculiarly revolting, and rubs in with superfluous force that this is a land whose main contemporary industry is the shooting down of wild creatures; not production of any kind but wholesale destruction. This state of things is not the fault of the Highlanders, but of the people who have bought their country and come to it chiefly to kill various forms of life.

SUGGESTED READING The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

destroyed some cavern of your reverence to watch Augustine punch the Prince Undying on the arm, and to watch the Prince Undying gamely cuff him back. Part of your brain temporarily calcified into atheism. You had not thought it would be like this. From the day the letter arrived in Drearburh, you’d thought that your Lyctoral days would be spent in prayer, training, and the beauty of necromantic mysteries. You did not think any part of it would be spent honestly quite drunk, wearing a piece of material no larger than a towel, and with Ianthe Tridentarius’s fingers idly caressing the hair at the nape of your neck. For a moment, you wondered wildly if you had hit your head quite hard entering the shuttle out of Drearburh, and had hallucinated everything subsequent.

All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.' Now I knew this for what it was; a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.

All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal

He (the Douglas squirrel) is the most influential of the Sierra animals, quick mountain vigor and valor condensed, purely wild, and as free from disease as a sunbeam.

But Stanley persisted in the kitchen, performing the small yet demanding apprentice's tasks she set for him- removing the skin from piles of almonds, grating snowy hills of lemon zest, the nightly sweeping of the kitchen floor and sponging of metal shelves. He didn't seem to mind: every day after school, he'd lean over the counter, watching her experiment with combinations- shifting flavors like the beads in a kaleidoscope- burnt sugar, hibiscus, rum, espresso, pear: dessert as a metaphor for something unresolvable. It was nothing like the slapdashery of cooking. Baking, to Avis, was no less precise than chemistry: an exquisite transfiguration. Every night, she lingered in the kitchen, analyzing her work, jotting notes, describing the way ingredients nestled: a slim layer of black chocolate hidden at the bottom of a praline tart, the essence of lavender stirred into a bowl of preserved wild blueberries. Stanley listened to his mother think out loud: he asked her questions and made suggestions- like mounding lemon meringue between layers of crisp pecan wafers- such a success that her corporate customers ordered it for banquets and company retreats. On the day Avis is thinking of, she sat in the den where they watched TV, letting her hand swim over the silk of her daughter's hair, imagining a dessert pistou of blackberry, creme fraiche, and nutmeg, in which floated tiny vanilla croutons. Felice was her audience, Avis's picky eater- difficult to please. Her "favorites" changed capriciously and at times, it seemed, deliberately, so that after Avis set out what once had been, in Felice's words, "the best ever"- say, a miniature roulade Pavlova with billows of cream and fresh kumquat- Felice would announce that she was now "tired" of kumquats.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries. How different are most of those of the white man, especially on the lower gold region—roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides of cañons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge to ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills, imprisoned in iron pipes to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the mountain's face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These are the white man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the Range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature is doing what she

You cry mercy?” “Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona. “I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.” “Yes,” said Nona, “but—but stop this, stop hurting the Captain…” She rooted around wildly to find a phrase, and fell back on Cam—“You’re acting out. Maybe you should take five.” “For eight thousand unjust bodies, I will stop,” said the Captain.

He thought back to dog sledding as a boy. During the day he scouted Doc’s property in wheeled sleds through thousands of acres of switchgrass, dirt, and live oaks. At night he sat with King by a small fire, even in the summer, and read books like the Call of the Wild, Winterdance, and Stone Fox. He read aloud to King the great adventures of Balto and the race to Nome, and stories of the un adulterated wild by John Muir.

In so wild and so beautiful a region your first day will be spent, every sight and sound novel and inspiring, and leading you far from yourself.

Choices aren't mistakes unless we spend a lot of time regretting them. You could look at them as wild adventures instead.

so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.

In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” It was a quote from John Muir.

Though alligators and snakes naturally repel us, they are no mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, un-depraved and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth. A

As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: “These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

No other excursion that I know of can be made into any of the wild portions of America where so much fine and grand and novel scenery is brought to view at so cheap and easy a price. Anybody may make this trip and be blest by it–old or young, sick or well, soft, succulent people whose limbs have never ripened, as well as sinewy mountaineers; for the climate is kindly, and one has only to breathe the exhilarating air and gaze and listen while being carried smoothly onward over the glassy waters.

God’s holy light making all divine.

Once long ago in Wisconsin I saw the heavens draped in rich purple auroral clouds fringed and folded in most magnificent forms; but in this glory of light, so pure, so bright, so enthusiastic in motion, there was nothing in the least cloudlike.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

I told him he must reform, for a man who neither believed in God nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the worst of all unbelievers. —John Muir, Travels in Alaska

On June 4, 1892, twenty-seven men met in San Francisco to form the Sierra Club. Muir was chosen as president, a title he would hold until his death.

Alaska’s chief asset, “more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted,” is its scenery. Echoing his Elder shipmate John Muir, the father of American mapmaking notes that, for the one Yosemite in California, “Alaska has hundreds.

As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram from a San Francisco newspaper, offering him a large sum if he would go over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition. "Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our grand Alaska." He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important and responsible position. "Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke now," I said. "There is ——" (naming a noted poet and author of the Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time." "—— doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know him too well." Muir

So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.