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It was a February day, one of those crystalline days of our snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass; and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele.

There was no moving figure on the baked mountains, no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the fires of the earth. Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was little vivacity.

Cattle were lying about in groups, and the loud, sweet song of the prairie lark was' heard on every side. For the bright snowless winter of the mesas was gone and the springtime was at hand. The grass was greening and all nature seemed turning to thoughts of love.

Only a mere fraction of tree surface is searched over at any one time. In large forests probably only a mere fraction of the trees are visited at all. One cold day in midwinter, when I was walking through the snowless woods, I saw chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers upon the ground, and upon roots and fallen branches.

The brave woodpeckers were clinging to the snowless sides of the larger boles and overarching branches of the camp trees, making short flights from side to side of the grove, pecking now and then at the acorns they had stored in the bark, and chattering aimlessly as if unable to keep still, evidently putting in the time in a very dull way.

The Golden River, which sprang from one of the lower and snowless elevations, was now nearly in shadow all but the uppermost jets of spray, which rose like slow smoke above the undulating line of the cataract and floated away in feeble wreaths upon the morning wind. On this object, and on this alone, Hans's eyes and thoughts were fixed.

During sunshiny days of the snowless winter, these dogs were led into the back yard of the bungalow. It had a high board fence, so they could run about and stretch, or lie in the warm grass. None of these dogs ever stayed very long, but they all soon learned to love the old captain and would rush around his feet or crawl against him, wagging their tails.

And between their swelling contours lay a country of lesser hills and valleys, equally snowless, and whose heart was the flood of a great river. Sterility had passed. Here were no barren hill-crests with a hundred weatherworn facets. Here were no fields of snow, driven by the fierce gales of the polar seas. Here were no glacial fields bound in an iron grip throughout the ages.

Far to the southward Mount Whitney lifts its granite summit four or five hundred feet higher than Shasta, but it is nearly snowless during the late summer, and is so feebly individualized that the traveler may search for it in vain among the many rival peaks crowded along the axis of the range to north and south of it, which all alike are crumbling residual masses brought into relief in the degradation of the general mass of the range.

For the moment each was absorbed in his own thought. None gave a sign of the nature of that thought, but it was an easy thing to guess since their faces were turned towards the reflection of Unaga's fires. It was Steve who first withdrew his gaze. He seemed reluctant. He turned and surveyed the snowless territory about them. It was an extraordinary display of Nature's mood.