The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in colour and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervour of the Middle Ages.
Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again with a burst of wonderful music at dawn. I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs, everything. The only birds he noticed or cared for, were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ousels—always particular favourites of mine too.
The second night, we camped in a snow-storm on the edge of the cañon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fir. And next day, we went down into the wonderland of the Valley itself.
I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir, and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs.
Theodore Roosevelt (Condensed)
THE BEAR HUNTERS’ DINNER
From Roosevelt’s Autobiography
When wolf-hunting in Texas, and when bear-hunting in Louisiana and Mississippi, I was not only enthralled by the sport but also by the strange new birds and other creatures, and the trees and flowers I had not known before.
By the way, there was one feast at the White House, which stands above all others in my memory, this was “The Bear Hunters’ Dinner.”
I had been treated so kindly by my friends on these hunts, and they were such fine fellows, men whom I was so proud to think of as Americans, that I set my heart on having them at a hunters’ dinner at the White House.
One December, I succeeded. There were twenty or thirty of them, all told, as good hunters, as daring riders, as first class citizens as could be found anywhere. No finer set of guests ever sat at meat in the White House.