father, who had but two absorbing interests, his stern religion and his thriving acres, “John, what time is it when you get up in the morning?”

“About one o’clock,” replied the boy, tremblingly.

“What time is that to be stirring about and disturbing the whole family?”

“You told me, Father—” began John.

“I know I gave you that miserable permission,” said the man with a groan, “but I never dreamed that you would get up in the middle of the night.”

The boy wisely said nothing, and the blessed time for study and experimentation was not taken away.

Even his father seemed to take pride in the hickory clock that he next constructed. It was in the form of a scythe to symbolize Time, the pendulum being a bunch of arrows to suggest the flight of the minutes. A thermometer and barometer were next evolved, and automatic contrivances to light the fire and to feed the horses at a given time.

One day a friendly neighbor, who recognized that the boy was a real mechanical genius, advised him to take his whittled inventions to the State Fair at Madison. There two of his wooden clocks and the thermometer were given a place of honor in the Fine Arts Hall, where they attracted much attention. It was generally agreed that this farm-boy from the backwoods had a bright future.

A student from the university persuaded the young inventor that he might be able to work his way through college. Presenting himself to the dean in accordance with this friendly advice, young Muir told his story, explaining that except for a two-month term in the country he had not been to school since he had left Scotland in his twelfth year. He was received kindly, given a trial in the preparatory department, and after a few weeks transferred to the freshman class.

During the four years of his college life John Muir made his way by teaching school a part of each winter and doing farm-work summers. He sometimes cut down the expense of board to fifty cents a week by living on potatoes and mush, which he cooked for himself at the dormitory furnace. Pat, the janitor, would do anything for this young man who could make such wonderful things. Years afterward he pointed out his room to visitors and tried to describe the wonders it had contained. It had, indeed, looked like a branch of the college museum, with its numerous botanical and geological specimens and curious mechanical contrivances.

Although he spent four years at the State University, he did not take the regular course, but devoted himself chiefly to chemistry, physics, botany, and geology, which, he thought, would be most useful to him. Then, without graduating, he started out “on a glorious botanical and geological excursion which has lasted,” he said, in concluding the story of his early life, “for fifty years and is not yet completed.”

He journeyed afoot to Florida, sleeping on the ground wherever night found him. “I wish I knew where I was going,” he wrote to a friend who asked about his plans. “Only I know that I seem doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness.’ ”

Because he loved the whole fair earth and longed to know something of the story that its rocks and trees might tell, he wandered on and on. After going to Cuba, a siege of tropical fever, contracted by sleeping on swampy ground, caused him to give up for a time a cherished plan to make the acquaintance of the vegetation along the Amazon.

“Fate and flowers took me to California,” he said. He found there his true Florida (Land of Flowers), and he found, also, what became the passion of his life and his life work—the noble mountains, the great trees, and the marvelous Yosemite. Here he lived year after year, climbing the mountains, descending into the cañons, lovingly, patiently working to decipher the story of the rocks, and to make the wonder and beauty which thrilled his soul a heritage for mankind forever.

He lived for months at a time in the Yosemite Valley, whose marvels he knew in every mood of sunshine, moonlight, dawn, sunset, storm, and winter whiteness of frost and snow. He would wander for days on the heights without gun or any provisions except bread, tea, a tin cup, pocket-knife, and short-handled ax.

Once, on reading a magazine article by an enthusiastic young mountain-climber, who dilated upon his thrilling adventures in scaling Mount Tyndall, Mr. Muir commented dryly: “He must have given himself a lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before breakfast.”

At a time when trails were few and hard to find, he explored the Sierra, which, he said, should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. When night came, he selected the lee side of a log, made a fire, and went to sleep on a bed of pine-needles. If it was snowing, he made a bigger fire and lay closer to his log shelter.

“Outdoors is the natural place for man,” he said. “I begin to cough and wheeze the minute I get within walls.”

Never at a loss to make his way in the wilderness, he was completely bewildered in the midst of city streets.

“What is the nearest way out of town?” he asked of a man in the business section of San Francisco soon after he landed at the Golden Gate in 1868.

“But I don’t know where you want to go!” protested the surprised pedestrian.

“To any place that is wild,” he replied.

So began the days of his wandering in pathless places among higher rocks “than the world and his ribbony wife could reach.” “Climb the mountains, climb, if you would reach beauty,” said John Muir, the wild, eager spirit of the lad who had braved scoldings and “skelpings” to climb the craggy peaks of Dunbar shining in his eyes.

When his friends remonstrated with him because of the way he apparently courted danger, he replied: “A true mountaineer is never reckless. He knows, or senses with a sure instinct, what he can do. In a moment of real danger his whole body is eye, and common skill and fortitude are replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge.”

It was not entirely the passion for beauty that took this lover of the sublime aspects of nature up among the mountains and glaciers—“up where God is making the world.” It was also the passion for knowledge—the longing to know something of the tools the Divine Sculptor had used in carving the giant peaks and mighty cañons.

“The marvels of Yosemite are the end of the story,” he said. “The alphabet is to be found in the crags and valleys of the summits.”

Here he wandered about, comparing cañon with cañon, following lines of cleavage, and finding the key to every precipice and sloping wall in the blurred marks of the glaciers on the eternal rocks. Every boulder found a tongue; “in every pebble he could hear the sound of running water.” The tools that had carved the beauties of Yosemite were not, he concluded, those of the hidden fires of the earth, the rending of earthquake and volcanic eruption, but the slow, patient cleaving and breaking by mighty glaciers, during the eons when the earth’s surface was given over to the powers of cold—the period known as the Ice Age.

“There are no accidents in nature,” he said. “The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that keeps the stars in their places. Each bird-song is an echo of the universal harmony. Nature is one.”

Because he believed that Nature reveals many of her innermost secrets in times of storm, he often braved the wildest tempests on the heights. He spoke with keen delight of the times when he had been “magnificently