Graydon, Katharine Merrill, Page 5

I I $3 John Hair Solosaon, With Miss Merrill were oftentimes children whoa he charmed with accounts of / the things he had seen and had heard. Through the years which have brought pian* hood and womanhood to his childish hearers, they have cherished the memory of that dark room, and of those beautiful stories, and they have never ceased to listen to the tales still aa wonderful - to the voice still as beloved. \ The accident, agonising though it was, gave light for darkness, and he now aade .the decision that his work should no longer lie along the line of aeehimics and invention, but he spent in the study of R&ture. So, from Indianapolis Mr. Muir set out afoot on a thousand-mile rabble to the Quit of Mexico, studying the flora of Kentucky, Tennessee, Uorth Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Yet the plants and the animals and the rocks were not his only companions; very small copies of Burns, of Milton, of the New Testament, he carried, and rm&& then a part of the very fiber and essence of his being. With appetite whetted by the exuberant vegetation of the Southern States, he pushed his way further south, sailing for Cuba, where he enjoyed the glorious plant life and scenery of the tropics. All the while quite unaware -whither his path was leading, he was pushing on toward the Lord\u27s garden of California* Ma own words best tell the story of his arrival; After leaving the Florida swamps I came here. All the world was before sie, and every day was a holiday. I stopped one day in San Francisco, and then asrced the nearest way out to the un- trarapled part of the country. \u27But whore do you want to go?\u27 asked the man to Mima I had applied for this important information. \u27To any place that is wild,* I said. This reply startled him, and he seemed to fear that 1 might be erasy, &.nd . that, therefore, the sooner 1 got out of town the better; so he directed me to the Oakland ferry. From &ast Oakland I started up the Santa Clara Valley on the first of .April, after a wet winter. The wars, sunny air was fairly throbbing with lark /)https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmr-all/1157/thumbnail.jp