It was nearer sunset than it should have been when Job reached the sign-board far up the toll-road that read, "To the Big Trees." Putting spurs to Bess, he galloped on at a rapid pace for a mile or more, when he became conscious that the sugar pines and cedars were giving place to strange trees which had loomed up before him so gradually that he was not aware the far-famed Sequoias, the giants of the forest, were all about him.
A dim, strange light filled the place. The twilight was coming fast in that far, lonely spot shaded by the close ranks of the Titanic forms. He walked Bess slowly down the shadowy corridor along the line of those straight giants, whose tapering spires seemed lost in heaven's blue.
How long it took to pass a tree! Bess and he were but toys beside them, yet he could scarcely realize their vastness till he slid off her back, and, throwing the rein over her neck, started around one, and lost Bess from view as he turned the corner and walked a full hundred feet before he had encircled the monster. How ponderous the bark, how strangely small the cones!
Mounting Bess, he rode down through the vast aisle of these monarchs of the mountains. A feeling of awe came over him. The world of Gold City and strife and jealousy and struggle, the realm of Mary Jane and Aunt Eliza, the world of petty humanity, seemed far away. He was alone with God and the eternities. Silent he stood, with bared head, and looked along the monster trunks that stretched far up, up, up, towards where the soft blue of evening twilight seemed to rest on them for support. He found himself praying--he could not help it. It was the litany of his soul rising with Nature's silent prayer: "Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." All through he said it, to the reverent "Amen," then, putting on his hat, rode on toward the farther grove.
[Illustration: "Grizzly Giant," Mariposa Grove.]
On he went past "Grizzly Giant," standing lone and bare, its foliage gone, its old age come--"Grizzly Giant," which was old before Christ was born; on by vigorous saplings, already rivals of the biggest pines. One time-worn veteran had succumbed to some Titanic stroke of Nature's power and lay prostrate on the ground. Decay and many generations of little denizens of the forest had hollowed its great trunk like some vast tunnel. Job, looking in, could see the light in the distance.