Fall River, an important tributary of the Pitt or Upper Sacramento, is only about ten miles long, and is all falls, cascades, and springs from its head to its confluence with the Pitt.

Bountiful springs, charmingly embowered, issue from the rocks at one end of it, a snowy fall a hundred and eighty feet high thunders at the other, and a rush of crystal rapids sing and dance between.

Of course such streams are but little affected by the weather.

Sheltered from evaporation their flow is nearly as full in the autumn as in the time of general spring floods.

While those of the high Sierra diminish to less than the hundredth part of their springtime prime, shallowing in autumn to a series of silent pools among the rocks and hollows of their channels, connected by feeble, creeping threads of water, like the sluggish sentences of a tired writer, connected by a drizzle of "ands" and "buts." Strange to say, the greatest floods occur in winter, when one would suppose all the wild waters would be muffled and chained in frost and snow.