Illness, also, interposed some checks as he worked with
characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass of Alaska
notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty years.
The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of
1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been
found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the
volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the
fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a
poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a
portrayal of the auroras - one of those phenomena which else where he
described as "the most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God."
Muir's manuscripts bear on every page impressive evidence of the
pains he took in his literary work, and the lofty standard he set
himself in his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of
an experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir.
He was tireless in pursuing the meaning of a physiographical fact,
and his extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail
it to its last hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his
adventures in Alaska, his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm,
and he would live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him
"shapeless harvests of revealed glory."
For a number of months just prior to his death he had the friendly
assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons.
