Read the excerpt from "Lake Tahoe" by Isabella Bird.
I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands,
but beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American beauty-snow splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar
pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest colour, and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty
on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700
feet deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet
in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe.
It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early
yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with side-walks heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and water-
melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches, apricots-all of startling size as compared with any !
ever saw before.... I pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing the bay in a fog as chill as November ....
Based on this excerpt, what is the purpose of this essay?
to describe to readers a trip Lake Tahoe
to provide information to readers about places to travel
O to explain to readers the differences between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe
O to persuade readers to travel to Lake Tahoe