PRIMEVAL CALIFORNIA

"Primeval California" was inscribed on the knapsack of the Artist, on the portmanteau of Foster, the Artist's chum, and on the fly-leaf of the note-book of the Scribe. The luggage of the boisterous trio was checked through to the heart of the Red Woods, where a vacation camp was pitched. The expected "last man" leaped the chasm that was rapidly widening between the city front of San Francisco and the steamer bound for San Rafael, and approached us—the trio above referred to—with a slip of paper in his hand. It was not a subpoena; it was not a dun; it was a round-robin of farewells from a select circle of admirers, wishing us joy, Godspeed, success in art and literature, and a safe return at last.

The wind blew fair; we were at liberty for an indefinite period. In forty minutes we struck another shore and another clime. San Francisco is original in its affectation of ugliness—it narrowly escaped being a beautiful city—and its humble acceptation of a climate which is as invigorating as it is unscrupulous, having a peculiar charm which is seldom discovered until one is beyond its spell. Sailing into the adjacent summer,—summer is intermittent in the green city of the West,—we passed into the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, the great landmark of the coast. The admirable outline of the mountain, however, was partially obscured by the fog, already massing along its slopes.

The narrow-gauge of the N.P.C.R.R. crawls like a snake from the ferry on the bay to the roundhouse over and beyond the hills, but seven miles from the sea-mouth of the Russian River. It turns very sharp corners, and turns them every few minutes; it doubles in its own trail, runs over fragile trestle-work, darts into holes and re-appears on the other side of the mountains, roars through strips of redwoods like a rushing wind, skirts the shore of bleak Tomales Bay, cuts across the potato district and strikes the redwoods again, away up among the saw-mills at the logging-camps, where it ends abruptly on a flat under a hill. And what a flat it is!—enlivened with a first-class hotel, some questionable hostelries, a country store, a post-office and livery-stable, and a great mill buzzing in an artificial desert of worn brown sawdust.

Here, after a five hours' ride, we alighted at Duncan's Mills, hard by the river, and with a girdle of hills all about us—high, round hills, as yellow as brass when they are not drenched with fog. In the twilight we watched the fog roll in, trailing its lace-like skirts among the highland forests. How still the river was! Not a ripple disturbed it; there was no perceptible current, for after the winter floods subside, the sea throws up a wall of sand that chokes the stream, and the waters slowly gather until there is volume enough to clear it. Then come the rains and the floods, in which rafts of drift-wood and even great logs are carried twenty feet up the shore, and permanently lodged in inextricable confusion.

I remember the day when we had made a pilgrimage to the coast, when from the rocky jaws of the river we looked up the still waters, and saw them slowly gathering strength and volume. The sea was breaking upon the bar without; Indian canoes swung on the tideless stream, filled with industrious occupants taking the fish that await their first plunge into salt water. Every morning we bathed in the unpolluted waters of the river. How fresh and sweet they are—the filtered moisture of the hills, mingled with the distillations from cedar-boughs drenched with fogs and dew!

Lounging upon the hotel veranda, turning our backs upon the last vestiges of civilization in the shape of a few guests who dressed for dinner as if it were imperative, we were greeted with mellow heartiness by a hale old backwoodsman, a genuine representative of the primeval. It was Ingram, of Ingram House, Austin Creek, Red Woods, Sonoma County, Primeval California. It was he, with ranch-wagon and stalwart steeds. The Artist, who was captain-general of the forces, at once held a consultation with Ingram, whom we will henceforth call the Doctor, for he is a doctor—minus the degrees—of divinity, medicine, and laws, and master of all work; a deer-stalker, rancher, and general utility man; the father of a clever family, and the head of a primeval house.

In half an hour we were jolting, bag and baggage, body and soul, over roads wherein the ruts were filled with dust as fine as flour, fording trout-streams, and winding through wood and brake. We passed the old logging-camp, with the hills about it blackened and disfigured for life; and the new logging-camp, with its stumps still smoldering, its steep slides smoking with the friction of swift-descending logs, the ring of the ax and the vicious buzz of the saw mingled with the shouts of the woodsmen. How industry is devastating that home of the primeval!

Soon the road led us into the very heart of the redwoods, where superb columns stood in groups, towering a hundred and even two hundred feet above our heads! A dense undergrowth of light green foliage caught and held the sunlight like so much spray; the air was charged with the fragrance of wild honeysuckle and resiniferous trees; the jay-bird darted through the boughs like a phosphorous flame, screaming his joy to the skies; squirrels fled before us; quails beat a muffled tattoo in the brush-snakes slid out of the road in season to escape destruction.

We soon dropped into the bed of the stream Austin Creek, and rattled over the broad, strong highway of the winter rains. We bent our heads under low-hanging boughs, drove into patches of twilight, and out on the other side into the waning afternoon; we came upon a deserted cottage with a great javelin driven through the roof to the cellar; it had been torn from one of the gigantic redwoods and hurled by a last winter's gale into that solitary home. Fortunately no one had been injured, but the inmates had fled in terror, lashed by the driving storm.

We came to Ingram House in the dusk, out of the solitude of the forest into a pine-and-oak opening, the monotony of which was enlivened with a fair display of the primitive necessities of life—a vegetable garden on the right, a rustic barn on the left, a house of "shakes" in the distance, and nine deer-hounds braying a deep-mouthed welcome at our approach.

In the rises of the house on the hill-slope is a three-roomed bachelors' hall; here, on the next day, we were cozily domiciled. There were a few guests in the homestead. The boys slept in the granary. The deer-hounds held high carnival under our cottage, charging at intervals during the night upon imaginary intruders. We woke to the blustering music of the beasts, and thought on the possible approach of bear, panther, California lion, wild cat, 'coon, and polecat; but thought on it with composure, for the hounds were famous hunters, and there was a whole arsenal within reach.

We were waked at 6:30, and come down to the front "stoop" of the homestead. The structure was home-made, with rafters on the outside or inside according to the fancy of the builder; sunshine and storm had stained it grayish brown, and no tint could better harmonize with the background and surroundings. In one corner of the stoop a tin wash-basin stood under a waterspout in the sink; there swung the family towels; the public comb, hanging by its teeth to a nail, had seen much service; a piece of brown soap lay in an abalone shell tacked to the wall; a small mirror reflected kaleidoscopical sections of the face, and made up for its want of compass by multiplying one or another feature. We never before ate at the hour of seven as we ate then; then a pipe on the front steps and a frolic with the boys or the dogs would follow, and digestion was well under way before the day's work began. Then the Artist shouldered his knapsack and departed; the lads trudged through the road to school; the women went about the house with untiring energy; the male hands were already making the anvil musical in the rustic smithy, or dragging stock to the slaughter, or busy with the thousand and one affairs that comprise the sum and substance of life in a self-sustaining community. We were assured that were war to be declared between the outer world and Ingram House, lying in ambush in the heart of our black forest, we might withstand the siege indefinitely. All that was needful lay at our hands, and yet, a stone's-throw away from our shake-built citadel, one loses himself in a trackless wood, whose glades are still untrodden by men, though one sometimes hears the light step of the bronco when Charlie rides forth in search of a strong bull. All work was like play there, because of a picturesque element which predominated over the practical. Wood-cutting under the window of the best room, trying out fat in a caldron or an earth-oven against our cottage, dragging sunburnt straw in a rude sledge down the hill-side road, shoeing a neighbor's horse in a circle of homely gossips, hunting to supply the domestic board at the distant market—is this all that Adam and the children of Adam suffer in his fall?

At noon a clarion voice resounded from the kitchen door and sent the echoes up and down the creek. It was the hostess, who, having prepared the dinner, was bidding the guests to the feast. The Artist came in with his sketch, the Chum with his novel, the Scribe with his note-book, followed by the horny-handed sons of toil, whose shoulders were a little rounded and whose minds were seldom, if ever, occupied with any life beyond the hills that walled us in. We sat down at a camp board and ate with relish. The land was flowing with milk and honey; no sooner was the pitcher drained or the plate emptied than each was replenished by the willing hands of our hostess or her boys.

Another smoke under the stoop followed, and then, perhaps, a doze at the cottage, or in one of the dozen rocking-chairs about the house, or on the rustic throne hewn from a stump in the grove between the house and the barn. The sun flooded the canon with hot and dazzling light; the air was spiced with the pungent odor of shrubs; it was time to rest a little before beginning the laborious sports of the afternoon. Later, we all wandered on the banks of the creek and were sure to meet at the swimming-pool about four o'clock. Meanwhile the Artist has laid in another study. Foster has finished his tale, and is rocking in a hammock of green boughs; the Scribe has booked a half-dozen fragmentary sentences that will by and by grow into an article, and the boys have come home from school.

By and by we wanted change; the monotony of town life is always more or less interesting; the monotony of country life palls after a season. Change comes over us in a most unexpected guise. Our canon was decked with the flaming scarlet of the poison-oak; these brilliant bits of foliage are the high-lights in almost every California landscape, and must satisfy our love of color, in the absence of the Eastern autumnal leaf. The gorgeous shrubs stand out like burning bushes by the roadside, on the hill-slope, in the forest recesses, and almost everywhere. The Artist's chum gave evidence of a special susceptibility to the poison by a severe attack that prostrated him utterly for a while. Yet he stood by us until his vacation came to an end, and, to the last, there was no complaint heard from this martyr to circumstances.

One day he left us—on mule-back, with nine dogs fawning upon his stirrup, and amid a hundred good-byes wafted to him from the house, the smithy, the barn, and the swimming-pool. He had orders to send in the Kid, or his successor, immediately upon his arrival at the Bay. We must needs have some one to indulge, some one whose interests were not involved in the primeval farther than the pleasure it afforded for the hour. The Kid was the very thing—a youngster with happiness in heart, luster in his eye, and nothing more serious than peach-down on his lip; yet there was gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the mere surface of men and things. The Kid drove in one night with rifle tall as himself, fishing-tackle, and entomological truck, wild with enthusiasm and hungry as a carp.

What days followed! Our little entomologist chased scarlet-winged dragon-flies and descanted on the myriad forms of insect-life with premature accomplishment. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" we heard revelations not unmixed with the ludicrous superstitions of the nursery.

There is a school-house a mile distant, on the forks of the creek; we visited it one Friday, and saw six angular youths, the sum total of the young ideas within range of the instructress, spelled down in broadsides; and heard time-honored recitations delivered in the same old sing-song that could only have been original with the sons of our first parents. The school-mistress, with a sun-bonnet that buried her face from the world, passed Ingram's ten times a week, footing it silently along the dusty road, lunch-pail in hand. She lives in a lonely cabin on the trail to the wilderness over the hill.

The Kid sketched a little; indeed, the artistic fever spread to the granary, where the boys spent some hours of each day restoring, not to say improving, the tarnished color of certain face-cards of an imperfect euchre deck, the refuse of the palette being carefully secreted to this end; we never knew at what moment we might sit upon the improvised color-box of some juvenile member of the family.

But hunting was our delectable recreation; the Doctor would lead off on a half-broken bronco, followed by a select few from the house or the friendly camps, Fred bringing up the rear with a pack-mule. This was the chief joy of the hounds; the old couple grew young at the scent of the trail, and deserted their whining progeny with Indian stoicism. Two nights and a day were enough for a single hunt,—one may in that time scour the rocky fortresses of the Last Chance, or scale the formidable slopes of the Devil's Ribs.

The return from the hunt was a scene of picturesque interest: the approach of the hunters at dusk, as they emerged one after another from the dark wood; the pack-mule prancing proudly under a stark buck weighing one hundred and thirty-three pounds, without its vitals; the baby fawn slain by chance (for no one would acknowledge the criminal slaughter); the final arrival of the fagged, sore-footed dogs, who were wildly greeted by the puppies, and kissed on the mouth and banged about by many a playful paw; the grouping under the trees in front of Bachelors' Hall, where the buck was slung, head downward among green leaves, and with stakes crossed between the gaping ribs; the light of the flickering lantern; the dogs supping blood from the ground where it had dripped; the satisfaction of the hunters; the admiration of the women; the wild excitement of the boys, who all talked at once, at the top of their voices, with gestures quicker than thought;—this was the Carnival of the Primeval.

One night, the Kid set out for the stubble-field and lay in wait for wild rabbits; when he came in with his hands full of ears, the glow of moonlight was in his eye, the flush of sunset on his cheek, the riotous blood's best scarlet in his lips, and his laugh was triumphant; with a discarded hat recalled for camp-duty, a blue shirt open at the throat, hair very much tumbled, and no thoughts of self to detract from the absolute grace of his pose.

But all hunting-parties were not so successful. One of seven came home empty-handed and disgusted. It became necessary, while the unlucky huntsmen were under our roof, to give them festive welcome. Fred drew out his fiddle; the Doctor gathered his strength and shook as lively a shoe on the sanded floor of the best room as one will hear the clang of in many a day. Clumsy joints grew supple; heavy boots made the splinters fly; a fellow-townsman, like ourselves on a vacation tour, jigged with the inimitable grace of a trained dancer. How few of our muscles are aware of the joy of full development! From the wall of the best room the "Family of Horace Greeley," in mezzotint, looked down through clouded glass and a veneered frame. The county map hung vis-a-vis. A family record, wherein a pale infant was cradled in saffron, and schooled in pink, passing through a rainbow-tinted life that reached the climax of color at the scarlet and gold bridal, and ended in a sea-green grave; this record, with a tablet for appropriate inscriptions under each epoch in the family history, was still further enriched with lids of stained isinglass carefully placed over the domestic calendar, as much as to say, "What is written here is not for the public eye." On the triangular shelf in the corner, stood the condensed researches of all Arctic explorers, in one obese volume; its twin contained the revelations of African discoveries boiled down and embellished with numberless cuts; a Family Physician, one volume of legislative documents, and three stray magazines, with a Greek almanac, completed the library. So, even in the primeval state, we were not without food for our minds as well as exercise for our muscles. After a time, even the dance ceased to attract us. The Artist had lined the walls of his chamber with brilliant sketches; the kid clamored for home.

I suppose we might have tarried a whole summer and still found some turn in the brook, some vista in the wood, some cluster of isolated trees, to hold us entranced; for the peculiar glory of the hour transfigured them, and the same effect was never twice repeated. Moreover, we at last grew intolerant of one great annoyance. You all have known it as we knew it, and doubtless endured it with as little grace. Is there anything more galling than the surpassing impudence of country flies? We resolved to return to town, and returned close upon the heels of our resolution. Again we threaded the dark windings of the wood, and bade farewell to every object that had become endeared to us. We wondered how soon change would lay its hand upon this primeval beauty. We approached the logging-camp. Presto! in the brief interval since our first glimpse of the forests above it, the hills had been shorn of their antique harvest, and the valley was a place of desolation and of death.

It seemed incredible that the dense growth of gigantic trees could be so soon dragged to market. There was a famous tree—we saw the stump still bleeding and oozing up—which, three feet from the ground, measured eleven and a half feet one way by fourteen feet the other. When its doom was sealed, a path was cut for it and a soft bed made for it to lie on. The land was graded, and covered with a cushion of soft boughs. Had the tree fallen on uneven ground, it would have been shattered; if it had swerved to right or left, nothing but fire could have cleared the wrecks.

The making of the death-bed of this monster cost Mrs. Duncan forty dollars. Then the work began. An ax in the hands of a skillful wood-cutter threw the tree headlong to the earth. Then it was sawed across, yielding eighteen logs, each sixteen feet in length, with a diameter of four feet at the smallest end. The logs were put upon wheels, and run over a light trestle-work to the mill, drawn thither by a ridiculous dummy, which looked not unlike an old-fashioned tavern store on its beam-ends, with an elbow in the air. At the mill, it was sawed into eighty thousand feet of marketable lumber.

Reaching the forest, on our way to the Mills, we found the river had risen so that ten miles from the mouth we were obliged to climb upon the wagon-seats, and hold our luggage above high-water mark.

At Duncan's, on the home stretch, we made our final pilgrimage, to a wild glen over the Russian River, where, a few weeks before, the Bohemian Club had held high jinks. The forest had been a scene of enchantment on that midsummer night; but now the tents were struck, the Japanese lanterns were extinguished, and nothing was left to tell the tale but the long tables of rough deal, where we had feasted. They were covered with leaves and dust; spiders had draped them with filmy robes. The quail piped, the jay-bird screamed, the dove sobbed, and a slim snake, startled at the flight of a bounding hare, glided away among the rustling leaves. So soon does this new land recover the primeval beauty of eternal youth.



INLAND YACHTING

When your bosom friend seizes you by the arm, and says to you in that seductive sotto voce which implies a great deal more than is confessed, "Come, let us go down to the sea in ships, and do business in the great waters," you generally go, if you are not previously engaged. At least, I do.

Much has been said in disfavor of yachting in San Francisco Bay. It is inland yachting to begin with. The shelving shores prevent the introduction of keel boats; flat and shallow hulls, with a great breadth of beam, something able to battle with "lumpy" seas and carry plenty of sail in rough weather, is the more practical and popular type. Atlantic yachts, when they arrive in California waters, have their rigging cut down one-third. Schooners and sloops with Bermudian mutton-leg sails flourish. A modification of the English yawl is in vogue; but large sloops are not handled conveniently in the strong currents, the chop seas, the blustering winds, the summer fogs that make the harbor one of the most treacherous of haunts for yachtsmen.

Think of a race when the wind is blowing from twenty-five to thirty-five miles an hour! The surface current at the Golden Gate runs six miles per hour and the tide-rip is often troublesome; but there is ample room for sport, and very wild sport at times. The total area of the bay is four hundred and eighty square miles, and there are hundreds of miles of navigable sloughs, rivers, and creeks. One may start from Alviso, and sail in a general direction, almost without turning, one hundred and fifty-five miles to Sacramento city. During the voyage he is pretty sure to encounter all sorts of weather and nearly every sort of climate, from the dense and chilly fogs of the lower bay to the semi-tropics of the upper shores, where fogs are unknown, and where the winds die away on the surface of beautiful waters as blue as the Bay of Naples.

There are amateur yachtsmen, a noble army of them, who charter a craft for a day or two, and have more fun in a minute than they can recover from in a month. I have sailed with these, at the urgent request of one who has led me into temptation more than once, but who never deserted me in an evil hour, even though he had to drag me out of it by the heels. I am at this moment reminded of an episode which still tickles my memory, and, much as a worthy yachtsman may scorn it, I confess that this moment is more to me than that of any dash into deep water which I can at present recall.

It was a summer Saturday, the half-holiday that is the reward of a week's hard labor. With the wise precaution which is a prominent characteristic of my bosom friend, a small body of comrades was gathered together on the end of Meigg's Wharf, simultaneously scanning, with vigilant eyes, the fleets of sailing crafts as they swept into view on the strong currents of the bay. It was a little company of youths, sick of the world and its cares, and willing, nay eager, to embark for other climes. They came not unfurnished. I beheld with joy numerous demijohns with labels fluttering like ragged cravats from their long necks; likewise stacks of vegetables, juicy joints, fruits, and more demijohns, together with a small portable iceberg; blankets were there, also guns, pistols, and fishing tackle. If one chooses to quit this world and its follies, one must go suitably provided for the next. Experience teaches these things.

The breeze freshened; the crowd grew impatient; more fellows arrived; another demijohn was seen in the distance swiftly bearing down upon us from the upper end of the wharf, and at this moment a dainty yacht skimmed gracefully around the point of Telegraph Hill, picking her way among the thousand-masted fleet that whitened the blue surface of the bay, and we at once knew her to be none other than the "Lotus," a crack yacht, as swift as the wind itself. In fifteen minutes there was a locker full of good things, and a deck of jolly fellows, and when we cast off our bow-line, and ran up our canvas, we were probably the neatest thing on the tide. I know that I felt very much like a lay figure in somebody's marine picture, and it was quite wonderful to behold how suddenly we all became sea-worthy and how hard we tried to prove it.

A heavy bank of cloud was piled up in the west, through which stole long bars of sunshine, gilding the leaden waves. The "Lotus" bent lovingly to the gale. Some of us went into the cabin, and tried to brace ourselves in comfortable and secure corners—item—there are no comfortable or secure seats at sea, and there will be none until there is a revolution in ship-building. Our yachting afforded us an infinite variety of experience in a very short time; we had a taste of the British Channel as soon as we were clear of the end of the wharf. It was like rounding Gibraltar to weather Alcatraz, and, as we skimmed over the smooth flood in Raccoon Straits, I could think of nothing but the little end of the Golden Horn. Why not? The very name of our yacht was suggestive of the Orient. The sun was setting; the sky deeply flushed; the distance highly idealized; homeward hastened a couple of Italian fishing boats, with their lateen sails looking like triangular slices cut out of the full moon; this sort of thing was very soothing. We all lighted our cigarettes, and lapsed into dreamy silence, broken only by the plash of ripples under our bow and the frequent sputter of matches quite necessary to the complete consumption of our tobacco.



About dusk our rakish cutter drifted into the shelter of the hills along the north shore of the bay, and with a chorus of enthusiastic cheers we dropped anchor in two fathoms of soft mud. We felt called upon to sing such songs as marines are wont to sing upon the conclusion of a voyage, and I believe our deck presented a tableau not less picturesque than that in the last act of "Black-eyed Susan." Susan alone was wanting to perfect our nautical happiness.

How charming to pass one's life at sea, particularly when it is a calm twilight, and the anchor is fast to the bottom: the sheltering shores seem to brood over you; pathetic voices float out of the remote and deepening shadows; and stars twinkle so naturally in both sea and sky that a fellow scarcely knows which end he stands on.

I have preserved a few leaves from a log written by my bosom friend. I present them as he wrote them, although he apparently had "Happy Thoughts" on the brain, and much Burnand had well nigh made him mad.

THE LOG OF THE "LOTUS"

9 p.m.—Dinner just over; part of our crew desirous of fishing during the night; hooks lost, lines tangled, no bait; a row by moonlight proposed.

10 p.m.—The Irrepressibles still eager to fish; lines untangled, hooks discovered; two fellows despatched with yawl in search of bait; a row by moonlight again proposed; we take observation—no moon!

11 p.m.—Two fellows returning from shore with hen; hen very tough and noisy; tough hens not good for bait; fishing postponed till daybreak; moonlight sail proposed as being a pleasant change; still no moon; half the crew turn in for a night's rest; cabin very full of half-the-crew.

Midnight.—Irrepressibles dance sailor's hornpipe on deck; half-the-crew below awake from slumbers, and advise Irrepressibles to renew search for bait.

12:30 a.m.—Irrepressibles return to shore for bait. Loud breathing in cabin; water swashing on rocks along the beach; very picturesque, but no moon yet; voice in the distance says "Halloa!" Echo in the other distance replies, "Halloa yourself, and see how you like it!"

1 a.m.—Irrepressibles still absent on shore; a dog barks loudly in the dark; a noise is heard in a far away hen-coop—Irrepressibles looking diligently for bait.

1:30 a.m.—Dog sitting on the shore howling; very heavy breathing in the cabin; noise of oars in the rowlocks; music on the water, chorus of youthful male voices, singing "A smuggler's life is a merry, merry, life." Subdued noise of hens; dog still howling; no moon yet; more noise of hens, bait rapidly approaching.

2 a.m.—Irrepressibles try to row yawl through sternlights of "Lotus"; grand collision of yawl at full speed and a rakish cutter at anchor. Profane language in the cabin; sleepy crew, half awake, rush up the hatchway, and denounce Irrepressibles. Irrepressibles sing "Smuggler's Life," etc.; terrific noise of hens; half-the-crew invite the Irrepressibles to "be as decent as they can." No moon yet; everybody packed in the cabin.

2:30 a.m.—Sudden squall. "Lotus," as usual, bends lovingly to the gale; dramatic youth in his bunk says, in deep voice, "No sleep till morn!" More dramatic youths say, "I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more'." Very deep voice says, "Macbeth hath mur-r-r-r-dered sleep!" General confusion in the cabin. Old commodore of the "Lotus" says, "Gentlemen, a little less noise, if you please." Noise subsides.

3 a.m.—Irrepressibles propose sleeping in binnacle; unfortunate discovery—no binnacle on board. Half-the-crew turn over, and suggest that the Irrepressibles take night-caps, and retire anywhere. Moved and seconded, That the Irrepressibles take two night-caps, and retire in a body—item: two heads better than one, two night-caps ditto, ditto.

3:30 a.m.—Commotion in cabin. Irrepressibles find no place to lay their weary heads. Moonlight sail proposed; observations on deck—no moon; squall in the distance; air very chilly. Irrepressibles retire in a body, and take night-caps. Song by Irrepressibles, "A Smuggler's Life." Half-the-crew sit up and throw boots. Irrepressibles assault half-the-crew, and take bunks by storm; great confusion; old commodore of the "Lotus" says, "Gentlemen had better sleep a little, so as to be in trim for fishing at daybreak," night-caps all round; order restored; chorus of subdued voices, "A Smuggler's Life."

4 a.m.—Signs of daybreak; thin blue mist over the water; white sea-bird overhead, with bright light on its breast; flocks bleating on shore; sloop becalmed under the lee of the land; fishermen casting nets; more fishermen right under them, casting nets upside down. Everything very fresh and shining; feel happy; think we must look like marine picture by somebody.

4:30 a.m.—Commodore of the "Lotus" comes on deck, and takes an observation; all favorable; commodore draws bucket of water out of the sea and makes toilet, white beard of the commodore waves gently in the breeze; fine-looking old sea-dog that commodore of the "Lotus."

Sunday Morning.—All quiet; air very clear and bracing. Shore resembles new world. Feel like Christopher Columbus discovering America. Peaceful and happy emotions animate bosom; think I hear Sabbath bells—evidently don't: no Sabbath bells anywhere around. Penitentiary of San Quentin in the distance; look at San Quentin, and feel emotion of sadness steal over me; moral reflection to try and avoid San Quentin as long as possible.

5 a.m.—Noise in cabins; boots flying in the air; cries for mercy; reconciliation and eye-openers all round. Everybody on deck; next minute everybody overboard bathing; water very cold; teeth chattering; something warming necessary for all hands. Yawl goes out fishing; two small boats at the disposal of Irrepressibles; a row by sunlight; no moon last night; funny boy says, "Bring moon along next time!" Everybody sees San Quentin at the same moment; half-the-crew advise Irrepressibles to "go home at once." Cries of "hi yi." Irrepressibles say "they will inform on half-the-crew when they get there"; disturbance on deck in consequence; Commodore suggests a new search for bait; order restored; new search for bait instituted. Three fellows sing "Father, come home," and look toward San Quentin. Bad jokes on the prison every ten minutes throughout the day. Small fleet of stern-wheel ducks come alongside for breakfast; ducks in great danger of the galley; flock of pelicans, with tremendous bowsprits, fly overhead; pistol-shot carries away tail feathers of pelican; order restored.

8 a.m.—Irrepressibles propose naval engagement; three small boats armed and equipped for the fray. Irrepressibles routed; some taken prisoners; great excitement; quantities of water dashed in all directions; boats rapidly filling; two fellows overboard; cries for help, "fellows can't swim a stroke"; intense excitement; boat sinks in five feet of water and two feet of mud; the fellows brought on board to be wrung out. Irrepressibles hang everything in the rigging to dry. Imagination takes her accustomed flight; good study of nude Irrepressibles in great number; think we must resemble the barge of Cleopatra on the Nile! unlucky thought; no Cleopatra on board. Subject reconsidered; lucky fancy—the Greek gods on a yachting cruise. Sun very hot; another bath all round; a drop of something, for fear of catching cold; the Greek gods on deck indulge in negro dances; two men on shore look on, and wonder what's up. Sun intensely hot; Greek gods turn in for a square sleep!

It becomes necessary to suppress the bosom friend, who, it is superfluous to state, was one of the leaders of the Irrepressibles on the memorable occasion—and the balance of his log is consigned to the locker of oblivion.

The cruise of the "Lotus" had its redeeming features, though they were probably unrecorded at the time. There was fishing and boating; rambles on shore over the grassy hills; a search for clams and a good old-fashioned clam bake; to which the sharpest appetites did ample justice; and there were quiet fellows, who stole apart from the rioters and had hours of solid satisfaction. You may have rocked in a small skiff yourself, casting your line in deep water, waiting and watching for the cod to bite. It is pleasant sculling up to a distant point, and sounding by the way so as to get off the sand and over the pebbly bottom as soon as possible. It is pleasant to cast anchor and float a few rods from shore, where the rocks are eaten away by the tides of numberless centuries, where the swallows build and the goats climb, and the scrub oaks look over into the sea, with half their hairy roots trailing in the air. It is less pleasant to thread your hook with a piece of writhing worm that is full of agonizing expression, though head and tail are both missing and writhing on their own hooks, which are also attached to your line. I wonder if one bit of worm on a hook recognizes a joint of itself on the next hook, and says to it, in its own peculiar fashion, "Well, are you alive yet?"

The baiting accomplished, with a great flourish you throw your sinker, and see it bury itself in the muddy water; then you listen intently, for the least suggestion of a disturbance down there at the other end of the line; the sinker thumps upon this rock and the next one, drops into a hole and gets caught for a moment, but is loosened again, and then a sort of galvanic shock thrills through your body; on guard! if you would save your bait; another twinge, fainter than the first, and at last a regular tug, and you haul in your line, which is jerking incessantly by this time. The next moment the hooks come to the surface, and on one of them you find a Lilliputian fish that is not yet old enough to feed himself, and was probably caught by accident.

Perhaps you haul in your line as fast as you can, bait it and throw it in again as rapidly as convenient—for this is the sport that fishermen love to boast of; perhaps you rock in your boat all day, and draw but a half-dozen of these shiners out before their time, and waste your precious worms to no purpose.

It's hungry work, isn't it? and the summons to dinner that is by-and-by sounded from the yacht is a pleasing excuse for deserting so profitless a task. The right thing to do, however, is to put on an appearance of immense success whenever a rival skiff comes within hail. You hold up your largest fish several times in succession, so as to delude the anxious inquirers in the other boat, who will of course think you have a dozen of those big cod with a striking family resemblance. It is a very successful ruse; all fishermen indulge in it, and you have as good a right to play the pantomime as they.

By-and-by we are glad to think of a return to town. Why is it that pleasure excursions seem to ravel out? They never stop short after a brilliant achievement nor conclude with an imposing tableau; they die out gradually. Someone gets out here, some-one else falls off there, and there is a general running down of the machinery that has propelled the festival up to the last moment. They flatten unmistakably, and it is almost a pity that some sort of climax cannot be engaged for each occasion, in the midst of which everyone should disappear, in red fire and a blaze of rockets.

Our yachting cruise was very jolly. We hauled in our lines and our anchors, and spread our canvas, while the wind was brisk and the evening was coming on; white-caps danced and tumbled all over the bay. It looked stormy far out in the open sea as we crossed the channel; thin tongues of fog were lapping among the western hills, as though the town were about to be devoured by some ghostly monster, and presently it was of course. The spray leaped half-way up our jib, and our fore-sail was dripping wet as we neared the town; there was a rolling up of blankets, and a general clearing out of the debris that always accumulates in small quarters. Everybody was a little tired, and a little hungry, and a little sleepy, and quite glad to get home again, and when the "Lotus" landed us on the old wharf at the north end of the town, we crept home through the side streets for decency's sake.

The young "Corinthian" would scorn to recognize a yachting exploit such as I have depicted. The young "Corinthian" owns his yacht, and lives in it a great part of the summer. He is the first to make his appearance after the rainy season has begun to subside, and the last to be driven into winter quarters at Oakland or Antioch, where the fleet is moored during four or five months of the year. The "Corinthian" paints his boat himself, and is an adept at every art necessary to the completeness of yachting life. He can cook, sail his boat, repair damages of almost every description; he sketches a little, writes a little, and is, in fact, an amphibious Bohemian, the life of the regatta, whose enthusiasm goes far towards sustaining the healthful and amiable rivalry of the two yachting clubs.

These clubs have charming club-houses at Saucelito, where many a "hop" is given during the summer, and where, on one occasion, "H.M.S. Pinafore" was sung with great effect on the deck of the "Vira," anchored a few rods from the dock; the dock was, for the time being, transformed into a dress-circle. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., made his entree in a steam launch, and all the effects were highly realistic. The only hitch in the otherwise immensely successful representation was the impossibility of securing a moon for the second act.

The annual excursion of the two clubs is one of the social events of the year. The favorite resort is Napa, a pretty little town in the lap of a lovely valley, approached by a narrow stream that winds through meadow lands and scattered groves of oak. The yachts are nearly all of them there, from twenty-six to thirty, a flock of white wings that skim the waters of San Pablo Bay, upward bound. At Vallejo and Mare Island they exchange salutes, abreast of the naval station, and enter the mouth of Napa Creek; it is broad and marshy for a time, but soon grows narrow, and very crooked. More than once as we sailed we missed stays, and drifted broadside upon a hayfield, and were obliged to pole one another around the sharp turns in the creek; it is then that cheers and jeers come over the meadows to us, from the lesser craft that are sailing breast deep among the waving corn. All this time Napa, our destination, is close at hand, but not likely to be reached for twenty or thirty minutes to come. We turn and turn again, and are lost to sight among the trees, or behind a barn, and are continually greeted by the citizens, who have come overland to give us welcome.

Riotous days follow: a ball that night, excursions on the morrow, and on the second night a concert, perhaps two or three of them, on board the larger vessels of the fleet. We are lying in a row, against a long curve of the shore; chains of lanterns are hung from mast to mast, the rigging is gay with evergreens and bunting.

The revelry continues throughout the night; serenaders drift up and down the stream at intervals until daybreak, when a procession is formed, a steamer takes us in tow, and we are dragged silently down the tide, in the grey light of the morning. At Vallejo, after a toilet and a breakfast, which is immensely relished, we get into position. Every eye is on the Commodore's signal; by-and-by it falls, bang goes a gun, and in a moment all is commotion. The sails are trimmed, the light canvas set, and away flies the fleet on the home stretch, to dance for an hour or two in the sparkling sunshine of San Pablo Bay, then plunge into the tumbling sea in the lower harbor, and at last end a three days' cruise with unanimous and hearty congratulations.

A week ago I could have added here that in the annals of the yacht clubs of San Francisco there has never been a fatal accident, never a drowning, nor a capsizing, nor a wreck, and this covers a period of thirteen years; alas! in a single day, on a cruise such as I have been writing of, there was a shocking death. One yacht nearly foundered, but fortunately escaped into smooth water, another was dashed upon the rocks, and is probably a total wreck; while a third lost her centre-board over a mud bank, where it buried itself, and held the little craft a helpless prisoner; the crew and guests of the latter took to the small boats, pulled three miles in a squall, and were rescued by a passing steamer when they were all drenched to the skin, and well-nigh exhausted.

You see that inland yachting is not child's play, nor are these inland yachts without their romantic records. The flag of the San Francisco yacht club has floated among the South Sea Islands; one of its boats has beaten the German and English types in their own waters; one has been as far as the Australian seas; one is a pearl fisher in the Gulf of California, and another is coquetting with the doldrums along the Mexican coast. They are staunch little beauties all, and it would be neither courteous nor healthful to think otherwise in the presence of inland yachtsmen.



IN YOSEMITE SHADOWS

"Yosemite, Sept.—: Come at once—the year wanes; would you see the wondrous transformation, the embalming of the dead Summer in windings of purple and gold and bronze—come quickly, before the white pall covers it—delay no longer. The waters are low and fordable, the snows threaten, but the hours are yet propitious; and such a welcome waits you as Solomon in all his glory could not have lavished on Sheba's approaching queen. * * *"

There was much more of the same sort of high-toned epistolary rhetoric, written and sent by a dear hand, whose fanciful pen seemed touched by the ambrosial tints of Autumn. So the year was going out in a gorgeous carnival, before the Lent-like solemnity of Winter was assumed.

I had only two things to consider now: First, was it already too late to hasten thither, and enjoy the splendid spectacle so freely offered and so alluring; secondly, could I, if yet in time, venture so boldly upon the edge of Winter, and risk the possibility—nay, probability—of being snow-bound for four or six months, 30 miles from any human habitation?

I did not long consider. I felt every moment that the soul of Summer was passing. I scented the ascending incense of smoking and crackling boughs. What a requiem was being chanted by all the tremulous and broken voices of Nature! Would I, could I, longer forbear to join the passionate and tumultuous miserere? It seemed that I could not, for gathering about me the voluminous furs of Siberia, I bade adieu to friends, not without some forebodings awakened by the admonitions of my elders, then, dropping all the folly of the world, like a monk I went silently and alone into the monastery of a Sierran solitude, resigned, trusting, prayerful.

What an entering it was! With slow, devotional steps I approached the valley. There was a thin veil of snow over the upper trail. It was smooth and unbroken as I came upon it, following the blazed trees in my way. Footprints of bear and fox, squirrel and coyote, were traceable. The owl hooted at me, and the jay shot past me like a blue flash of light, uttering her prolonged, shrill cry. As for the owl, I could not see him, but I heard him at startling intervals give the challenge, "Who are you?" so I advanced and gave the countersign. I don't believe it was for his grave face alone that the owl was chosen symbol of Wisdom.

Not too soon came the steep and perilous descent into the abysmal depths of the mountain fastness. It is a shame that pilgrims who come up thither do not time their steps so as to reach this Ultima Thule of old times and ways at sunset. Then the magnificence of the spectacle culminates. That new world below there is illuminated with the soft tints of Eden. What unutterable fullness of beauty pervades all. The forests—those moss-like fields are forests, and mighty ones, too—are all aflame with the burnished gold of sunset, brightening the gold of autumn; for gold twice refined, as it were, gilds the splendid landscape. Only think of that picture, shining through the mellow haze of Indian Summer, and flashing with the lambent glimmer of a myriad glassy leaves. You can not see them moving, yet they twinkle incessantly, and the warm air trembles about them while you hang bewildered from a toppling parapet, four thousand feet above them; birds swing under you in mid-air, streams leap from the sharp cliff, and reel in that sickening way through the air that your brain whirls after them. One is tired, anyhow, by the time he has reached this far, and a night camp in the cool rim of this world-to-come is just the panacea for any sort of weariness.

Take my advice: Sleep on it, and drop down on the wings of the morning, while the sun is filling up this marvelous ravine with such lights and shadows as are felt, yet scarcely understood. Refreshed, amazed, bewildered, go down into that solemn place, and see if you are not more saint-like than you dared to think yourself. When the times are out of joint, as they frequently are, come up here, forget men and things; don't imagine we are as bad as we seem, for it is quite certain we might be a great deal worse if we tried. While you bemoan our earthliness, you may not be the one saint among us. Coming down with the evening, I was scarcely at the gates of the inner valley when night was on me. Of this gate, it is formed of a ponderous monument on the right, called Cathedral Rock, and on the left is the one bald spot in the Sierras, the great El Capitan. The arch over this primeval threshold is the astral dome of heaven, and the gates stand ever open. There is no toll taken in any mansion of my Father's House, and this is one of them. Passing to the door of my host, I lifted the latch noiselessly. Before me dawned fresh experiences. At my back Night gathered deeper than ever, and all around I seemed to read the rubric of Life's new lesson.

We are a comfort to ourselves—six of us, all told. Summer invites our little company into a breezy hotel, over in the shadow across the valley. Winter suggests a log cabin, an expansive fireplace, plenty of hickory, and as much sunshine as finds its way into our secluded hermitage. So we are done up compactly, in between thick walls, our hard finish being in the shape of mud cakes in the chinks of the logs, and a very hard finish it is; but we take wondrous comfort withal.

How do I pass the hours? Leaving my friends, I wander forth, after breakfast, in any direction that pleases me. Take today this sheep path; it leads me to a pebbly beach at a swift turn of the Merced. That clump of trees produces the best harvest of frost-pointed leaves; there are new varieties offered every day at an alarming sacrifice, and I invest largely in these fragile wares. Tomorrow, I shall go yonder across three tumultuous streams, upon three convenient logs, broad and mossy. Some book or other goes with me, and is opened now and then. Such books as Plant Life, The Sexuality of Nature, Studies in Animal Life, suggest themselves. Open these anywhere, and each is annotated and illustrated by the scene before me. Every page is a running text to the hour I glorify.

Perhaps a leaf falls into my lap as I sit over the brook, on a log—a single leaf, gilded about its border, in the centre a crimson flush, fast swallowing up the original greenness; the whole will presently be bronzed and sombre. O, Leaf! how art thou mummified! We do not think of these little things of Nature. Look at this leaf. What is its record? How many generations, think you, are numbered in its ancestry? A perpetual intermarriage has not weakened its fibres. The anatomy of this leaf is perfect, and the sap of this oak flows from oak to acorn, from acorn to oak, in an interminable and uninterrupted succession since the first day. What are your titles and estates beside this representative? What is your heraldry, with its two centuries of mold; your absurd and confused genealogies, your escutcheons, blotted no doubt with crimes and errors, when this scion, which I am permitted to entertain for a moment, comes of a race whose record is spotless and without stain through ten thousand eventful years. Why, Eve would recognize the original of this stock from the mere family resemblance.

Do you think these days tiresome? It is embarrassing for some people to be left alone with themselves. They can no longer play a part, for there are none like themselves to play to. The sun and stars know you well enough—most likely, better than you yourselves do. I like this. I would out and say to myself: "Here is a confidant. Day hides nothing from me, or you; it expresses all, exposes all—even that which we might not ask to see. It is best that we should see it; there are no errors in Nature."

Walking, the squirrel nods to me. I nod back; and why shouldn't I? Nature has familiarly introduced us. Squirrel munches under his tail canopy till I am out of sight, jabbering all the while. What sage little fellows go on four feet! I believe an animal has all the instincts of Adam. He should never be tamed, however, lest he lose his identity. Civilization rubs down the points in our character. As the surf rounds the pebble, the masses round us. We are polished and insufferably proper, but have no angles left! It is the angles that give the diamond its lustre.

Are you hungry? When the index of shadow points out from the base of old Sentinel Rock and touches that column of descending spray they call Yosemite, I go to dinner. "The Fall of the Yosemite"—what a dream it is. A dream of the lotus-eaters, and an aspiration of the Ideal in Nature. You can not realize it; and yet, you will never forget it. Don't take it too early in the Spring, when it is less ethereal—nay, somewhat heavy; rather see it in summer after the rains, or in autumn, better than all, when it is like a tissue of diamond dust shaken upon the air. It really seems a labor for it to reach its foaming basin, it is so filmy, spiritual, delicate. The very air wooes it from its perpetual leap; sudden currents of wind catch it up and whirl it away in their arms, a trembling captive, or dash it against the solemn and sad-looking rock, where it clings for a moment, then trickles down the scarred and rugged face of it, fading in its descent; sometimes it is waved back by the elements, and almost seems to return into its cloudy nest up yonder close under the sky. It only comes to us at last by impulses, and all along its shining and vapory path rockets of spray shoot out like pendants, dissolving singly and alone.

But "to return to our muttons." My dial says 12 M. There is no winding up and down of weights here; 12 M. it undoubtedly is, and mutton waits. These muttons were begotten here of muttons begotten here to the third or fourth generation. Their wool is clipped, larded, and spun here by one who lives here and loves this valley. These mittens, that keep the frost from my fingers, are among the comforting results of this domestic economy. In the cabin, by the fireplace, stands the old-fashioned spinning wheel; and the old-fashioned body who manipulates the wool so skillfully is the light of our little household. The shadow has struck twelve from old Sentinel; and I take the sun once a day, and no oftener. A cool, bracing air, a sharp run over the meadows, for I see the hostess waving a signal at me for my tardiness, and I am hungry on my own account—such cliffs and vistas as one sees here make one hollow with looking at them, and are calculated to keep a supply of appetite on hand. Do you like good long strips of baked squash? How do you fancy bowls of warm milk—milk that declares a creamy dividend before morning? Here is a fine fowl of our own raising—one that has seen Yosemite in its glory and in its gloom; it ought to be good eating, and I can affirm that it is. That's a dinner for you, and one where you can begin on pie the first thing, if your soul craves it, which it frequently does.

A storm brewing, and rain in the lower valley. Never mind, there is no hurry here; one blushes to be caught worrying in the august presence of these mountains.

What can I do this stormy afternoon? Stop within doors and sit at the window; a small grossbeak overhead, and we two looking out upon the rain and fog. It is a mile nearly to that wall opposite, but look up high as I can from my window I see no strip of sky. Here is a precipice of homely, almost hideous-looking rock, and above it a hanging garden; those pines in that garden are a hundred feet and more in height: measure the second cliff by their proportions—how far is it, think you, to the garden above? A thousand feet, perhaps; and three, four—no, six of these terraces before you touch blue sky. Oh, what a valley! and where else under heaven are we sunk forty fathoms deep in shadow? But the sun is up yet, and there floats an eagle in its golden ray. I like to watch the last beams burn out in that upper gallery among the pines. There is a moment given us at sunset when we may partly realize the inexpressible sweetness of the eternal day that is promised us—a dim, religious light. There is no screen or tint soft enough to render the effect perfectly. Only these few seconds at sunset seem to hint something of its surpassing tenderness.

What cloud effects! Look up!—a break in the heavens, and beyond it the shoulder of a peak weighing some billions of tons, but afloat now, as soft in outline as the mists that envelop it. What masses of clouds tumble in upon us! The sky is obscured, night is declared at once, and the fowls go to roost at three P.M. How is the Fall in this weather? A silver braid dropped from one cloud to another. Its strands parted and joined again, lost and found in its own element. Leaping from its dizzy eyrie in the clouds, itself most cloud-like, it is lost in a whirlwind of foam. Now it is as a voice heard faintly above the wind, borne hither and thither. Long, stinging nights, plenty of woolen blankets, and delicious sleep. Then the evenings, so cosy around the fire. H—— reads Scott; we listen and comment. Baby is abed long ago—little Baby, four years old, born here also; knowing nothing of the beautiful world save what is gathered in this gallery of beauties. Such a queer little child, left to herself, no doubt thinking she is the only little one in existence, contented to teeter for hours on a plank by the woodpile, making long explorations by herself and returning, when we are all well frightened, with a pocketful of lizards and a wasp in her fingers; always talking of horned toads and heifers; not afraid of snakes, not even the rattlers; mocking the birds when she is happy, and growling bear-fashion to express her disapproval of any thing.

When the snows come, there will be avalanches by day and night, rushing into all parts of the valley. The Hermit hears a rumbling in the clouds, as he hoes his potatoes. He looks; a granite pilaster, hewn out by the hurricanes centuries ago, at last grown weary of clinging to that precipitous bluff, lets go its hold, and is dashed from crag to crag in a prolonged and horrible suicide. A pioneer once laid him out a garden, and marked the plan of his cellar; he was to begin digging the next day: that night, there leaped a boulder from under the brow of this cliff right into the heart of the plantation. It dug his cellar for him, but he never used it. It behooved him and others to get farther out from the mountain that found this settler too familiar, and sent a random shot as a sufficient hint to the intruder.

In the trying times when the world was baking, what agony these mountains must have endured. You see it in their faces, they are so haggard and old-looking: time is swallowed up in victory, but it was a desperate duel. There is a dome here that the ambitious foot of man has never attempted. Tissayac allows no such liberty. Look up at that rose-colored summit! The sun endows it with glory long after twilight has shut us in. We are cheated of much daylight here—it comes later and goes earlier with us; but we get hints of brighter hours, both morning and evening, from those sparkling minarets now decked with snowy arabesques. I have seen our canopy, the clouds, so crimsoned at this hour that the valley seemed a grand oriental pavilion, whose silken roof was illuminated with a million painted lamps. The golden woods of Autumn detract nothing from the bizarre effect of the spectacle. To be sure, these walls are rather sombre for a festival, but the sun does what it can to enliven them, whilst the flame-colored oaks and blood-spotted azaleas projecting on all sides from the shelving rocks resemble to a startling degree galleries of blazing candelabra. Night dispels this illusion, it is so very deep and mysterious here. The solemn procession of the stars silently passes over us. I see Taurus pressing forward, and anon Orion climbs on hand and knee over the mountain in hot pursuit.

Does it tire you to look so long at a gigantic monument? I do not wonder. The secret of self-esteem seems to lie in regarding our inferiors; therefor let us talk of this frog. I have heard his chorus a thousand times in the dark. His is one of the songs of the night. Just watch him in the meadow pool. See the contentment in his double chin; he flings out three links of hind leg and carries his elbows akimbo; his attitudes are unconstrained; he is entirely without affectation; life never bores him; he keeps his professional engagements to the letter, and sings nightly through the season, whether hoarse or not.

It is a good plan to portion off the glorious vistas of Yosemite, allotting so many surprises to each day. Take, for instance, the ten miles of valley, and passing slowly through the heart of it, allow a tableau for every three hundred yards. You are sure of this variety, for the trail winds among a galaxy of snowy peaks. Turn as you choose, it is either a water-fall at a new angle, a cliff in profile, a reflection in river or lake—the sudden appearance of the supreme peak of all, or ravine, canon, cavern, pine opening, grove or prairie. There is a point from which you may count over a hundred rocky fangs, tearing the clouds to tatters. I can not tell you the exact location of this terrific climax of savage beauty; try to find it, and perhaps discover half a dozen as singular scenic combinations for yourself. See all that you are told must be seen, then go out alone and discover as much more for yourself, and something no doubt dearer to your memory than any of the more noted haunts. "See Mirror Lake on a still morning," they said to me. I saw it, but went again in the evening, and saw a vision that the reader may not expect to have reflected here. It was the picture of the morning—so softened and refined a veil of enchantment seemed thrown over it. Hamadryad or water nymph could not have startled me at that moment: they belonged there, and were looked for. I shall hardly again renew those impressions; it was all so unexpected, and one is not twice surprised in the same manner. That wondrous amphitheatre was for once made cheerful with the broad, horizontal bars of fire that shifted about it, yet all its lights were mellowed in the purpling mists of evening, and the whole was pictured in little on the surface of the lake. There was nothing earthly visible, I thought then, for every thing seemed transfigured, floating in a lucent atmosphere. It was the hour when the birds are silent for the space of one intense moment, stopping with one accord—perhaps holding their breath till the spell is broken. As I stood entranced, a large golden leaf, ready and willing to die, let go its hold on the top bough of a tree overhanging the water. From twig to twig it swung. I heard every sound in its fall till it was out of the congregation of its fellows, turning over and over in mid-air, sailing toward the centre of the lake. There it hung on the rim of that stainless crystal, while a thin ring of silver light noiselessly expanded toward the shore. The sun was down. All the birds of heaven said so with their bubbling throats. Bewildered with the delicious conclusion of this illustration of still life, I turned homeward, dispelling the mirage. Then such a ride home in the keen air, while a pillar of smoke rose over the little cabin, telling me which of the hundred bowers of autumn sheltered my nest.

But, again and again, I have seen all. Pohono has breathed upon me with its fatal breath, yet I survive. It is said that three Indian girls were long ago bewitched by its waters, and now their perturbed spirits haunt the place. Those perfectly round rainbows may form the nimbus for each of the martyrs; they, at any rate, look supernatural enough for such an office. The wildly wooded pass to the Vernal and Nevada Falls has echoed to my tread. I have been sprayed upon till my spirit is never dry of the life-giving waters that flow so freely. But I am just a little tired of all this. I begin to breathe short, irregular breaths. The soul of this mighty solitude oppresses me; I want more air of the common sort, and less wisdom in daily talks and walks. I remember the pleasant nonsense of life over the mountains, and sigh for those flesh-pots of Egypt once in a while. These rocks are full of texts and teachings—these cliffs are tables of stone, graven with laws and commandments. I read everywhere mysterious cyphers and hieroglyphics; every changing season offers to me a new palimpsest. I do not quite like to play here; I dare not be simple; I'm altogether too good to last long. How many thousand ascensions have been made in these worshipful days, I wonder; not merely getting the body on to the tops of these wonderful peaks, but going thither in spirit, as when the soul goes up into the mountains to pray? This eye-climbing is as fatiguing and perilous as any. I feel the want of some pure blue sky.

A few farewell rambles associate themselves with packing up and plans of desertion. Not sad farewells in this case, for if I never again meet these individual mountains, I carry with me their memory, eternal and incomparably glorious. Let us peep into this nook: I got plentiful blackberries there in the spring, together with stains and thorny scratches. I haul myself over the ferry and back, for old acquaintance' sake; the current is so lazy, it seems incredible that the same waters are almost impassable at some seasons. I succeed in wrecking a whole armada of floating leaves with stems like a bowsprit. A few beetles take passage in these gilded barges—no doubt, for the antipodes.

Did you ever drive up the cattle at milking time? I have; but not without endless trial and tribulation, for they spill off the path on either side in a very remarkable way, and when I rush after one with a flank movement, the column breaks and falls back utterly demoralized. A little strategy on the part of their commander (which is myself) triumphs in the end, for I privately reconstruct and march them all up in detachments of one. I look after the little trees, the unbent twigs; they are more interesting to me than your monsters. This nursery of saplings sprang up in a night after a freshet: here are quivering aspens trembling forever in penance for that one sin. They once were gravely pointed out by the guide of a party of tourists as "shuddering asps." He is doubtless the same who, being asked "what that was," (pointing to the North Dome, six thousand feet in the air) said "he'd be hanged if he knew; some knob or other." I recall ten thousand pleasant times as I turn my face seaward; not only the great and omnipotent shadows under the south wall of the valley, nor the continuous canticles of the waters, but innumerable little things that fill up and make life perfect.

The talks, the walks with my friends here, the parrot "Sultan," fed daily from the table, soliloquizing upon men and things in Arabic and Hindostanee, for he scorns English and talks in his sleep. There is Bobby, the grossbeak, brought to the door in pin feathers and skin like oiled silk by an Indian. His history is tragic: this Indian brained the whole family and an assortment of relatives; Bobby alone remaining to brood over the massacre, was sold into bondage for two bits and a tin dipper without the bottom. The sun seems to lift his gloom, for he sings a little, sharpens his bill with great gusto and tomahawks a bit of fruit, as though dealing vengeance upon the destroyer of his race.



When shall I see another such cabin as this—its great fireplaces, and the loft heaping full of pumpkins? O, Yosemite! O, halcyon days, and bed-time at eight P.M., tucking in for ten good hours and up again at six; good eatings and drinkings day by day, mugs of milk and baked squash forever, plenty of butter to our daily bread; letters at wide intervals, and long, uninterrupted "thinks" about home and friends (as the poet of the "Hermitage" writes in one of his letters). Shall I ever again sit for two mortal hours hearing a housefly buzz in the window and thinking it a pleasant voice! But alas! those restless days, when the air was full of driving leaves and I could find nothing on earth to comfort me.

I leave this morning. Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away. The heart leaps with emotion: everything is momentous in a quiet life. This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk. Its threshold will soon be cushioned with snow; let us hasten on. If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply: Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness. Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground glass. Go in spring and autumn, if possible. I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been. You can enter and go out at this portal. Passing seaward, to the left, out of the gray and groping mists a form, arises, monstrous and awful in its proportions; spurning the very earth that crumbles at its very base as it towers to heaven. The vapors of the air cleave to its massive front. The passing cloud is caught and torn in the grand carvings of its capitals. Gaze upon it in the solemnity of its sunlit surface. Impressive, impassive, magnetic; having a pulse and the organs of life almost; terrible as the forehead of a god. The full splendor of the noonday can not belittle it, night can not compass it. The moon is paler in its presence and wastes her lamp, the stars are hidden and lost over and beyond it. Across the face of it is borne forever the shadowy semblance of a swift and flying figure. Despair and desperation are in the nervous energy depicted in this marvelous medallion. Surely, the Indian may look with a degree of reverence upon that picture, painted by the morning light, fading in the meridian day, and gone altogether by evening. A grand etching of colossal proportions, representing the great chief Tutochanula in his mysterious flight. The Wandering Jew might look upon it and behold his traditional beard and flowing robes blown here by the winds in the rapidity of his desperate haste. It is the last one sees of the valley, as it is the last any have seen of Tutochanula. He fled into the west, cycles ago, and I follow him now into the west, nest-building, and getting into the shadow and resting after the door of the mountain is passed, and my soul no longer beats impetuously against those stormy walls.

With uncovered head, having nothing between me and Saturn, wiser, I trust, for my intercourse with these masters, purer in heart and holier for my prolonged vigil, with careful and reverential steps I pass out of Yosemite shadows.



AN AFFAIR OF THE MISTY CITY

I.

WHAT THE MOON SHONE ON

She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered vaguely through folds of scurrying fog. She shone upon a silent street that ran up a moderate hill between far-scattered corporation gas-lamps—a street that having reached the hill top seemed to saunter leisurely across a height which had once been the most aristocratic quarter of the Misty City; the quarter was still pathetically respectable, and for three squares at least its handsome residences stared destiny in the face and stood in the midst of flower-bordered lawns, unmindful of decay. Its fountains no longer played; even its once pampered children had grown up, and the young of the present generation were of a different cast; but the street seemed not to heed these changes; indeed it was growing a little careless of itself and needed replanking. Was it a realization of this fact, I wonder, that caused it on a sudden to run violently down a steep place into the Bay, as if it were possessed of Devils? Well it might be, for the human scum of the town gathered about the base of the hill, and the nights there were unutterably iniquitous.

O that pale watcher, the Moon! She shone on a rude stairway leading up to the bare face of a cliff that topped the hill; and five and forty uncertain steps that had more than once slid down into the street below along with the wreckage of the winter rains, for the cliff was of rock and clay and though the rock may stand until the crack of Doom, the clay mingles with the elements and an annual mud pudding, tons in weight, was deposited on the pavement of the high street, to the joy of the juveniles and the grief of the belated pedestrians. The cliff towering at the junction of the two thoroughfares shared with each its generous mud-flow and half of it descended in lavalike cascades into the depths of a ravine that crossed the high street at right angles, passing under a bridge still celebrated as a triumph of architectural ungainliness.

She shone, my Lady Moon, into that deep ravine which was half filled with shadow and made a weird picture of the place; it seemed like the bed of some dark noiseless river, the source of which was still undiscovered; and as for its mouth, no one would ever find it, or, finding, tell of it, for the few who trusted themselves to its voiceless and invisible current were heard of no more; sometimes a sharp cry for help pierced the midnight silence, and it was known upon the hill that murder was being done down yonder—that was all. Yet day by day the great tide of traffic poured through this subterranean passage, with muffled roar as of a distant sea.

She shone on all that was left of a once beautiful and imposing mansion. It crowned the very brow of the cliff; it proudly overlooked all the neighbors; it was a Gothic ruin girded about with a mantle of ivy and dense creepers, yet not all of the perennial leafage that clothed it, even to the eaves, could disguise the fact that the major portion of the mansion had been razed to the ground lest it should topple and go crashing into that gulf below. There, once upon a time, in a Gothic garden shaded by slender cypresses, walked the golden youth of the land; there, feminine lunch parties, pink teas, highly exclusive musicales and fashionable hops, flourished mightily; now the former side-door served as the front entrance to all that was left of the mansion; the stone that was rejected had become the headstone of the corner, as it were; it was an abrupt corner to be sure, with the upper half of its narrow door filled with small panes of glass; its modest threshold was somewhat worn; but upon the platform before it a large egg-shaped jar of unmistakable Chinese origin encased the roots of a flowing cactus that might have added a grace to the proudest palace in the Misty City. This was the modest portal of the Eyrie; ivy vines sheltered it like a dense thatch; ivy vines clung fast to a deep bay window that nearly filled one side of the library of the old mansion, now a living-room; ivy vines curtained the glazed wall of a conservatory where some one slept as in a bower. A weird dwelling place was this the moon shone upon, where pigeons nested and cooed at intervals in all the green nooks thereof.

She shone on the tall slim panes of glass in the bay window till they shimmered like ice, and brightened the carpet on the floor of the room—a carpet that was faded and frayed; she threw a soft glow upon the three walls beyond the window; where were low, convenient shelves of books; there were books, books, books everywhere—books of all descriptions, neither creed nor caution limited their range. Many pictures and sketches in oil or water-color—some of them unframed—were upon the walls above the book-shelves; there were bronze statuettes, graceful figures of lute-strumming troubadours upon the old-fashioned marble mantel; there were busts and medallions in plaster, and a few casts after the antique. Heaped in corners, and upon the tops of the book-shelves lay bric-a-brac in hopeless confusion; toy canoes from Kamchatka and the Southern seas; wooden masks from the burial places of the Alaskan Indians and the Theban Tombs of the Nile Kings; rude fish-hooks that had been dropped in the coral seas; sharks' teeth; and the strong beak of an albatross whose webbed feet were tobacco pouches and whose hollow wing-bones were the long jointed stem of a pipe; spears and war-clubs were there, brought from the gleaming shores of reef-girdled islands; a Florentine lamp; a roll of papyrus; an idol from Easter Island, the eyes of which were two missionary shirt buttons of mother-of-pearl, of the Puritan type; your practical cannibal, having eaten his missionary, spits out the shirt buttons to be used as the eyes which see not; carved gourds were there, and calabashes; Mexican pottery; and some of the latest Pompeiian antiquities such as are miraculously discovered in the presence of the amazed and delighted tourist who secretly purchases the same for considerably more than a song.

There were pious objects, many of them resembling the Ex Votos at a shrine; an ebony and bronzed indulgenced crucifix with a history, and Sacred Hearts done in scarlet satin with flames of shining tinsel flickering from their tops.

There were vines creeping everywhere within the room, from jars that stood on brackets and made hanging gardens of themselves; creepers, yards in length that sprung from the mouths of water-pots hidden behind objects of interest, and these framed the pictures in living green; a huge wide-mouthed vase stood in the bay window filled with a great pulu fern still nourished by its native soil—a veritable tropical island this, now basking in the moonlight far from its native clime. Japanese and Chinese lanterns were there; and an ostrich egg brought from Nubia that hung like an alabaster lamp lit by a moonbeam; and fans, of course, but quaint barbaric ones from the Orient and the Equatorial Isles; and framed and unframed photographs of celebrities each bearing an original autograph; and easy chairs, nothing but the easiest chairs from the very far-reaching one with the long arms like a pair of oars over which one throws his slippered feet, and lolls in his pajamas in memory of an East Indian season of exile, to the deep nest-like sleepy hollow quite big enough for two, in which one dozes and dreams, and out of which it is so difficult for one to rise. Over all this picturesque confusion grinned a fleshless human skull with its eye sockets and yawning jaws stuffed full of faded boutonnieres.

The moon shone, but paler now for it was growing late, on a closed coupe that rolled rapidly from the Club House in the early morning after a High Jinks night, and clattered through the streets accompanied by the matutinal milk wagons with their frequent, intermittent pauses; thus it rolled and rolled over the resounding pavement toward that house on the hill top, The Eyrie.

The vehicle zigzagged up the steep grade, and stopped at the foot of the long stairway; some one alighted and exchanged a friendly word or two with the driver, for in that lonely part of the town it was pleasant to hear the sound of one's own voice even if one was guiltily conscious of making conversation; then with a cheerful "Good-night," this some-one climbed the steps while the vehicle hurried away with its jumble of hoofs and wheels. A key was heard at the outer door; the door sagged a little in common with everything about the house—and a tenant passed into the Eyrie.

Enter Paul Clitheroe, sole scion of that melancholy house whose foundations had sunk under him, and left him, at the age of five and twenty, master of himself, but slave to fortune.

In the dim light he closed and fastened the outer door; from a hall scarcely large enough for two people to pass in, he entered the inner room with the confident step of a familiar. Having deposited hat, cane and ulster in their respective places—there was a place for everything or it would have been quite impossible to abide in that snuggery—he sank into one of the easy chairs, rolled a cigarette with meditative deliberation, lighted it and blew the smoke into the moonlight where it assumed a thousand fantastic forms.

The silence of the room seemed emphasized by the presence of its occupant; he was one who under no circumstances was likely to disturb the serenity of a house. In most cases a single room takes on the character of the one who inhabits it; this is invariably the case where the apartment is in the possession of a woman; but turn a man loose in a room, and leave him to himself for a season, and he will have made of that room a witness strong enough to condemn or condone him on the Last Day; the whole character of the place will gradually change until it has become an index to the man's nature; where this is not the case, the man is without noticeable characteristics.

Those who knew Paul Clitheroe, the solitary at the Eyrie, would at once recognize this room as his abode; those of his friends who saw this room for the first time, without knowing it to be his home, would say: "Paul Clitheroe would fit in here." A kind of harmonious incongruity was the chief characteristic of the man and his solitary lodging.

He sat for some time as silent as the inanimate objects in that singularly silent room. An occasional turn of the wrist, the momentary flash of the ash at the end of his cigarette, the smoke-wreath floating in space—those were all that gave assurance of life; for when this solitary returned into his well-chosen solitude he seemed to shed all that was of the earth earthy, and to become a kind of spectre in a dream.

Having finished his cigarette, Paul withdrew into the conservatory, his sleeping room, half doll's house and half bower, where the ivy had crept over the top of the casement and covered his ceiling with a web of leaves. Shortly he was reposing upon his pillow, over which his holy-water font—a large crimson heart of crystal with flames of burnished gold, set upon a tablet of white marble—seemed almost to pulsate in the exquisite half-lights of approaching dawn.

It may not have been manly, or even masculine, for him thus literally to curtain his sleep, like a faun, with ivy; it may not have been orthodox for him to admit to his Valhalla some of the false Gods, and to honor them after a fashion; the one true God was duly adored, and all his saints appealed to in filial faith. That was his nature and past changing; if he could not look upon God as a Jealous God visiting His judgments with fanatical justice upon the witted and half-witted, it was because his was a nature which had never been warped by the various social moral and religious influences brought to bear upon it.

He may have lacked judgment, in the eyes of the world, but he had never suffered seriously in consequence. It may not have been wise for him to fondly nourish tastes and tendencies that were usually quite beyond his means; but he did it, and doing it afforded him the greatest pleasure in life.

You will pardon him all this; every one did sooner or later, even those who discountenanced similar weaknesses or affectations—or whatever you are pleased to call them—in anyone else, soon found an excuse for overlooking them in his case.

He was not, thank heaven, all things to all men; all things to a few, he may have been—yea, even more than all else to some, so long as the spell lasted; to the majority, however, he was probably nothing, and less than nothing. And what of that? If he did little good in the world, he certainly did less evil, and, as he lay in his bed, under a white counterpane upon which the dawning light, sifting through the vines that curtained the glazed front of his sleeping room, fell in a mottled Japanese pattern, and while the ivy that covered the Gothic ceiling trailed long tendrils of the palest and most delicate green, each leaf glossed as if it had been varnished, this unheroic-hero, this pantheistic-devotee, this heathenized-Christian, this half-happy-go-lucky aethestic Bohemian, lay upon his pillow, the incarnation of absolute repose.

And so the morning broke, and the early birds began to chirp in the ivy and to prune their plumage and flutter among the leaves; and down the street tramped the feet of the toilers on their way to forge and dock. Over the harbor came the daffodil light from the sun-tipped eastern hills, and it painted the waves that lapped the sleek sides of a yacht lying at anchor under the hill. A yacht that Paul had watched many a day and dreamed of many a night; for he often longed with a great longing to slip cable and hie away, even unto the uttermost parts.



II.

WHAT THE SUN SHONE ON

He shone on the far side of the eastern azure hills and set all the tree tops in the wood beyond the wold aflame; he looked over the silhouette out of a cloudless sky upon a Bay whose breadth and beauty is one of the seven hundred wonders of the world; he paved the waves with gold, a path celestial that angels might not fear to tread. He touched the heights of the Misty City and the sea-fog that had walled it in through the night as with walls of unquarried marble—albeit the eaves had dripped in the darkness as after a summer shower—and anon the opaque vapors dissolved and fled away. There she lay, the Misty City, in all her wasted and scattered beauty; she might have been a picture for Poets to dream on and Artists to love—their wonder and their despair—but she is not; she is hideous to look upon save in the sunset or the after-glow when you cannot see her, but only the dim vision of what she might have been.

He rose as a God refreshed with sleep and called the weary to their work, and disturbed the slumbers of those that toil not and spin not, and have nothing to do but sleep.

There were no secrets from him now; every detail was discovered; and so having gilded for a moment the mossy shingles of the Eyrie he stole into the room where Paul Clitheroe passed most of his waking hours, and through the curtain of ivy and geraniums that screened the conservatory from the eyes of the curious world, and where Paul was at this moment sleeping the sleep of the just. From the bed of the ravine below the Eyrie rose the rumble and roar of traffic. The hours passed by. The sleeper began to turn uneasily on his pillow. The sound of hurrying feet was heard upon the board walks in front of the Eyrie-cliff; many voices, youthful voices, swelled the chorus that told of the regiments of children now hastening to school. From dreamland Paul returned by easy stages to the work-a-day world. He arose, donned a trailing garment with angel sleeves and a large crucifix embroidered in scarlet upon the breast—that robe made of him a cross between a Monk and a Marchioness—slipped his feet into sandals and entered the larger chamber which was at once living-room and library. He opened the shutters in the deep bay window and greeted the day with the silent solemnity of a fire-worshipper; gave drink to his potted palms and ferns and flowering plants; let his eye wander leisurely over the titles of his books; lingered a little while over his favorites and patted some of them fondly on the back. Taking a small key from its nail by the door he opened the mail box without, carrying his letters to his writing table and leaving them there unopened. He loved to speculate as to whom the writers were and what they may have said to him. This piqued his curiosity, and tided him over a scant breakfast at an inexpensive but fly-blown restaurant where he was wont to eat or make a more or less brave effort to eat whenever he had the wherewithal to settle for the same. Breakfast over and gone the young man returned to his Eyrie, and in due course was at his writing table, and at work upon the weekly article that had been appearing in the Sunday issue of one of the popular Dailies for an indefinite period, and the price of which had on several occasions kept him from becoming a conspicuous object of charity.

Having written himself out for the day, as he was apt to in a few hours, he wandered down to the Club for a bit of refreshment which was sure to be forthcoming, for his friends there were ever ready to dine him, or more frequently to wine him, merely for the pleasure of his company.



So the afternoon waned and the dinner hour approached; fortunately this hour was usually bespoken and for a little while at least he was lapped in luxury. On his way home he was very apt to turn in at the wicker gates of a typical German Rathskellar where he was unmolested; where the blustering pipes of a colossal orchestrion brayed through an aria from Trovatore with more sound than sentiment and all unmindful of modulation.

He was at home by midnight, for the beer and the bravura ceased to flow at the witching hour. Then he lounged in the easy chair, gradually and not unconsciously shedding all the worldly influences that had been clothing him as with a hair-shirt even since he first went forth that morning. Safely he sank into the silence of the place. Every breath he drew was balm; every moment healing. So he passed into the silence, enfolded by invisible arms that led him gently to his pillow where he sank to sleep with the trustful resignation of a tired babe.