BENJ, F, TAYLOR
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 
 OF 
 
 LOS 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 CALIFORNIA 
 ANGELES
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 BY 
 
 BE^J. F. TAYLOR, 
 
 AUTHOR OP " SONGS OF YESTERDAY," "OLD-TIME PICTURES," "WORLD ON 
 WHEELS," " CAMP AND FIELD," ETC. 
 
 WITH ILL US TRA TIONS. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 
 
 1878.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1878, 
 BY 8. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 
 
 XNISHT R LEONARD . 
 
 vox_voy 
 
 Donohn* A Henneberry, Binds
 
 Collegt 
 
 Library 
 
 Jtr 
 
 TO 
 
 MRS. MARY SCRANTON BRADFORD, 
 
 OF CLEVELAND, OHIO, 
 
 WHOSE DAILY DEEDS OF NOBLE KINDNESS HAVE 
 
 BKIGHTENED MANY A LIFE AND BEAUTIFIED 
 
 HER OWN, THIS BOOK OF DAYS OF 
 
 SUNSHINE IS AFFECTIONATELY 
 
 INSCRIBED BY HER 
 
 RELATIVE AND FRIEND. 
 
 883848
 
 Colleg* 
 Library 
 
 CONFIDENTIAL. 
 
 E only care-free, cloudless summer of my life, since 
 childhood, was spent in California. The going there 
 was a delight, and the leaving there a regret. 
 
 This gypsy of a book has few facts and not a word of 
 fiction; not so much as a dry fagot of statistics or a wing- 
 feather of a fancy. 
 
 "How do you like California?" was the daily question, 
 and to the uniform reply came the quick rejoinder: "Ah, 
 but you should see it in the winter, for the summer is in 
 the winter." 
 
 The writer sympathizes with any reader who misses 
 what he seeks in this small volume, and can only soften 
 "the winter of our discontent" by saying: Ah, but you 
 should know " what pain it was to drown " what had to 
 be omitted! 
 
 Perhaps we two may meet again in the groves of Los 
 Angeles, when the oranges are in the gold and the almond 
 blossoms shine.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 OVERLAND TRAIN - 9 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 "SET SAIL" - 21 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN - 28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON - 38 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN - 48 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 FROM WINTER TO SUMMER - 61 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 SAN FRANCISCO STREET SCENES 71 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN - 81 
 
 "John," the Heathen 84 
 
 "Hoodlum," the Christian 88 
 
 Picnics ...... 91
 
 6 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE 94 
 
 The Pacific Breezes 101 
 
 Weather on Man 103 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 GOING TO CHINA 106 
 
 A Chinese Restaurant - 108 
 
 " We'll All Take Tea " 109 
 
 The Joss-House and the Gods 110 
 
 "Twelve Packs in his Sleeve" - 114 
 
 An Opium Den - 115 
 
 The Opium-Smoker's Dream 116 
 
 "The Royal China Theatre" - 118 
 
 "The Play's the Thing" - - 119 
 
 The Orchestra 121 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MISSION DOLORES ANI> THE SAINTS - 124 
 
 The Old Graveyard 126 
 
 The Saints - 128 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB 131 
 
 A Dead Lift at a Live Weight 133 
 
 On the High Seas - 140 
 
 The Hog's Back 143 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE GEYSERS 146 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST ... 155
 
 CONTENTS. ' 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 HIGHER AND FIRE 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 A MINT OF MONEY 
 Aladdin's Cave 
 
 Is it Worth it 18 
 
 Washing-Day 
 Midas's Kitchen 
 Bricks and Hoop-Poles 
 
 Weighing Live Stock 189 
 
 "The Golden Dustman" 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 BOUND FOR THE Yo SEMITE 
 Taking a Mountain 
 A Mountain Choir 
 "The Ayes Have It" 
 Down the Mountains 
 
 The Big Trees 205 
 
 A Forest Ride 209 
 
 First Glimpse of the Yo Semite 210 
 
 Through the Valley 214 
 
 The Grand Register 217 
 
 El Capitan 221 
 
 The Bridal Veil >222 
 
 Mirror Lake 224 
 
 Up a Trail 227 
 
 Yo Semite Fall and Sun Time - 
 Breaking up Camp
 
 8 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS - 240 
 
 Seals 242 
 
 The Golden Gate 245 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC - - 249 
 
 A Difficult Sunrise 250 
 
 The Tehachapi Love- Knot - 251 
 
 The Mojave Desert 254 
 
 A Vegetable Acrobat ... 355 
 
 The Mirage 257 
 
 The City of the Angels 259 
 
 The Orange Groves 262 
 
 The Vineyards 264 
 
 "A Bee Ranch" - 266 
 
 The Mission of San Gabriel - 269 
 
 The Garden 271 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY - - 276 
 
 Latitudes - 281 
 
 The Spirit of California ' - 283 
 
 The Men and Women - 287 
 
 Home Again ..... 291
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 
 
 i. 
 
 1ROM Hell Gate to Gold Gate 
 
 And the Sabbath unbroken, 
 A sweep continental 
 
 And the Saxon yet spoken! 
 By seas with no tears in them, 
 
 Fresh and sweet as Spring rains, 
 By seas with no fears in them, 
 
 God's garmented plains, 
 
 Where deserts lie down in the prairies' broad calms, 
 Where lake links to lake like the music of psalms. 
 
 n. 
 Meeting rivers bound East 
 
 Like the shadows at night, 
 Chasing rivers bound West 
 
 Like the break-of-day light, 
 Crossing rivers bound South 
 
 From dead winter to June, 
 From the marble-old snows 
 
 To perennial noon 
 
 Cosmopolitan rivers, Mississippi, Missouri, 
 That travel the planet like Jordan through Jewry.
 
 10 r.rnv I:I:N TIM: < \TI >. 
 
 in. 
 Through the kingdoms of corn, 
 
 Through tin- empires of grain, 
 Through dominions of forest 
 
 Drives the thundering train 
 Through fields where God's cattle 
 
 Are turned out to gi 
 And 'His poultry whirl up 
 
 From the wheels as we pass; 
 Through level horizons as still as the moon, 
 With the wilds fast asleep and the winds in a swoon, 
 
 IV. 
 
 There's a thrill in the air 
 
 Like the tingle of wine, 
 Like a bugle-blown blast, 
 
 When the scimiters shine 
 And the sky-line is broken 
 
 By the Mountains Divine! 
 Where the planet stands up 
 
 Body-guard before God, 
 And to cloud-land and glory 
 
 Transfigures the sod. 
 Ah! to see the grand forms' 
 
 Magnificent lift 
 In their sandals of daisies 
 
 And turbans of drift. 
 
 Ah! to see the dull globe brought sublime to its feet, 
 \Vlu-re in mantles of blue the two monarchies meet, 
 The azure of grace bending low in its place,
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 11 
 
 And this world glancing back with a colorless face. 
 Who marvels Mount Sinai was the State House of God? 
 Who wonders the Sermon down old Galilee flowed? 
 That the Father and Son each hallowed a height 
 Where the lightnings were red and the roses were white ! 
 Oh, Mountains that lift us to the realm of the Throne, 
 A Sabbath-day's journey without leaving our own, 
 All day ye have cumbered and beclouded the West, 
 Low glooming, high looming, like a storm at its best, 
 By distance struck speechless and the thunder at rest. 
 
 All day and all night 
 
 It is rattle and clank, 
 All night and all day 
 
 Smiting space in the flank, 
 And no token those clouds 
 
 Will ever break rank. 
 Still the engines' bright arms 
 
 Are bared to the shoulder 
 In the long level pull 
 
 Till the mountains grow bolder. 
 Ah! we strike the up grade! 
 
 We are climbing the world! 
 And it -rallies the soul 
 
 Like volcanoes unfurled, 
 
 Where it looks like the cloud that led Moses of old, 
 And the pillar of fire born and wove in one fold 
 From the womb and the loom of abysses untold.
 
 12 BETWKI.N THE GATES. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We strike the (iivat iVsert 
 
 With its wildiTiu'ss howl, 
 With its cactus and sage, 
 
 With its serpent and owl, 
 And its pools of dead water, 
 
 Its torpid old streams, 
 The corpse of an earth 
 
 And the nightmare of dreams; 
 And the dim rusty trail 
 
 Of the old Forty-nine, 
 That they wore as they went 
 
 To the mountain and mine, 
 With graves for their milestones; 
 
 How slowly they crept, 
 Like the shade on a dial 
 
 Where the sun never slept, 
 
 But unwinking, unblinking, from his quiver of ire 
 Like a desolate besom the wilderness swept 
 
 With his arrows of fire. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Now we pull up the globe! It is grander than flying, 
 'Mid glimpses of wonder that are grander than dying, 
 Through the gloomy arcades shedding winter and drift, 
 By the bastions and towers of omnipotent lift. 
 Through tunnels of thunder with a long sullen roar, 
 Night ever at home and grim Death at the door. 
 We swing round a headland, 
 Ah! the track is not there!
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 13 
 
 It has melted away 
 
 Like a rainbow in air! 
 Man the brakes! Hold her hard! We are leaving the 
 
 world ! 
 
 Red flag and red lantern unlighted and furled. 
 Lo, the earth has gone down like the set of the sun 
 Broad rivers unraveled turn to rills as they run 
 Great monarchs of forest dwindle feeble and old 
 Wide fields flock together like the lambs in a fold 
 Yon head-stone a snow-flake lost out of the sky 
 That lingered behind when some winter went by! 
 Ah, we creep round a ledge 
 On the world's very edge, 
 On a shelf of the rock 
 
 Where an eagle might nest, 
 And the heart's double knock 
 Dies away in the breast 
 We have rounded Cape Horn! Grand Pacific, good morn! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Now the world slopes away to the afternoon sun 
 Steady one!- Steady all! The down grade has begun. 
 Let the engines take breath, they have nothing to do, 
 For the law that swings worlds will whirl the train 
 through. 
 
 Streams of fire from the wheels, 
 
 Like flashes from fountains; 
 And the dizzy train reels 
 
 As it swoops down the mountains : 
 And fiercer and faster
 
 14 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 As if demons drove tandem 
 Engines "Death" and "Disaster!" 
 
 From dumb Winter to Spring in one wonderful hour 
 From Nevada's white wing to Creation in flower! 
 December at morning tossing wild in its might 
 A June without warning and blown roses at night! 
 
 DOUBLING CAPE HORN. 
 
 Above us are snow-drifts a hundred years old, 
 Behind us are placers with their pockets of gold, 
 And mountains of bullion that would whiten a noon, 
 That would silver the face of the Harvesters' moon. 
 Around- us are vineyards with their jewels and gems,
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 15 
 
 Living trinkets of wine blushing warm on the steins, 
 And the leaves all afire 
 With the purple of Tyre. 
 Beyond us are oceans of ripple and gold, 
 Where the bread cast abroad rolls a myriad fold 
 Seas of grain and of answer to the prayer of mankind, 
 And the orange in blossom makes a bride of the wind, 
 And the almond tree shines like a Scripture in bloom, 
 And the bees are abroad with their blunder and boom 
 Never blunder amiss, for there's something to kiss 
 Where the flowers out-of-doors can smile in all weather, 
 And bud, blossom and fruit grace the gardens together. 
 Thereaway to the South, without fences and bars, 
 Flocks freckle the plains like the thick of the stars; 
 Hereaway to the North, a magnificent wild, 
 With dimples of cations, as if Universe smiled. 
 Ah! valleys of Vision. 
 
 Delectable Mountains 
 As grand as old Bunyan's, 
 And opals of fountains, 
 And garnets of landscapes, 
 And sapphires of skies, 
 Where through agates of clouds 
 Shine the diamond eyes. 
 
 IX. 
 
 We die out of Winter in the flash of an eye, 
 
 Into Eden of earth, into Heaven of sky; 
 
 Sacramento's fair vale with its parlors of God, 
 
 Where the souls of the flowers rise and drift all abroad, '
 
 lli BETWEEN T1IK GATES. 
 
 A- it r.'MirriTtion were all the year round 
 Ami tin- writing of Christ sprang alive from tln> ground, 
 When He said to the woman those words that will last 
 \\ 'lio 11 the globe shall grow human with the dead it has 
 
 clasped. 
 
 Live-oaks in their orchards, rare exotics run wild, 
 No orphan among them, each Nature's own child. 
 Oh, wonderful land where the turbulent sand 
 Will burst into bloom at the touch of a hand, 
 
 And a desert baptized 
 
 Prove an Eden disguised. 
 
 x. 
 
 There's a breath from Japan 
 
 Of an ocean-born air, 
 Like the blue-water smell 
 
 In an Argonaut's hair! 
 'Tis a carol of joy 
 
 With a sweep wild and free; 
 And the mountains deploy 
 
 Round the Queen of the West, 
 Where she sits by the sea 
 By the Occident sea 
 
 In her Orient vest, 
 Babel Earth at her knee, 
 And the heart of all nations 
 
 Alive in her breast 
 Where she sits by the Gate 
 
 With its lintels of rock, 
 
 And the key in the lock
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 17 
 
 By the Lord's Golden Gate, 
 
 With its crystal-floored chamber, 
 
 And its threshold of amber, 
 
 Where encamped like a king, 
 
 The broad world on the wing, 
 Her grand will can await. 
 Where now are the dunes, 
 The tawny half- moons 
 Of the sands ever drifting, 
 Of the sands ever sifting, 
 By the shore and the sweep 
 Of the sea in its sleep? 
 Where now are the tents, 
 With their stains and their rents. 
 All landward and seaward 
 
 Like white butterflies blown? 
 All drifted to leeward, 
 
 All scattered and gone. 
 And this uttermost post 
 
 Of earth's end is the throne 
 Of the Queen of the Coast, 
 Who has loosened her robe 
 And girdled the globe 
 
 With her radiant zone 
 The throb of her pulses 
 
 Has fevered the Age 
 She has silvered and gilded 
 
 All history's page! 
 She has spoken mankind, 
 1*
 
 18 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 And has uttered her ships 
 Like the eloquent words 
 
 From most eloquent lips 
 They have flown all abroad 
 Like- the angels of God ! 
 Sails fleck the world's waters 
 
 All bound for the Gate, 
 All their bows to the Bay, 
 
 Like the finger of Fate. 
 Child of the wilderness 
 
 By deserts confined, 
 Wide waters before her, 
 
 Wild mountains behind, 
 She unlocks her treasures 
 
 To the gaze of mankind. 
 
 Her name is translated into each human tongue, 
 Her fame round the curve of the planet is sung, 
 And she thinks through its swerve 
 By the telegraph nerve. 
 
 XI. 
 
 When the leaf of the mulberry is spun into thread, 
 Then the spinner is shrouded and the weaver is dead; 
 And that shroud is unwound by the fingers of girls, 
 And the films of pale gold clasp the spool as it whirls, 
 As it ripens and rounds 
 
 Like some exquisite fruit 
 In the tropical bounds, 
 
 In air sweet as a lute, 
 Till the shroud and the tomb,
 
 OVERLAND TRAIN. 19 
 
 Dyed in rainbow and bloom, 
 Glisten forth from the loom 
 Into garments of pride, 
 Into robes for a bride, 
 Into lace-woven air 
 That an angel might wear. 
 Ah! marvelous space 
 'Twixt the leaf and the lace, 
 
 From the mulberry worm 
 To the magical grace 
 
 Of the fabric and form! 
 Oh, Imperial State, 
 
 Splendid empire in leaf, 
 That grows grand on the way 
 
 To the sky and the day, 
 Like the coralline reef 
 
 To be royally great. 
 
 Dead gold is barbaric, but its threads can be woven 
 Into harmonies fine, like the tones of Beethoven, 
 Can be raveled and wrought 
 
 Into love-knots of faith 
 
 For the daughters of Ruth 
 Into garments of thought, 
 
 Into pinions for truth 
 And be turned from the wraith 
 
 Of a misty ideal 
 That may vanish in night, 
 
 To things royal and real 
 That shall live out the light.
 
 20 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 So the true golden days 
 
 Shall be kindled at last, 
 And this realm shall rule on 
 When the twilights are gone, 
 In the grandeur of truth 
 And the beauty of youth 
 
 Till long ages have passed!
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "SET SAIL." 
 
 ON" a bright Spring morning we set sail from Chicago 
 for the Golden Gate. Nothing on solid land is the 
 twin of an ocean voyage but a trans-continental trip by 
 rail. There is a sort of " through " look about Pacific- 
 bound passengers. The shaggy blanket; the bruin of an 
 overcoat; the valise not black and glossy, but the color of a 
 sea-lion; the William Penn of a hat, broad as to its brim 
 as the phylacteries of the Pharisees; the ticket that shuts 
 over and over like a Chinese book; the capacious lunch 
 basket where, amid sardines, cheese, dried beef, bread, 
 pickles and pots of butter, protrude bottles with slender 
 necks like Mary's, Queen of Scots, and young teapots with 
 impudent noses; the settling into place like geese for a 
 three- weeks' anchorage all these betoken, not a flitting, 
 but a flight. 
 
 The splendid train of the Chicago and Northwestern 
 road, that controls a line of more than three thousand 
 miles, and traverses six states and territories, steams out 
 of the "Garden City's" ragged edges that refine and 
 soften away into rural scenes, and meets many a lovely 
 village hurrying toward the town. It rings its brazen 
 clangor of salute. Shrubbery and stations clear the way. 
 The horizons curve broadly out. We are fairly at sea 
 
 amid the rolling glory of Illinois. The eastward world 
 
 21
 
 2'J i;i r\vi:i:x THE GATES. 
 
 slips away beneath the wheels, like the white wake at a 
 M IK mner's heels. 
 
 And then I think of another day in the year '49, and 
 the stormy month of March, when the tatters of while 
 winter hull-hid earth's chilly nakedness, and Euroclydon 
 blew out of the keen East like the King's trumpeter, and 
 a little procession of wagons was drawn up facing West 
 on Lake street, Chicago, and daring fellows were snapping 
 revolvers and casing rifles, and making ready for the 
 long, dim trail through wilderness, desert and canon, 
 through delay, danger and darkness a trail drawn across 
 the continent like the tremulous writing of a death- 
 warrant when Mercy holds the pen. The horses' heads 
 were toward the sunset, and the stalwart boys were ready, 
 the gold-seekers of the early day. There were women on 
 the sidewalks, there were children lifted in men's stout 
 arms that might never clasp them more. 
 
 The captain gave the word, and the cavalcade drew 
 slowly out, the last canvas-covered wain dwindled to an 
 ant's white egg, and the pioneers were gone; gone into a 
 silence as profound as the grave's. Spring should come 
 and go, June should shed its roses, autumn roll its golden 
 sea and break into the barn's broad bays in the high- 
 tides of abundance; the winter fire* should glow again, 
 and yet no word from the Argonauts, no lock from tlio 
 Golden Fleece of the new-found El Dorado of the farthest 
 West. Ah, the weary waitings, the hopes deferred, the 
 letters soiled and wrinkled and old, that crept by return- 
 ing trains, or doubled the Cape or crossed the Isthmus, 
 that the readers thanked God for and took courage, be- 
 cause the writers were not dead last year. 
 
 And now it is a six days' sweep as on wings of eagles
 
 "SET SAIL." 23 
 
 from the Prairies of Garden Gate to Pacific's Golden Gate! 
 Verily Galileo's whisper has swelled to a joyful shout: 
 "THE WORLD MOVES!" Fox river, Rock river, Mississippi, 
 the old Father of them all, are crossed in one sunshine. 
 The Cedar is reached by tea-time; we are riding the 
 breezy swells of Iowa; the second morning finds us giv- 
 ing Council Bluffs a cold shoulder, and making for "The 
 Big Muddy." which is the prose for that ancient maiden, 
 Missouri. Council Bluffs is the old Kanesville, where the 
 Mormons advanced the first parallel in their long siege 
 to take the parched desert of Utah, with its strange 
 mimicry of the salted ocean that slakes no thirst, and to 
 make a blooming garden with streams of living water. 
 
 Omaha goes between wind and water, a bad region 
 for a solid shot to strike a ship, but a good thing for 
 a town. It was the base of supplies for the bearded 
 mountain-men who bundled their furs down to the river. 
 It was the point of departure for the Pike's Peakers and 
 the caravans " Frisco "-bound. It has hot water on both 
 sides of it, from ocean to ocean. It has cold water, such 
 as it is, " slab and good," like witches' broth, in the 
 Missouri that, allied with the Mississippi, flows from the 
 regions of the rude North, up the round world to the 
 Gulf of Mexico and tke sea. And it has wind. Caves cf 
 JEolus! How it blows! If the wild asses of Scripture 
 times could live on the East wind, they would fairly fat- 
 ten on the Zephyrs of Omaha. 
 
 The bridge over the .Missouri, swung in the air like 
 a rainbow with no colors in it, and almost three thousand 
 feet long, is a great gateway to the West. It- has tri- 
 umphed over the uneasiest sands that ever slipped out 
 from under a foundation, and the worst river to drown
 
 24 BETWKKN Till! (i.\ I H. 
 
 geographies that ever went anywhere. I have crossed 
 (hat river in a stage-eoaeh, in a boat, and on foot. It 
 gi-t< up ami lii-s duuii in a m-\v place ut'tener than any 
 other running water in America. It changes beds like 
 a fidgety man in a sultry night. It is as worthless for 
 a boundary-line as a elothes-line. It has been known to 
 slier out an Iowa county-seat, and leave it within the 
 limit ~ of Nebraska, as a sort of lawyer's lunch, to be 
 wrangled over. 
 
 Fort Calhoun, some two houiV drive up the river from 
 Omaha, is the point whence Lewis and Clark set forth, 
 seventy- three years ago, into a wilderness that howled, 
 and discovered that great watery trident of the Columbia, 
 and named it Lewis, Clark and Multnomah. A while ago 
 I visited the Fort, and the stump of the flag-staff yet 
 remained whence the old colors drifted out in the morn- 
 ing light, when the Discoverers set forth. In their da\ 
 the Fort stood on the river's bank, and in case of in- 
 vestment from the landward side, water could be drawn 
 up in buckets from the Missouri, and so they wet their 
 throats and kept their powder dry. In my day, I looked 
 from the old site upon a forest of cotton woods about a 
 Sabbath-day's journey in breadth! That river had gotten 
 up and lain down again at a quiet and comfortable dis- 
 tam-e from the click of locks and clank of scabbards. 
 What it will do next nobody can tell. 
 
 The Union Pacific train is just ready to move out. 
 The bright-hued cars of the Northwestern are succeeded 
 by the soberly-painted coaches of the Union Pacific. They 
 have taken the tint of ocean-going steamers. Men and 
 women are bundling aboard with bags and baskets. The 
 spacious Depot is thronged with crowds in motley wear.
 
 SET SAIL/ 
 
 25 
 
 A breeze draws through the great building like the blast 
 of a furnace. At one hawk-like swoop it catches up a 
 woman's bonnet and dishevels her head, and blows her 
 ticket out at one door 
 while her urchin of 
 a boy trundles out at 
 another. Her des- 
 peration is logical. 
 She grasps for the 
 hat, plunges for the 
 ticket, and proceeds 
 to look up the baby. 
 Let no indignant 
 matron deny the soft 
 impeachment. The 
 fact remains: bon- 
 net, ticket, baby. 
 
 Here, a Norwe- 
 gian sits upon a 
 knapsack colored like 
 
 f IT 
 
 an alligator, his leather breeches polished as a razor- 
 strap, and his hair gone to seed. There, an Indian with 
 his capillary midnight flowing down each side of his ole- 
 aginous face, as if he had ambushed in a horse's tail and 
 forgot his body was in sight. 
 
 Yonder, a pair of Saxons just escaped from a band- 
 box, fit for the shady side of Broadway, but not for the 
 long trail. 
 
 Now, an Englishman in tweed, and sensible shoes with 
 
 soles as thick as a shortcake, an inevitable white hat, and 
 
 a vest that nobody would think of asking him to " pull 
 
 down," for a little more waistcoat, and pantaloons could 
 
 2 '
 
 IT. KKTWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 go out of fashion. Then, a girl with a portfolio in a 
 >tr;il>. \vlio means to be "a chiel amang us takin' notes," 
 wln'ii she ought to be using her bright eyes and 'giving 
 " Faber No. 2 " a blessed rest. 
 
 The Depot bubbles and boils like a caldron. The 
 engine backs, clanging down with a cloud and a rush. 
 People climb on and climb off the laden cars crazier 
 than ever. They are giving old ladies a lift from behind. 
 They are tugging up carpet-bags like cats with their la>i 
 kittens. They are all colors with excitement and hurry. 
 It strikes you queerly that everybody is going, and no- 
 body is staying. The demon of unrest is the reigning 
 king. "Long live the king!" for life is motion. Still 
 life is death's first cousin. A Babel of trunks is surging 
 toward the baggage-cars. Trucks are piled like drome- 
 daries. There's the Saratoga that might be lived in if 
 it only had a chimney, and the iron-bound chest of the 
 mistletoe-bough tragedy, and the dapper satchel as sleek 
 and black as a wet mink, and the little brindled hair- 
 trunk with its brazen lettering of nail-heads, and the 
 canvas sack as rusty as an elephant. And so they tum- 
 ble aboard with an infinite jingle of checks; an acrobatic, 
 jolly troop, the heart's delight of the trunk-makers. You 
 see your own property, bought, new for the occasion, 
 rolling over and over corner-wise like a possessed por- 
 poise. Alas, for any pigments or unguents or dilutions 
 or perfumes that may break loose in that somerset, and 
 make colored maps of the five continents upon your 
 wedding vest or your snowy wrapper. Last, the leathern 
 purses of the United States Mail fly from the red wagons 
 like chaff from a fanning-mill. The engine's steam and 
 impatience are blown off in a whistle together. It spits
 
 "SET SAIL." 27 
 
 spitefully on one side and the other, like a schoolboy out 
 of the corners of his mouth. 
 
 And amid the whirl of the Maelstrom for if Nor- 
 way has none, at least Omaha has one there are only 
 two living things that are quiet and serene. The one is 
 a youthful descendant of Ham, with a heel like the head 
 of a clawhammer five claws instead of a pair lying 
 on a truck upon a stomach that, like an angleworm's, 
 pervades the whole physical man, and the descendant 
 turned up at both ends, like a rampant mud-turtle, his 
 mouth full of ivory and his eyes round with content. 
 
 The other is the " last man" not Montgomery's, but 
 an earlier product that man in gray, in a silk cap, and 
 taking lazy whiffs at a cigar that has about crumbled to 
 ashes. He is as calm as the Sphinx, but neither so grand 
 nor so grim. He is going to San Francisco when the 
 train goes, and he patiently bides his time. He is an old 
 traveler, and watches with an amused eye the human 
 vortex. He has seen it before at Gibraltar, at Canton, 
 and now at Omaha. 
 
 At last the conductor gives the word "All aboard!" 
 signals the engineer who has been leaning with his head 
 over his shoulder, the bell lurches from side to side with 
 a clang, your last man gives his cigar a careless toss and 
 swings himself upon the rear platform, and the train 
 with its black banners and white flung aloft pulls out, 
 and we are off for the plains and the deserts, and the 
 gorges and the mountains, and the Western sea.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 
 
 IF a man cannot stay at home, traveling in a Pullman 
 palace car is the most like staying there of any- 
 thing in the world. It takes about an hour to get set- 
 tled in a train bound for a five days' voyage, and some 
 people never do. See the man across the way. He has 
 turned that carpet-bag over and over like a flapjack, 
 and set it before him as a Christian does the law of the 
 Lord, and had it under his feet, and tried to hang it up 
 somewhere. It is as restless as a San Francisco flea. And 
 then his overcoat has been folded with each side out, and 
 his blanket vexes him, and his hat is an affliction, and 
 he is a nephew-in-law of Martha, who was " troubled 
 about many things." There is a sort of solar-system 
 genius about some men in the adjustment of their rail- 
 way belongings that is pleasant to see: everything with 
 a sort of gravitation to it; all at hand and nothing in 
 the way. 
 
 When people leave Omaha for the West they usually 
 have eyes for nothing but the scenery. There was one 
 man in our car who kept his nose in a book, like a pig's 
 in a trough, and he had never traveled the route, and 
 he was a tourist! An asylum for idiots ought to seem 
 like home to him! 
 
 The sun was borrowed from an Easter-day. The air
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 29 
 
 is transparent. The willows show the green. The mean- 
 der of emerald on the hillsides paints the route of the 
 water-courses. We are overtaking the Spring. Behind 
 us, Winter was begging at the door. The trees were as 
 dumb as an obelisk. Around us are tokens of May and 
 whispers of June. You are turning into a cuckoo Lo- 
 gan's cuckoo; not General Logan, of the Boys in Blue, 
 nor Logan, the last of his race, who used dolefully to 
 say in the declamation of our boyhood, " not a drop of my 
 blood flows in the veins of any living creature," but Logan 
 the poet, who apostrophized the bird, " Companion of the 
 Spring," and said: 
 
 " Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green, 
 .- f Thy eky is ever clear, 
 
 There is no sadness in thy song, 
 No winter in thy year!" 
 
 We strike the bottom lands of Nebraska, as rich as 
 Egypt. We are following the trail of Lewis and Clark, 
 for here is a stream they christened Papilion, from the 
 clouds of butterflies, those " winged flowers " that blos- 
 somed in the air as they went. The men are gone, but 
 the breath of a name remains. Sixty miles from Omaha, 
 and no sign of wilderness. Towns, farms, rural homes 
 I confess to a covert feeling of disappointment. I expected 
 to be knocked in the head with the hammer of admiration 
 upon the anvil of sublimity right away. We have entered 
 the great Valley of the Platte, the old highway of the 
 emigrants, who paid fearful toll as they went. The world 
 widens out into one of the grandest plains you ever be- 
 held, and in the midst of it, lying flat as a whipped 
 spaniel, is the Platte, a river that burrows sometimes 
 like a prairie dog, and runs under ground like a mole,
 
 80 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 and sometimes broadens into a sea that can neither be 
 forded or navigated a river as lawless as the Bedouins. 
 It would not be so much of a misnomer to rechristen it 
 tin- F/itf. And the thread of a train moves through this 
 magnificent hall for hundreds of miles, with its sweeps 
 of green and its touches of russet grass here and there, 
 as if flashes of sunshine had rusted thereon in wet weather. 
 Herds of cattle freckle the distance. An Indian village 
 of smoky tents is pitched beside the track, and the occu- 
 pants are all out, from the caliper-legged old grizzly to 
 the bead-eyed papoose sprouting behind a squaw from 
 " the fearful hollow " of his mother's dingy blanket. They 
 are here to get the wreck of the lunch-baskets flung from 
 the windows of the eastward trains. The chemistry of 
 civilization has bleached some of them. It is a village 
 of beggars. 
 
 Clouds fly. low in the Valley of the Platte, and thun- 
 der-storms have the right of way. It was wearing toward 
 sundown when great leaden clouds with white edges 
 showed in the route of the train. They looked like a 
 solid wall with irregular seams of mortar, built up from 
 earth to heaven. Then the wind came out of the wall, 
 and the careening cars hugged the left-hand rail, and the 
 hail played tattoo upon the dim windows, and the engine 
 "slowed," for we were running in the teeth of the storm, 
 and darkness fell down on the Valley like a mantle. The 
 lightning hung all about in tangled skeins, like Spanish 
 moss from the live-oaks, and played like shuttles of fire 
 between heaven and earth, carrying threads of white and 
 red, as if it were weaving a garment of destruction 
 There were evidently but two travelers in the Valley. 
 the storm and the train. And the thunder did not go
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 31 
 
 lowing and bellowing about like the bulls of Bashan, as 
 it does among the Catskills and the Cumberlands, but it 
 crashed short and sharp, like shotted guns, that have a 
 meaning to them, and not like blank cartridges, " full of 
 sound and fury, signifying nothing." The scene was sub- 
 lime. The pant of the engine and the grind of the car- 
 wheels were inaudible. We were traversing a battle- 
 field. It was crash, rattle and flash. The " thunder-drum 
 of heaven " must have had a drum-major to beat the long- 
 roll that day. 
 
 There was a young lady in our car, California-born, who 
 was returning home from an Eastern visit. She had never 
 heard the thunder nor seen the lightning in all her life. 
 She had lived in a cloudless land of everlasting serenity. 
 The pedal-bass of the skies and the opening and shutting 
 of the doors up aloft filled her with alarm, and when 
 the storm died down to great fitful sighs, the lightest 
 heart in all the train was her own. 
 
 We had hoped to see a prairie-fire somewhere on the 
 way, if only it would not harm any body or thing one 
 of those flying artilleries of flame that sweep the plains in 
 close order from rim to rim of the round world, but we 
 were only indulged with a rehearsal. Just before the 
 storm a fringe of fire showed in the Northwest, like an 
 arc of the horizon in flames. It was as if Day, getting 
 ready for bed, had trimmed it with a valance of fire; but 
 it was "out," like Shakspeare's "brief candle," under the 
 weight of the tempest. 
 
 We go to supper at Grand Island in sheets, like so 
 many unbound books, albeit they were sheets of rain, and 
 it was pleasant to get back 'to the lighted car, with its 
 homelike groups and its summer hum of talk. Prepara-
 
 32 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 tions for going to bed are in order. Sofas turn couches, 
 and couches alcoves. The lean man shelves himself as a 
 saber is slipped into its scabbard. The fat man, condemned 
 to the upper berth, is pulling himself up the side as an 
 awkward bear boards a boat. There is a flitting of female 
 shapes behind the restless curtains; one bulge in the crim- 
 son and the woman is unbuttoning her shoes; another 
 bulge and she says, " Good-by, proud world, I'm going 
 home," and she turns her back upon us and bounces into 
 bed "to sleep, perchance to dream." 
 
 The steady dank-it-e-clank of the wheels grows plain 
 in the silence, like the roar below the dam of a village 
 mill at night. There is something wonderfully sedative 
 about the regular motion of the Overland Train. Its reg- 
 ular twenty and twenty-two miles an hour are as restful 
 as a lullaby. There is no fatigue about it. The nervous 
 dashes of a devil's-darning-needle of a train are as catch- 
 ing as the whooping-cough. They make you nervous also. 
 As twenty-two miles is to forty-five miles, so is one worry 
 to the other, is the .Kule-of-Three of the road. 
 
 It is not usual for anybody to get up in the morning 
 higher than he went to bed at night, but if you sleep 
 from Grand Island and supper to Sidney and breakfast, 
 you will have slept yourself more than two thousand feet 
 higher than the sea level when you gave that pillow its 
 last double and fell asleep. 
 
 The morning is splendid, and everybody is on the 
 alert. "Prairie dogs!" cries some watchful lookout, and 
 every window frames as many eager faces as it will hold. 
 And there, to be sure, they are; the fat, rollicking, sandy 
 dogs, as big as exaggerated rats, but with tails of their 
 own. They sit up straight as tenpins and watch the
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 33 
 
 train. Their fore paws hang down from the wrists in a 
 deprecating, mock-solemn way, as if they had just washed 
 their hands of you, and said, "There they are; more of 
 them; jogging along to California." They fling up a pair 
 of heels and dive into their holes. They appear as much 
 at home o'n one end as the other. Travelers say they 
 bark at the trains, but they didn't bark at ours, unless 
 they "roared us gently." Soon there is another cry of 
 "Antelope!" and again the car is in commotion. There 
 the graceful fellows are, showing the white feather behind, 
 as they dash off a little way, then turn and look at us with 
 lifted head, then bound down the little hollows and out 
 of sight. Prairie dogs and antelopes, in their native land, 
 were better than two consolidated menageries at the East. 
 To the tame passengers of the party, whereof this writer 
 was one, there was a wilderness flavor about it quite 
 strange and delightful. But there was a couple on board, 
 a British lion and his mate, that never ventured an eye on 
 the picture. They were 
 Bible people, for " their 
 
 strength was in sitting > . . f 
 
 still," and in keeping still 
 withal. The lion parted 
 his hair in the middle, and 
 his eyebrows were arched 
 into the very Gothic of 
 superciliousness. Escaped 
 from the sound of Bow 
 Bells, he was a cockney at 
 large, and of all poultry 
 an exclusive cockney is the cheapest. The figure is a 
 little mixed, but then there was a gallinaceous strain in
 
 :>4 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 liis leonine veins. Together they made about as lively a 
 lirure df beings for the general company as a couple of 
 mummies direct from the pyramid of Cephren would have 
 l>een L respect the noble, hearty Briton of Motherland; I 
 pray always that peace may dwell in her palaces but the 
 lien, in his best estate, is apt to fall off a little in the 
 hinder quarters. His front view is the grander view, but 
 when those quarters are finished out before with the brow 
 and bearing of a snob, it becomes an unendurable animal 
 whose ancestors never would have been admitted into 
 the Ark. 
 
 There is a mightier lift to the land. The bluffs and 
 peaks begin to rise in the distance. The horizon is scol- 
 loped around as if some cabinet-maker had tried to dove- 
 tail earth and sky together. To eyes that have looked 
 restfully upon the rank green pastures of the East, these 
 billowy sweeps of tawny landscape seem just the grazing 
 that Pharaoh's lean kine starved upon, but they are really 
 in about the finest grass country in America. Watch 
 those dots on the hillsides at the right. They are sheep, 
 and there are thousands if there is so much as one 
 "Mary's little lamb." Those spots on the distant left, 
 like swarms of bees, will develop, under the field-glass, 
 into herds of "the cattle upon a thousand hills." 
 
 We are pulling up the world, and away to the North, 
 like thunder-heads at anchor, rise the sullen ranges of 
 the Black Hills, a glimpse or two of surly Alps. The 
 first snow-shed is in sight. It looks like an old rope- 
 walk slipped down the mountain on a land-slide, and we 
 rumble through it while the unglazed windows wink day- 
 light at us in a sinister way that is new, but not nice. 
 
 The first glimpse of Winter watching the world from
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 35 
 
 the crest of Colorado is a poem. There he stands in 
 the clear Southwest, calm and motionless as Orion. Long's 
 Peak is in sight! It seems near enough for a neighbor. 
 It is eighty miles away. Its crown of snow is as serenely 
 white in the sunshine as if there had been a coronation 
 this very morning, and it had freshly fallen from the 
 fingers of the Lord, and the height made King of the 
 Silver State, the Centennial child of the Republic. 
 
 They say I shall see grander mountains, but that 
 day and that scene will be bright in my memory as the 
 hour and the picture of perfect purity and peace. 
 
 I think of other eyes than mine weary eyes that 
 brightened as they caught sight of that December in 
 the sky. I think of the caravans of the long ago; of 
 the heroes of the trail; of the oxen that swung slowly 
 from side to side in their yokes, as if, like pendulums, 
 they would never advance; of the days they traveled 
 toward the Peak that never seemed to grow nearer, like 
 a star in far heaven. And I see at the right of the 
 train the old trail they wore, and the years vanish away, 
 and the camp-fires of the cactus and grass are twinkling 
 again, and I lie down beside them under the sky that 
 is naked and strange, and I hear the cayote's wild cry 
 and the alarms of the night. 
 
 An untraveled man's idea of a mountain is of a tre- 
 mendous, heaven-kissing surge of rock, earth and snow, 
 rolling up at once from the dull plain like a tenth wave 
 of a breaker, and fairly taking your breath away. But 
 a mountain range grows upon you gradually. It some- 
 how gets under your feet before you know it, until the 
 tingling sweep of the light air startles you with the 
 truth that you are above the world.
 
 86 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 Here is an apparent plain, but in twenty miles you 
 begin to encounter the globe's rough weather again. The 
 tandem engines, panting and pulling together like a per- 
 fect match, labor up the Black Hills. The dimples of 
 valleys are green as emeralds. The rugged heights are 
 tumbled thick with gray granite, and sprinkled with 
 dwarfs of pines that stand timidly about as if at a loss 
 what to do next. A round eight thousand feet above 
 the sea, where water boils with slight provocation, and 
 you begin to feel a little as if you had swallowed a bal- 
 loon just as they made ready to inflate it, and the pro- 
 cess went on, and you are at Sherman. It is the highest 
 altitude the engine reaches between the' two oceans. 
 Strange that the skill of a civil engineer can teach a 
 locomotive how to fly without wings; can wile it up by 
 zigzags and spirals along the craggy heights and through 
 the air, fairly defrauding the attraction of gravitation 
 out of its just due. 
 
 The train halted, and everybody disembarked, much as 
 Noah's live cargo might havo done on Ararat. We 
 wanted to set foot on the solid ground at high tide like 
 the sea, but we all discovered that it took a great deal of 
 air to do a little breathing with. Nothing was disdained 
 for a souvenir. Pebbles that little David would have 
 despised were picked up and pocketed, and one of the 
 party, more fortunate than the rest it was the writer's 
 alter ego found a dainty little horseshoe on that tip- top 
 of railroad things in North America, and bore it cheer- 
 fully away for doesn't it make us witch and wizard 
 proof? We accepted it as a good omen, but who wore 
 it? Perhaps the winged horse, Pegasus, made a landing 
 there and cast a shoe if he was ever shod. Sherman
 
 FROM VALLEY TO MOUNTAIN. 
 
 37 
 
 was named after the brilliant General who marched to 
 the Sea. 
 
 Beyond the hemlock shadows of the spruce pine and 
 the scraggy ridges, where giants played "jack-stones" 
 when giants were, seventy miles away to the South, glit- 
 ters Pike's Peak, whose name was inked across many a 
 canvas-covered wain in the old time, and whose cold and 
 deathless light has kindled ardor in many a toiler's tired 
 heart. Long's Peak, to the west of it, and three days' 
 journey off as the mules go, is near us still.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON. 
 
 TO get away from great mountains in white cloaks is 
 about as difficult as to escape from the fixed stars. 
 We travel all day with ridges of snow on our left, bil- 
 lowing away into magnificent ocean scenery, as if the 
 Arctic had been lashed into foaming fury, and then frozen 
 to death with all its icebergs, drifts and cafions imperish- 
 able as adamant. They were thirty miles away, yet so 
 distinct and clear-cut against the blue, so palpably pres- 
 ent as seen through air that might blow on the plains 
 of Heaven unforbidden, that almost anybody on the train 
 fancied he could walk near enough to make a snowball 
 before breakfast! This mountain atmosphere is a perpet- 
 ual illusion. Among these gorges are those graceful cats 
 with the long stride, to whom men are mice, the moun- 
 tain lions you will see a pair of them caged at the 
 next station and here are those huge but rather amia- 
 ble and aromatic brutes, the cinnamon bears, the blondes 
 among the bruins. 
 
 The train works its way between the Black Hills and 
 the Rockies, and you half fancy, as you watch the silent 
 plunge-down of their shaggy sides, and the gloomy gorges, 
 and the inaccessible crags, that the grizzlies must have 
 been born of mountains, not of bears. You can hardly 
 realize that those monstrous dromedaries of hills, those
 
 WONDEBLAND TO BUGLE CA^ON. 39 
 
 stone mastodons lying about, with streaks of Winter here 
 and there, really belong to the backbone of the continent. 
 
 Among those sombre hills the thunders have their 
 nests, and when the broods come off, as they do sometimes, 
 five at once, the flapping of their wings is something to 
 be remembered. Think of five thunder-storms let loose in 
 the air together, all distinctly outlined like men-of-war! 
 
 Nature has its compensations, and so you are not sur- 
 prised to know that rainbows are about two fingers 
 broader here than they are in the East, and the colors 
 deeper and brighter. There is no lack of material for 
 making those gorgeous old seals of the covenant. But I 
 did not see enough ribbon of a bow to make a girl's 
 necktie, nor hear thunder enough to stock a Fourth- of- 
 July oration. 
 
 Before setting out for the Golden Coast, I thought a 
 young earthquake would be pleasant to write about, and 
 there is the Bohemian instinct. I have changed my mind. 
 People who are acquainted with them tell me that no 
 novice needs an introduction when he experiences one of 
 those planetary ague-thrills. He knows it as well as if 
 he had been rocked in the same cradle and brought up 
 with an earthquake all his life. It jars his ideas of 
 earthly stability all to pieces. Who is it says that the 
 globe is swung by a golden chain out from the throne 
 of God, and that sometimes a careless angel on some 
 errand bound, just touches that chain with the tip of his 
 long wings, and it vibrates through all its links, and so 
 we have the little shiver men call earthquake? I fancy 
 that writer regarded the phenomenon through the long- 
 range telescope of sentimental poetry. "Let us have 
 peace."
 
 40 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 The tribes and nations of bright-hued flowers every- 
 where are wonderful to behold. No chasm so dark, no 
 mountain so rude, that these fearless children of Eden 
 are not there. They smile back at you with their quaint 
 faces from rugged spots where a Canada thistle would 
 have a tug for its life. They ring blue-bells at you. 
 They salute you with whole belfries of pink and purple 
 chimes. They swing in delicate necklaces from grim 
 rocks. They flare like little flames in unexpected places. 
 You see old favorites of the household magnified and 
 glorified almost beyond recognition. It is as if a poor 
 little aster should full like the moon and be a dahlia. 
 The inmates of the Eastern conservatories are running 
 about wild, like children freed from school. And it does 
 not look effeminate to see a broad-breasted, wrinkled 
 rock with a live posy in its button-hole. I think every 
 human bosom, however rude and rough, has some sweet 
 little flower of thought or memory or affection that it 
 wears and cherishes, though no man knows it. Let us 
 have charity. 
 
 Hark! There is nothing to hear! The engines run 
 as still as your grandmother's little wheel with her foot 
 on the treadle. The tandem team is holding its breath 
 a little. It is not exactly facilis est descensus Arerni, but 
 in plain talk we are going down hill. We are making for 
 the Laramie Plains. They open out before us into four 
 thousand square miles of wild pasture. They sweep from 
 the Black Hills to the range of the Medicine Bow. 
 Where are your Kohinoors, your " mountains of light," 
 now? Yonder are the gorgeous Sultans, the Diamond 
 Peaks cut by the great Lapidary of the Universe. And 
 yet they may be tents, those radiant cones, pitched by
 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON. 41 
 
 celestial shepherds on that lofty height. Did ever earthly 
 pastures have such regal watch and ward? See there, 
 away beyond the jeweled encampment, where the Snowy 
 Range lifts into the bright air, as if it were a ghostly 
 echo of the Diamond Peaks at hand. 
 
 All the country is rich in mineral wealth as a thou- 
 sand government mints. The Bank of England, "the Old 
 Lady of Threadneedle street," could lay the very founda- 
 tions of her building upon a specie basis should she move 
 it hither. Those suspicious holes far up the mountain sides 
 and away down in the valleys, with their chronic yawn 
 of darkness, are not the burrows of bears nor the dens 
 of beclawed and bewhiskered creatures that make night 
 hideous with complaint. They are the entrances to mines 
 of gold, silver, copper, lead and cinnabar. Cinnabar is 
 the red-faced mother of white quicksilver, but she has a 
 ruddy daughter that inherits the family complexion. You 
 have seen her on sweeter kissing places than these rude 
 mountain heights. She shows at times upon a woman's 
 cheek, and her name is Vermilion. 
 
 You see all along, ruined castles, solitary towers, tri- 
 umphal columns, dismantled battlements, broken arches, 
 some red as with perpetual sunset, and some gray with 
 the grime of uncounted years. At the mouth of that 
 cafion, far up the crags, stands a Gibraltar of desolation, 
 a speechless city where no smokes pillar to the skies, no 
 wheels jar the rocky streets, no banners float from min- 
 aret or dome. It is the city of No-man's-land. Its 
 builders are the volcanic blacksmiths. How the forges 
 roared and glowed to make it! Its sculpture is the work 
 of frost and rain and time. It has been founded a thou- 
 sand years.
 
 42 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 The coarse bunches of buffalo grass dot the plains here 
 and there. A mule would carry his ears at " trail arms " 
 if it were offered him for breakfast, but it is sweet to 
 the raspy tongues of the beef-cattle of the wilderness. It 
 is the buffalo's correlative: first the grass, then the beast. 
 Where are the stately herds, fronted like the curly-headed 
 god of wine or the Numidian lion, that in columns myriad 
 strong trampled out ground-thunder as they marched? 
 Gone to gratify the greed of lawless butchers who turned 
 a ton of beef into a vulture's dinner for the sake of a 
 dozen pounds of tongue. Cowper's man who shot the 
 trembling hare was a prince to such fellows. 
 
 Sage-brush has the freedom of the desert, highland 
 and lowland. You see its clumps of green everywhere. 
 It is the rank seasoning, the surumer-?msavory for the 
 sage-hen. Though without beauty, you regard it with 
 affection. It was the fuel of the old pioneers. It has 
 cooked the buffalo-steak, and boiled the coffee, and baked 
 the wheaten cake. Women with babes in their arms 
 have gathered around the sage-brush fire in the chill 
 nights and thanked God. Strange, indeed, that the more 
 we receive the more ungrateful we grow! And there are 
 the cactuses, the green pincushions of the desert, the points 
 all ready to the heedless hand. 
 
 By Point of Rocks, where stand the columns of the 
 American Parthenon, four hundred feet high, a thousand 
 feet in the air, and grander than any Grecian ruin that 
 ever crumbled; over Green river, lighted up by its fine 
 green shale McAdam as an old pasture brightens in May; 
 through clefts where rock and ridge run riot; sunless 
 gorges where crags frown down upon the train from the 
 top of the sky; swinging from cliff to cliff, as spiders float
 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON. 43 
 
 on their flying bridges ; booming through snow-sheds, with 
 their flitter of sunshine; on tracks looped around upon 
 themselves like love-knots for Vulcan; railroad above you 
 and railroad below; by giants' clubs, and bishops' mitres, 
 and Cleopatra's Needles, and Pompey's Pillars, and mono- 
 liths of Pyramids older than Cheops, founded with a 
 breath and builded with a touch; up on the swell and 
 down in the trough of the boisterous old mountains, as 
 a ship rides the sea; past the mouths of grim canons that 
 swallow the day; through tunnels of midnight that never 
 knew dawn; cutting flourish and capital, swings the long, 
 supple train. 
 
 Through a gate in the Wahsatch Mountains we plunge 
 into Echo Canon and Utah together; Utah, the tenth sov- 
 ereignty on our route from New York; Utah, Turkey the 
 second, and the land of harems much as if you should 
 bind up a leaf or two of the Koran with the books of 
 Moses a region where the Scripture is reversed, and one 
 man lays hold of seven women. You look to see the red 
 fez and the Turkish veil, and you do see dwellings with 
 a row of front doors that seem to have been added, one 
 after another, as the new brides came into the family; 
 a door a bride, which is pretty much all the adoration 
 any of the poor creatures get. 
 
 Yonder, in a row before a house with three doors, sit 
 a man and three women, and around them a group of 
 children of assorted lengths, like the strings of David's 
 harp. Here, for the first time, I see a Mormon store with 
 its sanctimonious sign. It almost seems to talk through 
 its nose at you with the twang that often issues from an 
 empty head and seldom from a full heart, and it whines 
 these words: "Holiness to the Lord" here the picture
 
 44 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 of an eye "Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution," 
 and the profits of it are the prophet's, and his name was 
 Brigham Young. 
 
 The train is just swinging around a bold battlement 
 of rock, beside which Sir Christopher Wren's St. Paul's 
 would be nothing more than the sexton's cottage. You 
 see at its base a well-worn wagon-road, that looks enough 
 like a bit of an old New York thoroughfare to be an emi- 
 grant. It is the stage road and trail of the elder time. 
 You catch a glimpse of irregular heaps of stone piled 
 upon the edge of the precipice five hundred feet aloft. 
 They are the solid shot of the Mormon artillery. Twenty 
 years ago, when the United States troops were marching 
 to Salt Lake, with inquisitive bayonets, curious to know 
 whether the Federal Government included the heathen- 
 dom as well as the Christendom of the United States, 
 they must pass by that rugged throat of a road, and 
 under the frown of the mountain, and here the Nauvoo 
 Legion proposed to crush them with a tempest of rock, 
 but the army halted by the way and the ammunition 
 remains. 
 
 The train seems hopelessly bewildered. It makes for 
 a mountain wall eight hundred feet high, just doubles it 
 by a hand's-breadth, sweeps around a curve, plunges into 
 a gorge that is so narrow you think it must strangle 
 itself if it swallows the train; red rocks everywhere huge 
 as great thunder-clouds touched by the sun, and big 
 enough for the kernel of such a baby planet as Mars; 
 monuments, graven by the winds; terraces, along whose 
 mighty steps the sun goes up to bed; the glow of his 
 crimson sandal on the topmost stair, and it is twilight in 
 the valley and midnight in the gorge. It is a fearful
 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON. 45 
 
 nightmare of stone giants. Weird witches in gray groups, 
 whispering together in the hollow winds of the moun- 
 tains; witches' bottles for high revel: Egyptian tombs; 
 fortresses that can never be stormed. Yonder, a thousand 
 years ago, they were launching a ship six hundred feet 
 high in the air, but it holds fast to "the ways" still! 
 Its stately red bow carries a cedar at the fore for a flag. 
 It is a craft without an admiral. Some day an earth- 
 quake out of business will turn shipwright, put a shoulder 
 to the hull, and leviathan will be seen no more. 
 
 If you want to reduce yourself to a sort of human 
 duodecimo, handy to carry in the pocket, you can effect 
 the abridgment as you make the plunge with bated breath 
 into the canon. It is a splendid day, old Herbert's sky 
 above and a Titanic carnival below. Echo Canon, where 
 voices answer voice from cliff and wall and chasm, and 
 talk all around the jagged and gnarled and crushed hori- 
 zon. Just the place for Tennyson's bugle; 
 
 "The splendor falls 011 castle walls, 
 And snowy summits old in story" 
 
 and here is Castle Rock, with its red lintels and its gray 
 arches, and the mighty Cathedral that no man has builded, 
 with its sculptures and its towers; and yonder is the 
 Pulpit, ten thousand tons of stone heaved up a hundred 
 feet into the air, where Gog and Magog might stand and 
 be pigmies; and there are the white lifts of the Wah- 
 satch Range: 
 
 "The long light shakes across the lakes, 
 
 And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
 Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
 Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 
 
 "O, hark, O hear! how thin and clear, 
 And thinner, clearer, farther going!
 
 46 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 O, sweet nnd fur from cliff and scar 
 
 The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! 
 Blow, let us hear the purple gleus replying: 
 Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying " 
 
 and here are glen and cliff, and here is Elfland. The 
 engine gives a single scream, and airy trains are answer- 
 ing from crag and crown, from gulf and rock, as if 
 engines had turned eagles and taken wing from a hun- 
 dred mountain eyries. 
 
 " O love, they die in yon rich sky," 
 
 and here is that same sky above us, affluent with the 
 flowing gold of the afternoon sun; an unenvious sky that 
 lets you look through into heaven itself; an ethereal 
 azure like the glance of a blue-eyed angel; 
 
 "They faint on hill, on field, on river;" 
 
 and here beside us the Weber River rolls rejoicing, and 
 the hills are not casting their everlasting shadows upon 
 us like the veil of the temple that could not be rent. 
 And then come the last lines, that, thanks unto God, are 
 true the world over: 
 
 ''Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
 
 And grow forever and forever. 
 Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
 And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying." 
 
 Let the lyric be known as the Song of Echo Canon. In 
 my memory the twain will be always one. 
 
 This being afraid of a motionless rock when there is 
 no more danger of its falling than there is of the moon 
 crushing your hat in, is a new feeling, and yet it is an 
 emotion akin to fear. So vast, so rude, so planetary in 
 magnitude, such ghostly and ghastly and unreal shapes, 
 you fancy some enchantment holds strange beings locked
 
 WONDERLAND TO BUGLE CANON. 47 
 
 in stone; that, some day, there will be a general jail- 
 delivery, and the spell will be broken. To me, as I re- 
 member that valley of illusions, they seem the monstrous 
 petrifications of a wild and riotous imagination. I am 
 glad I saw that huge stoneyard of the gods, but I have 
 no desire to dwell in it. To have heard a bugle blown 
 in it would have been something to remember, but I 
 should have wanted it to sound " boots and saddles," and 
 then be the first man to mount. To carry those boulders 
 about mentally requires an atlas of a fancy, so I will 
 just leave them where I found them, monuments to the 
 memory of patient centuries and imperishable power. 
 Weber Eiver and the Pacific train are both doing their 
 best to get out of these enchanted mountains, but they 
 stand before us, and close up behind us, and draw in 
 around us, and offer us gorges to hide in, and water to 
 drown in, and gulfs to tumble in, and anvils to dash our 
 brains out, and there! the escape is accomplished! The 
 rugged canon vanishes like a dream of the night, and a 
 valley of surpassing loveliness, sweet as the vale of Ras- 
 selas or Avoca, a little parlor of the Lord, guarded by 
 gentle mountains and carpeted with the fine tapestry of 
 cultivation, and dwelt in by peace, has taken us in. 
 Have you ever, when walking along a woodland path in 
 a summer night, discovered a dewdrop at your feet by 
 the light of a star that shone in it? So is that valley, 
 fallen amid those scenes of ruggedness and wonder.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 
 
 E Thousand-mile Tree!'' So cried everybody. 
 -*- There it stands beside the track, with its arras in 
 their evergreen sleeves spread wide in perennial greeting. 
 A thousand miles from Omaha and twenty-five hundred 
 from New York. No stately tree with a Mariposa ambi- 
 tion, yet, after the Oak of the Charter and the Elm of 
 the Treaty, few on the continent are worthier of historic 
 fame. Forty years ago, defended round about by two 
 thousand miles of wilderness, a wilderness as broad as 
 the face of the moon at the full ! To-day it is almost 
 like the tree of knowledge, " in the midst of the garden." 
 The articulate lightnings run to and fro upon their sin- 
 gle rail, almost within reach of its arms, from Ocean to 
 Ocean. Hamlets and cities make the transit of the wil- 
 derness like Venus crossing the sun. Millions of eyes 
 shall look upon it with a sentiment of affection. It stands 
 in its vigorous life for the Thousandth Milepost on the 
 route of Empire. 
 
 Why so many grand things in the. Far West go to 
 the Devil by default nobody knows. I think it high 
 time he proved his title. Thus, " Devil's Gate " names a 
 Gothic pass in the cleft mountains, through which, be- 
 tween rocky portals lifting up and up to the snow-line, 
 the mad and crested waters of the Weber River plunge 
 in tumultuous crowds. They seem a forlorn hope storm- 
 
 48
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 49 
 
 ing some tremendous Ticonderoga. " The Devil's Slide " 
 is a Druidical raceway seven hundred feet up on the 
 mountain side, twelve feet wide, pitched at an angle of 
 fifty degrees, and dry as a powder-house. It is bounded 
 by parallel blocks of granite lifted upon their edges, and 
 projecting from the mountain from twenty to forty feet. 
 A ponderous piece of work, but who was the stone-mason? 
 Instead of being a slide, it seems to me about such a 
 
 THOUSAND-MILE TREE. 
 
 pig-trough as Cedric the Saxon would have hewn, in the 
 days before "hog" turned "pork" and "calf" was "veal." 
 If it belongs to the Devil at all, it must have been the 
 identical table-ware he pitched after the herd of possessed 
 swine that ran down into the sea, and here it lies high 
 and dry even until this day. 
 
 At Ogden we take the Silver Palace-cars of the Cen- 
 tral Pacific. Let nobody forget what toil, danger, priva- 
 tion, death and clear grit it cost to bring the twenty 
 miles an hour within human possibilities; that everything 
 from a pound of powder and a pickax to a railroad bar 
 3
 
 50 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 followed the track of the whalers of old Nantucket and 
 doubled Cape Horn; a hundred miles and a lift of seven 
 thousand feet heavenward; a hundred miles and not a drop 
 to drink for engine or engineer; a thousand miles and 
 hardly an Anglo-Saxon dweller. Two thousand feet of 
 solid granite barred the way upon the mountain top 
 where eagles were at home. The Chinese Wall was a toy 
 beside it. It could neither be surmounted nor doubled, 
 and so they tunneled what looks like a bank-swallow's 
 hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was 
 expended in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a 
 thoroughfare to fight half the battles of the Revolution. 
 It was in its time the topmost triumph of engineering 
 nerve and skill in all the world. It stitched the East and 
 the West lovingly together, and who shall say that we are 
 not a United States? 
 
 The level rays of the setting sun glorified the scene 
 as we steamed out a few miles, until at our left, a sea of 
 glass, lay the Great Salt Lake, a fishless sea, and as full 
 of things in " um " as an old time Water Cure used to 
 be of isms, with its calcium, magnesium and sodium. A 
 man cannot drown in it comfortably. No decent bird 
 will swim in it. If Jonah, the runaway minister, had 
 been pitched into it, that lake would have tumbled him 
 ashore before he had time to take lodgings at the sign of 
 " The Whale." It absolutely rejects everything but some- 
 thing in " wm." It ought to be the " dulce domum " for 
 Lot's wife. Everybody passes Promontory Point in the 
 night, the memorable spot where, on that May day, 1869, 
 the East and the West were wedded, and the blows that 
 sent home the spikes of silver and gold securing the last 
 rail in the laurel were repeated by lightning at Wash-
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 51 
 
 ington and San Francisco, in the length of a heart-beat; 
 blow for blow, from the Potomac to the Pacific. Think 
 of echo answering echo through a sweep of more than 
 three thousand miles! All in all, after the signing of the 
 Declaration of Independence, it was the most impressive 
 and thoughtful ceremony that ever graced the continent. 
 It was electric with the spirit of the New Era. 
 
 Tally Eleven! We are in Nevada, eleventh sovereignty 
 from the Atlantic seaboard. We have struck the Great 
 American Desert. I wish I could give, with a few brief 
 touches, the scenery of the spreads of utter desolation, 
 strangely relieved by glimpses of valleys of clover that 
 smell of home, and conjure up the little buglers of the 
 dear East, that in their black and buff trimmed uniforms 
 and their rapiers in their coat-tail pockets, used to cam- 
 paign it over the fields of white clover where we all 
 went Maying; sights of little islands of bright greenery, 
 as at Humboldt, as much the gift of irrigation as Egypt 
 is of the Nile; great everlasting clouds of mountains, 
 tipped as to their upper edges with snow as with an eter- 
 nal dawn; patches ghastly white with alkali as if earth 
 were a leper, and yellow with sulphur as if the brimstone 
 fire of the Cities of the Plain had been raining here, and 
 salt had been sown and the ground accursed forever. 
 
 Tumble in upon these alkali plains a few myriads of 
 the buffalo that have been wantonly slaughtered, and 
 with the steady fire of the unwinking, unrelenting, lid- 
 less sun that glares down upon the dismal scene as if 
 he would like to stare it out of existence, you would 
 have the most stupendous soap-factory in the universe, to 
 which the establishments of the Colgates and the Babbitts 
 would be as insignificant as the little inverted conical
 
 52 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 leach of our grandmothers, wherewith they did all the 
 lyeing the dear simple souls were guilty of. 
 
 Fancy an immense batch of wheaten dough hundreds 
 of miles across, wet up, perhaps, before Columbus discov- 
 ered America, permeating and discoloring and tumefying 
 in the sun through five centuries; strown with careless 
 handfuls of salt and sprinkles of mustard, and garnished, 
 like the mouth of a roasted pig, with parsley-looking 
 sage-brush, and tufts of withered grass, and rusty cac- 
 tuses, and veins of dead water sluggish as postprandial 
 serpents; and whiffs of hot steam from fissures in the 
 unseemly and ill-omened mass; a corpse of a planet wel- 
 tering and sweltering, with whom gentle Time has not 
 yet begun; no May to quicken it, no June to glorify it, 
 no Autumn to gild it. 
 
 Then fancy all this in a huge basin wnose red and 
 rusty rim, broken and melted out of shape, you see here 
 and there in the northern horizon fancy all this, and 
 yet there is nothing but "the sight of the eyes" that 
 will " affect the heart." Miners and mountain men have 
 been lavishly liberal in giving things to the Devil. If 
 he must have something in the way of estate, give him 
 this bleached batch of desert dough for his own con- 
 sumption ! 
 
 You will take notice that in this description of waste 
 places I have not mentioned Tadmor nor t alluded to 
 Thebes. A man cannot very well be reminded of things 
 he never saw; neither have I quoted anything from Os- 
 sian about lonely foxes and disconsolate thistles waving 
 in the wind. All these things have been mentioned once 
 or twice, and the American Desert needs no foreign im- 
 portations of Fingals to make it poetically horrible.
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 53 
 
 You nave gone over it in a palace. You have eaten 
 from tables that would be banquets in the great centres 
 of civilization. You have slept upon a pleasant couch 
 "with none to molest or make you afraid." You have 
 drank water tinkling with ice like the chime of sleigh- 
 bells in a winter night water brought from mountains 
 fifteen, twenty, thirty miles away. You have retired 
 without weariness and risen without anxiety. Now, I 
 want you to remember the men and women without 
 whom there would be nothing worth seeing that could 
 be seen, on the Pacific Slope; the men and women who 
 crossed these plains in wagons whose very wheels clamored 
 for water as they creaked; those men and women who 
 toiled on through this realm of disaster, parched, fam- 
 ished, dying yet not despairing, to whom every day was 
 only another child of the Summer Solstice, and who said 
 every morning, "Would to God it were night!" Some 
 made their graves by the way, and some lived to look 
 upon the Pacific sea, and I want you to believe that in 
 our time there has never been a sturdier manhood, 
 a ruggeder resolution, a more Miles Standish sort of 
 courage, than marked the career of the pioneers to the 
 West. 
 
 Tally Twelve! Twelfth empire from the Atlantic. 
 Less than three hundred miles from the Pacific. We are 
 in California the old Spanish land of the fiery furnace. 
 The turbaned mountains rise to the right, and the dark 
 cedars and pines in long lines single file, like Knight 
 Templars in circular cloaks, seem marching up the 
 heights. 
 
 You feel, somehow, that though not a pine-needle 
 vibrates, the wind must be " blowing great guns," so to
 
 54 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 ruffle up and chafe the solid world. Across ravines that 
 sink away to China like a man falling in a nightmare, 
 and then the swooning chasms suddenly swell to cliffs 
 and heights gloomy with evergreens and bright with 
 Decembers that never come to Christmas, the train pur- 
 sues its assured way like a comet. It circles and swoops 
 and soars and vibrates like a sea-eagle when the storm 
 is abroad. Mingled feelings of awe, admiration and sub- 
 limity possess you. Sensations of flying, falling, climbing, 
 dying, master you. The sun is just rising over your left 
 shoulder. It touches up the peaks and towers of ten 
 thousand feet, till they seem altars glowing to the glory 
 of the great God. You hold your breath as you dart out 
 over the gulfs, with their dizzy samphire heights and 
 depths. You exult as you ride over a swell. Going up, 
 you expand. Coming down, you shrink like the kernel of 
 a last year's filbert. We are in the Sierras Nevada! The 
 teeth of the glittering saws with their silver steel of ever- 
 lasting frost cut their way up through the blue air up 
 to the snow-line up to the angel-line between two 
 worlds. 
 
 It was day an instant ago, and now it is dark night. 
 The train has burrowed in a tunnel to escape the speech- 
 less magnificence. It is roaring through the snow-sheds. 
 It is rumbling over the bridges. Who shall say to these 
 breakers of sod and billows of rock, " Peace, be still ! " 
 and the tempest shall be stayed and the globe shall be 
 at rest? 
 
 And all at once a snow-storm drives over your head. 
 The air is gray with the slanting lines of the crazy, 
 sleety drift. Some mountain gale that never touches the 
 lower world, but, like a stormy petrel, is forever on the
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN". 
 
 55 
 
 wing and never making land, has caught off the white 
 caps and turbans from some ambitious peaks, and whipped 
 them whirling through the air. You clap your hands 
 like a boy, whose sled has been hanging by the ears in 
 the woodshed all summer, at his sight of the first snow. 
 But the howling, drifting storm goes by, and out flares 
 the sun, and the cliffs are crimson and silver. 
 
 You think you have climbed to the crown of the 
 world, but lo, there, as if broke loose from the chains of 
 gravitation, "Alps on Alps arise." Look away on and on, 
 at the white undulations to the uttermost verge of vision, 
 as if a flock of white-plumed mountains had taken wing 
 and flown away. 
 
 A chaos of summers and winters and days and nights 
 and calms and storms is tumbled into these gulches and 
 gorges and- rugged seams of scars. Rocks are poised 
 midway gulfward that awaken a pair of perpetual won- 
 ders: how they ever came to stop, and how they ever got 
 under way. With such momentum they never should 
 have halted: with such inertia they never should have
 
 56 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 started. Great trees lie head-downward in the gulfs. 
 Shouting torrents leap up at rocky walls as if they meant 
 to climb them. See these herds of broad-backed recum- 
 bent hills around us, lying down like elephants to be 
 laden. See the bales of rocks and the howdahs cf crags 
 heaped upon them. They are John Milton's own beasts 
 of burden, when he said, " elephants endorsed with towers," 
 and such an endorsement should make anybody's note 
 good for a million. 
 
 Do you remember the old covered bridges that used 
 to stand with their feet in the streams like cows in mid- 
 summer, and had little windows all along for the fitful 
 checkers of light? Imagine those bridges grown to giants, 
 from five hundred to two thousand feet long, and strong 
 at, a fort. Imagine some of them bent into immense curves 
 that, as you enter, dwindle away in the distance like the 
 inside of a mighty powder-horn, and then lay forty-five 
 miles of them zigzag up and down the Sierras and the 
 Rockies, and wherever the snow drifts wildest and deep- 
 est, and you have the snow-sheds of the mountains, with- 
 out which the cloudy pantings of the engines would be 
 as powerless as the breath of a singing sparrow. They 
 are just bridges the other side up. They are made to lift 
 the white winter and shoulder the avalanche. But you 
 can hardly tell how provoking they are sometimes, when 
 they clip off the prospect as a pair of shears snips a 
 thread, just as a love of a valley or a dread of a canon, 
 or something deeper or grander or higher or ruder catches 
 your eye, " Out, brief candle ! " and your sight is extin- 
 guished in a snow-shed. But why complain amid these 
 wonders because you have to wink! 
 
 Summit Station is reached, with its sky parlors, and
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 57 
 
 grand Mount Lincoln, from whose summit it is two miles 
 " plumb down " to the city by the sea, and we have a 
 mile and a half of it to swoop. The two engines begin 
 to talk a little. One says, "Brakes!" and the other, "All 
 right!" "Take a rest!" says the leader. "Done!" says 
 the wheeler, and they just let go their nervous breaths, 
 and respire as gently as a pair of twin infants. The 
 brakes grasp the wheels like a gigantic thumb and finger, 
 the engines hold back in the breeching, but down we go, 
 into the hollows of the mountains; along craggy spines, 
 as angry as a porcupine's and narrow as the way to 
 glory; out upon breezy hills red as fields of battle; off 
 upon Dariens of isthmuses that inspire a feeling that 
 wings will be next in order. Sparks fly from the trucks 
 like fiery fountains from the knife-grinder's wheel, there 
 is a sullen gride of expostulation beneath the cars, but 
 down we go. Should the water freeze in the engines' 
 stomachs, " the law that swings worlds would whirl the 
 train through ! " 
 
 The country looks as if a herd of mastodons with 
 swinish curiosity had been turned loose to root it inside 
 out. It is the search for gold. Mountains have been 
 rummaged like so many potato-hills. When pickax and 
 powder and cradles fail, and the " wash-bowl on my 
 knee " becomes what Celestial John talks broken China 
 then as yonder! Do you see those streams of water 
 playing from iron pipes upon the red hill's broad side? 
 They are bombarding it with water, and washing it all 
 away. The six-inch batteries throw water about as solid 
 under the pressure as cannon-shot. A blow from it would 
 kill you as quick as the club of Hercules. Boulders 
 dance about in it like kernels in a corn-popper. I give
 
 58 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 the earnest artillerymen a toast: "Success to the douche! 
 The heavier the nugget the lighter the heart." 
 
 The train is swaying from side to side along 'the 
 ridges, like a swift skater upon a lake. It is four 
 thousand feet above the sea. It shoulders the mountains 
 to the right and left. It swings around this one, and 
 doubles back upon that one like a hunted fox, and drives 
 bows-on at another like a mad ship. Verily, it is the 
 world's high-tide! You have been watching a surly old 
 giant ahead. There is no climbing him, nor routing 
 him, nor piercing him; but the engines run right on as 
 if they didn't see him. Everybody wears an air of 
 anxious expectancy. We know we are nearing the spot 
 where they let men down the precipice by ropes from 
 the mountain-top, like so many gatherers of samphire, 
 and they nicked and niched a foothold in the dizzy wall, 
 and carved a shelf like the ledge of a curved mantel- 
 piece, and scared away the eagles to let the train swing 
 round. 
 
 The mountains at our left begin to stand off, as if to 
 get a good view of the catastrophe. The broad canons 
 dwindle to galleries and alcoves, with the depth and the 
 distance You look down upon the top of a forest, upon 
 a strange spectacle. It resembles a green and crinkled 
 sea full of little scalloped billows, as if it had been 
 overlaid with shells shading out from richest emerald to 
 lightest green. Jfature is making ready for something. 
 The road grows narrower and wilder. It ends in empty 
 air There is nothing beyond but the blue! And yet 
 the engines pull stolidly on. 
 
 Down brakes! We have reached the edge of the 
 world, and beyond is the empyrean! You stand upon
 
 THE DESERT, THE DEVIL AND CAPE HORN. 59 
 
 the platform. The engines are out of sight. They are 
 gone. The train doubles the headland, halts upon the 
 frontlet of Cape Horn! clings to the face of the preci- 
 pice like a swallow's-nest. 
 
 The Grand Canon is beneath you. It opens out as 
 with visible motion. The sun sweeps aslant the valley 
 
 .like a driving rain of g"old, and strikes the side of the 
 mountain a thousand feet from the base. There, twenty- 
 five hundred feet sheer down, and that means almost a 
 half mile of precipice, flows in placid beauty the Ameri- 
 can River. You venture to the nervous verge. You see 
 two parallel hair-lines in the bottom of the valley. They 
 are the rails of a narrow-gauge railroad. You see bushes 
 that are trees, martin-boxes that are houses, broidered 
 handkerchiefs that are gardens, checked counterpanes that 
 
 .are fields, cattle that are cats, sheep that are prairie- 
 dogs, sparrows that are poultry. You look away into the 
 unfloored chambers of mid-air with a pained thought that 
 the world has escaped you, has gone down like a setting 
 star, has died and left you alive ! Then you can say with 
 John Keats upon a far different scene, when he opened 
 Chapman's magnificent edition of Homer: 
 
 "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken; 
 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific, and all his men 
 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise 
 Silent upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 Queer people travel. Returning to the car I saw a 
 broad-gauge Teuton, with the complacent bovine expres- 
 sion of a ruminating cow, eating a musical Bologna 
 lunch of " linked sweetness long drawn out," and I said 
 to*him, "Did you see Cape Horn?" "Cabe Hornd? Vat
 
 60 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 is she?" One of those difficult old-bachelor questions 
 that will never find anybody to answer. Everything in 
 this world but sausage and lager 
 
 "A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FROM WINTER TO SUMMER. 
 
 A CALIFORNIA train is a human museum. Here now, 
 JL.L. upon ours, are the stray Governor of Virginia, an 
 army captain going to his company in Arizona, a trader 
 from the Sandwich Islands, a woman from New Zealand, 
 a clergyman in search of a pastorate, an invalid looking 
 for health, a pair of snobs, Mongolians with tails depend- 
 ing from between their ears, the proprietor of an Oregon 
 salmon-fishery, a gold-digger, a man whose children were 
 born in Canton while his wife lived in San Francisco, 
 some Shoshones and dogs in the baggage car, and a fam- 
 ily who ate by the day, breakfasted, dined, supped, lunched, 
 picked and nibbled without benefit of clergy. It would 
 take a chaplain in full work just to "say grace" for 
 that party. Victuals and death were alike to them. Both 
 had "all seasons for their own." They ate straight across 
 the continent. If they continue to make grist-mills of 
 themselves, crape for that family will be in order at an 
 early day. 
 
 At some station in the Desert where we halted for 
 water, there sat, huddled upon the platform, some Sho- 
 shone Indians, about as gaudy and filthy as dirt and red 
 blankets could make them, and papooses near enough 
 like little images of Hindoo gods to be cousins to the 
 whole mythology. One of the squaws, with an ashen 
 
 61
 
 62 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 gray face and white hair, a forehead like a hawk's, an 
 eye like a lizard's, an arm like a ganglion of fiddle- 
 strings, and a claw of a hand, looked to be a hundred 
 years old, and her voice was as hollow as if she had an 
 inverted kettle for the roof of her mouth, and talked 
 under it. Near by, on the same platform, an English- 
 man was pacing to and fro, putting down his well-shod 
 feet as if he had taken the country in the name of the 
 queen of 'ome and the Empress of India. A Frenchman, 
 in a round cap with a tassel to it, stands with the wind 
 astern and his brow bent like a meditative Bonaparte, 
 trying to light a twisted roll of paper in the hollow of 
 his hand. Two Chinamen in blue, broad-sleeved blouses, 
 their shiny black cues swinging behind like bell-ropes in 
 mourning, stood near, shying their ebony almonds at the 
 whole scene. On the track, waiting for a shake of the 
 bridle, waited the engine, breathing a little louder now 
 and then, like a man turning over in his sleep. 
 
 Regarded with thoughtful eyes, the grouping was 
 impressive. Here in the Desert, as far away from blue 
 water as they could possibly get, standing upon the same 
 hundred square feet of platform, were Mongolians from 
 the pagoda-land of " the drowsy East," aborigines from 
 the heart of the continent, men from Fatherland and 
 Motherland, and the lands of the lilies, the storks, the 
 long nights, the broad days and the interrogation-points, 
 all met and mingled here for a little minute, and the 
 cause of it is the wonder of it. There it stands upon the 
 track. It is number 110. It is the locomotive, at once 
 a beast of burden, a royal charger, a civilizer and a cir- 
 cuit-rider. 
 
 At stations throughout the way, in places unutterably
 
 FEOM WINTER TO SUMMER. 63 
 
 dismal and desolate, wagon roads, stage routes and horse 
 trails make for the mountains. No man not gifted with 
 geological eyes, which means a pair of organs that can 
 see through millstones before they are picked, would ever 
 suspect what floods of disguised mercury, what billions 
 of blue-pills and boluses, what caverns of honest silver, 
 what spangled nuggets of clean gold, what Pactolian sands, 
 what wealth of agates of price, what life-giving springs, 
 what Cracows of salt, what fountains of soda, lurk in all 
 impossible places, as if the planet had gone into bank- 
 ruptcy and hidden its assets in these regions. You pass 
 through a place without knowing it whence seventy-five 
 millions of pure gold have been taken, with a two-mill- 
 ion income to-day, and the world is there still not so 
 much as an eyelet-hole through it. 
 
 Unless you have been made cosmopolitan by travel, 
 the Overland Voyage gives you a lonely far-away feeling 
 it will puzzle you to describe. The air is so clear, the 
 horizon so broad, the world so strange, the tune of life 
 keyed two or three notes higher than you ever played it 
 before, that you catch yourself wishing for a lounge on 
 some old native sod where, if your name is not " McGregor," 
 at least it is Richard when he was "himself again," beneath 
 a rock maple that gives you sugar in April, shade in 
 June and beauty in October. 
 
 We have rounded Cape Horn! Grand Pacific, good 
 morn! Rattling down the ridges, bringing up with a 
 sweep in niches of valleys, like a four-in-hand before 
 stage-houses with room for the cut of a figure 8. A 
 half-mile down and one hundred and ninety-three out, 
 and there is The Golden Gate. We are plunging into a 
 carnival of flowers. They hold up their dear little faces
 
 64 . BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 everywhere to be admired, and why not? Snow-storm in 
 the morning and midsummer at noon! Read over the 
 old stories of the Arabian Nights, and believe every word 
 of them. The chaparral of little evergreen oaks shows 
 bright along the hills, and the air is sweet with the white 
 blossoms. You pass settlements of a tree that has orig- 
 inal ways of its own. Like the Manzanita tree, it does 
 not grow in Webster's Dictionary. It is the Madrona. It 
 has no fall of the leaf, but it strips oft' its clothes like 
 a boy bound for a swim, for it slips out of its old bark 
 and is fitted to a new suit. It borrowed the fashion from 
 the Garden of Eden. Its wood is crooked enough for a 
 politician, and it has as much the look of a foreign land 
 as a date-palm. Many trees and shrubs in California are 
 evergreen, though there is nothing about them to make 
 you suspect it, and the reason they are, is that the 
 weather is so wonderful from January to December they 
 never know the proper time to shed their leaves, and so 
 "wear green on their coats" and never change their 
 clothes all the year round! 
 
 The valley of the Sacramento is a garden, and Sacra- 
 mento is the " urbs in horto " of it. It is our first glimpse 
 of the Celestial Flowery Kingdom of the Christian world. 
 Roses never die. Rare exotics that we at the East cher- 
 ish as if they were infants, and bend over like new-made 
 fathers and mothers, are distrained for conservatoiy rent 
 and turned out-of-doors. The white dome of the State 
 Capitol rises like a pale planet above the green surges 
 and waving banners of semi-tropic luxuriance a planet 
 with one mansion, the Temple of Liberty, and one inhab- 
 itant, an unprotected female, Power's Genius of California,
 
 FROM WINTER TO SUMMER. 65 
 
 and the blue dome of Mount Diablo lifts in the far 
 horizon. 
 
 These are the spacious parlors with their seventeen 
 thousand square miles, and all carpeted with beauty from 
 the silver Sierras " at the eastward of Eden " to the thin 
 apparition of the Coast Range in the West. The orange 
 blossoms are abroad, and the fruit is as golden as the three 
 pawnbroker planets, and as green as a walnut in its first 
 round-about, all at once. They that dwell here sit under 
 their own vine and fig-tree, and the palm waves over 
 their heads. The stately orchards of live-oaks, in their 
 chapeaux of green, stand at ease in the picture, to coun- 
 terfeit the royal parks of Old England. The Sacramento 
 River wanders down on the way to the sea, while cloudlets 
 of steam and flicker of flag and of wing mark the route. 
 Taste and wealth have conspired with Nature. There is 
 no fairer landscape between the Tropics. 
 
 And what a blessed country for Don Quixote! How 
 " the knight of the sorrowful countenance " would brighten 
 at sight of California! The Castilian Alexander sighing 
 for more windmills to conquer, would have them here. 
 Every well-ordered family may keep a dog, a cat, or some 
 children, but the windmill is sure to be the pet of the 
 household. It is an odd sight, fifty windmills in a broad 
 landscape, all going at once; some painted green as dragon- 
 flies, some red, white and blue; these with hoods, those 
 with their arms bare to the shoulder; facing different 
 ways, looking square at you, or askance, or not seeing 
 you at all. Insects out of some gigantic entomology, 
 whirling their antennae at you, to beckon you or frighten 
 you, or halt you or start you. Then with a little whisk 
 of wind, one will whip about like a cat and front the
 
 66 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 other way. Some of them have tails like a fish. Others, 
 in the rolling country, have long slender bodies of wooden 
 aqueducts that suggest devil's-darning-needles, only they 
 have long, thin legs, sometimes four, and then a dozen, 
 just to keep their dropsical bodies at the right altitude 
 for irrigation. These fellows turn their heads like hooded 
 owls on a perch, and it would not astonish you much to 
 see any of them develop wings and fly away, if only it 
 was not your way. They are as thick in California as 
 the little white and yellow butterflies around a wet place 
 in the road. It would have puzzled Agassiz to classify 
 them, but they are the home-made rain-storms of the Cal- 
 ifornia summer. Look at those coppery hills yonder, dried 
 to tinder point. See the dust, fine as Scotch mist, rolling 
 around the wagons and enveloping them in clouds as 
 was old jEneas. But how brilliant the green fields, how 
 new the flowers, how glittering the trees, how rank the 
 corn fresh from 
 the baptism of the 
 precious bugs of 
 windmills. How 
 sweet the air as 
 with the smell of 
 rain! This is a 
 rainless land from 
 spring to fall, but like other Ships of State it runs by 
 wind and water all the same. 
 
 You plunge into a tunnel a thousand feet long, are 
 gone -a minute in a kind of short night with noon at one 
 end of it and sunshine at the other. You emerge into 
 valley after valley with picturesque halls between, the 
 mountains keeping company as you go. Diablo draws
 
 FKOM WINTER TO SUMMER. 67 
 
 near, gashed with gorges, his robe of mountain blue folded 
 away, and the cowl of a ghostly Franciscan flung over his 
 head. The salt sea breezes, such as Dibdin could have 
 sung a rousing song about, come rushing up to welcome 
 the stranger from the alkali air and the shimmering heat 
 and the giddy heights and the everlasting snow. There 
 are pansies by the way, broad-faced like little moons 
 pansies, and that's for thought of thankfulness. There are 
 poppies scattered abroad poppies, and that's for forget- 
 fulness of all things that weary. There are wild lupins, 
 true blue, and buttercups that take you back to child- 
 hood and home pastures, where the reflected tint of the 
 floral gold upon your chin told the secret of your love, 
 not of beauty but of butter. At last! the bay of San 
 Francisco, with its gems of islands, its waters doubling 
 the flags of all nations; the Queen, with her face to the 
 Golden Gate, and her hair wet with the breath of the 
 Pacific. It is seven miles to San Francisco. Say it is 
 one of the finest voyages you ever made. Thank God 
 you are yet in the United States. There floats the twin 
 of the flag you left three thousand miles ago. The denser, 
 richer, more gracious air conies to you like a familiar 
 friend. 
 
 But let us not ride high-horses to bed. The sun is 
 sliding down into what you never saw it drown in before 
 the Pacific Ocean. The last time you saw it meet with 
 a like calamity, it fell into Lake Michigan. It has strength 
 enough left to show what manner of person you are: as 
 dusty as an elephant, a smutch on your face, a kink in 
 your hat, and your ungloved hand shaded like some smoky 
 work of the old masters. Let us leave scenery for soap, 
 and beauty for broom brushes.
 
 68 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 The car is an aggravated case of the First of May. 
 Everybody is making ready to move. Leather valises, cot- 
 ton trunks, carpet-bags of the style that it takes two to 
 show the pattern, are repacked, the wrecks and bones of 
 departed luncheons tossed from the window, cloaks and 
 wraps shaken out of wrinkle, traveling-caps wadded and 
 pocketed. Dusky porters are alert, whisking half dollars 
 from coats with a wisp-broom, leaving the dust undis- 
 turbed, as if they thought California tourists carried the 
 sacred ashes of their forefathers about with them. A 
 woman is polishing her front hair with a licked finger. 
 One mother is washing a family of three with Desde- 
 mona's handkerchief. 
 
 Everybody is going everywhere, one to Puget Sound, 
 that looked very dim and other- worldish on the old maps; 
 another to the Halls of the Montezumas, where the grand 
 old hero of Lundy's Lane went; a third to Japan. You 
 open upon a new page of the geography, and hear more 
 names of far-away regions in an hour than you ever 
 heard in your life. They talk in a neighborly way of up 
 the coast to Oregon, and down the coast to Callao, and 
 over to Honolulu, as if it were just across a four-rod 
 street. 
 
 The train runs through Oakland, a lovely live-oak 
 suburb of San Francisco, thirty thousand strong, where 
 a thousand houses a year has been the recent rate of 
 growth. You catch a glimpse of the tropical glories. You 
 see hedges of fuchsias and walls of scarlet geraniums 
 twelve feet high, blazing like the Burning Bush. You 
 see walls of evergreen carved into arches and alcoves 
 and gateways, as if they were green marble. You see 
 the California quail in his neat uniform and his quaint
 
 FROM WINTER TO SUMMER. 69 
 
 crest running about the door-yards of the city, as domes- 
 tic as witty-legged bantams. You see bits of velvet lawn 
 as emerald as emeralds, and intense as green fire. You 
 see calla-lilies as large and pure as holy chalices. You 
 see a cloud of foliage on a distant hill as blue as if a bit 
 of clear sky had fallen down upon green trees and dyed 
 them the color of heaven. It is the blue guin-tree. You 
 see Australian shrubbery that never knows it is an exile. 
 
 At last you go to sea on the cars. You run three 
 miles out in salt water upon a pier. You are in the 
 midst of ocean-going ships, and saucy tugs, and fishing- 
 smacks and rollicking jolly-boats. Men-of-war lie quiet 
 with cables in their noses and anchors at the end of 
 them, nasal charms of gigantic dimensions. You see the 
 double-headed fowl of the imperial standard of the Czar, 
 and the tricolor of France, and the tawny moon of Japan 
 in a brick-red sky, and the calico-pattern of the Hawaiian 
 Islands, and the splendid flag you were born under, more 
 beautiful than all. You hear fitful blasts of music from 
 the distant decks. You see lines of ports like the finger- 
 holes of flutes along the ships' sides. They are the bur- 
 rows of thunder and lightning. 
 
 The little company here separate. Good-byes and 
 good wishes interchange, and we part with a figurative 
 " cup of kindness " at our lips, and few, I dare say, left 
 the train who could not have joined in the sad old song 
 of the "Three Friends:" 
 
 " And in fancy's wide domain 
 There we all shall meet again.*' 
 
 I do not know Pythias, and I did not see Damon on the 
 train, but I do know that just in proportion as men be- 
 come truly human, they grow frank and friendly.
 
 70 r.i.T\vi:i:x THE GATES. 
 
 You board one of the grandest ferry-boats in Ameri- 
 can waters. /,'/ ('<t]n'fnn. vast parlors on a bridge that 
 crosses while you sit still, whereon four thousand people 
 can be borne without a battle of the bones. Everything 
 is sweet and tidy as a nice little bride's first house-keep- 
 ing. I recall the old steamer "Nile," Commodore Blake, 
 that used to sail the fresh- water seas, with a pair of 
 golden lizards at the bow for a figure-head. It was 
 thought grand with its owlish saloons and its stuffy 
 cabins, and its hissings and sputterings and rumblings of 
 hot water everywhere, and its perpetual palsy like an 
 irritable volcano with an uneasy digestion. You could 
 have put the habitable part of that Nile, crocodiles and 
 all, into El Capitals back parlor. 
 
 You left the runners and hackmen of the East in four- 
 and-twenty-blackbird rows, all their mouths wide open 
 like young robins, all hailing you together in gusts of 
 Northeasters, to ride somewhere and stay somewhere, and 
 they are always " going right up." Here, they meet you 
 on the boat. They accost you confidentially, they touch 
 you in a velvety way on the elbow with "kerridge, sir?" 
 They are " the mildest-mannered men that ever " asked 
 a fare. I am not sure I quite like it. I take a kind 
 of malicious satisfaction in watching the howling der- 
 vishes, as they stand just the other side "the dead line" 
 of the curbstone or the rope railings, and howl. It is 
 delicious to think they cannot get at me and pull me 
 apart, and rend my baggage, and send me around to 
 various hotels a morsel apiece, even as they feed lions 
 and variegated cats in a menagerie.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO STREET SCENES. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO! Crowned with palaces and dense 
 with business houses as a redwood forest, six cur- 
 rents of life surging along her congested streets that jar 
 with the endless thunder of commerce, four on the side- 
 walks and two on the cars; the ships of the world cour- 
 tesying through the Golden Gate and sailing into the 
 Bay like stately old dowagers entering the reception-room 
 of a monarch. And then remember it was a desert of 
 sand-dunes, strown with seaweed and white bones, and 
 desolate as an old African Gold Coast thirty years ago, a 
 time hardly long enough for a century-plant to get a 
 good ready for blossoming, and now more than three 
 hundred thousand strong, it faces both ways and con- 
 fronts the world! 
 
 The stranger's home is the hotel. There are lions and 
 lions, and no lack of them in San Francisco. The Grand, 
 The Lick, The Occidental, The Russ, The Baldwin, The 
 Cosmopolitan, The Commercial and 'The Palace. With 
 the affectionate republican weakness for simplicity you 
 go direct to The Palace. It is a house full of houses, a 
 kind of architectural Surinam toad that swallows un- 
 counted broods of little toads to keep them out of danger. 
 The comparison is not appetizing, but it will serve. Five 
 such hotels would have bought all Florida at the time of 
 
 71
 
 72 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 the Government purchase. It has seven stories, seven 
 hundred and fifty rooms, eighteen acres of floor, and has 
 broken out with bay windows till it is knobby as an old- 
 ta>liioned bank- vault door, and full of eyes as a field 
 of potatoes, or a peacock's tail, or an overwhelming 
 affirmative. If you wish to hide from an enemy who 
 dwells at The Palace, the safest thing to do is to board 
 there yourself. There is slight chance of your ever meet- 
 ing him. The table, attendance, rooms and prices are all 
 first class, but why a man is any happier on a vulgar 
 fraction of eighteen acres, than on some cozy corner of 
 an acre and a half, and why he is willing to pay more 
 for it, is, perhaps, a vulgar question concerning a vulgar 
 fraction. It is annexing a State to get a bedroom. 
 
 A certain degree of elegance comports with the com- 
 fort of the average man, but the elegance may attain an 
 uneasy magnificence, as when the luxurious pile of the 
 carpet you tread yields to your foot, resembling a leis- 
 urely stroll on an immense feather bed, or as when a 
 man unused to dwelling in a huge looking-glass, is con- 
 stantly hastening to meet himself and be introduced to 
 himself and be polite to himself. This incessant meeting 
 with the identical stranger gets monotonous after awhile, 
 particularly if you wish to room alone. 
 
 The bay-window order of architecture prevails to a 
 degree that suggests the proverb about glass houses and 
 geological restlessness. It is the first feature the stranger 
 observes, and it gives the city a Venetian-balconied look, 
 hinting moons, flutes and troubadours. You think of 
 Juliet when that love-lorn fanatic of a Romeo declared, 
 in defiance of rhetoric and gender, " and Juliet is the 
 sun! "
 
 SAtf FRAtfCISCO STREET SCENES. 73 
 
 You have only to look at the stately fronts mile after 
 mile, with all the windows gracefully leaping out of 
 themselves, to read the weather record. They are an 
 almanac far more accurate than Poor Richard's. The sun 
 of California is a power. There is nothing to dim a fire- 
 fly between the king and the Californian. But the win- 
 dows tell you the people crave the sun. " Pleasant, shady 
 rooms to let," says the New York Herald. " Bright, 
 cheerful apartments, with the sun all day," says the San 
 Francisco Chronicle, though how that can be is not quite 
 so plain, unless you live in a lighthouse. The reason for 
 this love of basking is a misty reason for one so clear. 
 The fogs from the Pacific seldom rise a thousand feet, 
 and the Coast Range of mountains, lifting its magnificent 
 sea-wall, defends the land from these ghosts of the ocean. 
 But they icill drive down the Coast and change through 
 the Golden Gate like clouds of shadowy horse, and roll 
 over the city and sweep up the valleys. Again you learn 
 from the street fronts that demoralized glaciers never 
 bombard the city with hail-storms, else there would be 
 "a wreck of matter" and a crash of glass. You look in 
 vain for one of the old tallow chandler's fixed bayonets. 
 No thunder-clouds open ports upon San Francisco, and 
 you rejoice that you have escaped the lightning-rod man, 
 who with the book-canvasser and the insurance agent, 
 constitutes the three deadly sins against a quiet life. 
 
 Street life in San Francisco is a kaleidoscope that is 
 never at rest. There is nothing like it on the continent. 
 The flower-stands with their gorgeous* array, the open- 
 fronted alcoves fairly heaped with floral beauty, as if Eve 
 had just moved in and had no time to arrange her 
 "things"; the glimpses of bright color from leaf and 
 4
 
 74 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 blossom, that catch the eye everywhere, in mansion, shop 
 and shed; the bits of bouquets you see on draymen's 
 coat-collars, and blooming from broken cups in tinkers' 
 dens and smithies; smiling in churches in prayer-time; 
 adorning brides with genuine orange blossoms; strewing 
 coffins with everlasting June. 
 
 Then the fruit-stands that are never out of sight, with 
 the mosaics of beauty spread upon them, as if Pomona's 
 own self presided at the board. Rubies of tomatoes, plums 
 and cherries; varnished apples from Oregon, as cheeky 
 and ruddy as "a fine ould Irish gentleman"; pears, 
 peaches, apricots, nectarines, oranges, and those cunning 
 Lilliputs of lemons, the limes; strawberries, blackberries 
 and raspberries, that melt at a touch of your tongue; 
 fresh figs, looking like little dark leather purses, and full 
 of seeds and sugar all these grouped upon the same 
 broad table; everything from all the year round but 
 snowballs, as if the gifts of the seasons were converged, 
 like sunbeams through a lens, upon one luscious spot of 
 summer luxury and brilliance. You halt if you are not 
 hungry, for you have learned that the richest beauty is 
 not always in the flower. You find that fruit goes by 
 avoirdupois; peaches are in pounds and not in pecks; that 
 it is not much cheaper than it is three thousand miles 
 away; that your dimes have turned into "short bits," 
 your quarters into "two bits"; that three "bits" are 
 thirty-seven and a half cents, and it takes forty cents to 
 make it; that pennies are curiosities, and poor little nickels 
 nowhere; if an article is not five cents it is nothing; if 
 it is twelve cents it is fifteen. So you buy something at 
 a " bit " a bite and move on. 
 
 This is the paradise of bootblacks, the rainless-sky
 
 SAN FRANCISCO STREET SCENES. 75 
 
 weather from spring to fall rendering " a shine " a good 
 investment. These artists on leather have little wardrobes 
 of affairs set against the buildinge along the sidewalks, 
 furnished with easy-chairs and foot-rests, and often car- 
 peted and adorned with mirrors and pictures. At the 
 first glance, they remind you of the wayside niches in 
 foreign countries wherein some saintly image is enshrined, 
 but a second look, and the saint is resolved into a very 
 earthly piece of human ware, armed with brushes and 
 French polish, to make looking-glasses of your upper 
 leathers. And these Mother Hubbard's cupboards of places 
 are as good as a weather-gauge to a stranger, telling him 
 that the year is one long genial season, neither summer 
 nor winter, but the tonic of the one and the glow of the 
 other. 
 
 And there come some strolling players that are not 
 Hamlet's, to confirm the story, with their harps and fiddles 
 stripped of the green-baize jackets of more inclement 
 skies, and naked to the very bones and tendons. 
 
 You notice in the ever-moving tides of street life an 
 absence of the rainbow tints and the flickering white of 
 woman's Eastern apparel. The hues are soberer. Seldom 
 a day in a whole year that fur sacques, shawls and over- 
 coats are not in order at some hour between sunrise and 
 bed-time. It is July, but see the fur-trimmed garments 
 and the dark cloaks and the heavy veils go flitting along, 
 and the sun just emptying his quiver of golden arrows 
 all the while. 
 
 There, drawn by a span of horses, is a mill. By the 
 wheel, five feet in diameter, you would say it is a grist- 
 mill and runs by water, but the glimpse of a couple of 
 big dogs chained behind discloses the power that moves
 
 76 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 that wheel, for they travel in it without going an inch. 
 Some animals with less feet than Tray and Blanche make 
 incessant efforts to advance with a like result. Tied to a 
 post, they can travel all day without slipping the halter. 
 That mill is a huge machine for sharpening shears, scis- 
 sors, swords and chopping-knives. It has power enough 
 to put an edge on the battle-ax of young Lochinvar. 
 
 A couple of breezy voices with a touch of the fore- 
 castle in them raise a song above the din and roar and 
 sharp castanet accompaniment of iron shoe and flinty 
 street. You turn and see something that might have 
 been copied out of an old English seaport picture; a pair 
 of tall, broad, rolling sailors in neat blue, with the flat 
 tasseled caps and the neckerchief in the conventional salt- 
 water knot. Each has but a single leg to go upon, and 
 you catch yourself looking to see if the missing member 
 is not shut up like a jack-knife, which might be the thing 
 for a jack-tar; but no, it is clean gone, carried away, 
 perhaps, by a cannon-shot, or else shut together like the 
 tube of a telescope. Well, the two messmates with the 
 one pair of legs, standing in the middle of the street, 
 are singing jolly old sea-songs as salt as a mackerel, and 
 swinging about on crutch and cane as the flakes of silver 
 bits rattle down upon the pavement. Passing children 
 bring out their dots of half dimes, and hurrying passers- 
 by remember the old boys of the blue roundabout. It 
 was a pleasant little touch of kindly feeling worth the 
 time it took to see it. 
 
 You miss the trim-looking fellows in belted blue, sil- 
 ver buttoned, becapped, armed with clubs, and blazing 
 with stars as big as Venus on the breasts of their coats. 
 They are not here, but in their stead men in gray, neither
 
 SAN FRANCISCO STREET SCENES. 77 
 
 showy nor obtrusive. The streets are safe to walk in by 
 night and by day, and the city seems to a stranger to 
 govern itself. 
 
 Here comes a covered wagon emblazoned " Flying 
 Bakery" a sort of flying battery of batter. It contains 
 a table, chairs, stove, cook and driver. You step aboard, 
 and in the turn of a hand, muffins are served up to you, 
 as light as a wisp of fog and fresh from the fire. Brisk 
 little two-wheelers go darting about jolly as a jaunting- 
 car, and they are flying butteries, laden with butter in 
 rolls shaped like a fruit-can, wrapped in tissue-paper and 
 sweet as a field of red clover. Elephantine four-in-hands 
 drawing huge wagons to match, are forever going and 
 coming. Basket phaetons resembling runaway cradles are 
 working in and out amid the great crashing wains and the 
 saucy coaches and the cars of all colors, as busy as red 
 ants in a flurry, that meet and cross and run side by 
 side and swing about each other in a free-and-easy fash- 
 ion. The streets are gridironed with tracks. You see 
 thoroughfares lying up against the tall horizon, steep as 
 a house roof, but the wagons go rattling down them at 
 a reckless rate. You see a car at the foot of a hill, laden 
 with passengers, and waiting behind a platform car with 
 a lever in the middle of it, and an engineer without any 
 engine. While you wait for the horses, that platform 
 starts of its own accord, and tugs the car up that hill. 
 It looks like a piece of witchcraft. The wooden horse of 
 the Arab that went by a peg in his ear was not more 
 magical. You see another car coming down without horse 
 or hold-back. You are tempted to cry out, " The cars are 
 running away with themselves!" The traction is an end- 
 less chain beneath the track, the power a stationary engine
 
 78 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 on the top of the hill, and it draws up the cars like so 
 many buckets of passengers. Looking at the cars black 
 with people to the platforms, you say: everybody rides. 
 Working your way through the counter-currents that 
 How and eddy and whirl around the corners, you say: 
 everybody walks. Regarding both cars and pavements 
 you say: everybody rides and the rest walk. The Italian 
 fruit wagons are banging about; equestrians dashing to 
 and fro upon horses that were born free and caught with 
 a lariat wiry fellows that will gallop all day without 
 turning a hair. 
 
 Sometimes painters used to go to Gibraltar to copy 
 the costumes of far countries that set the streets in a 
 blaze; but to see nations, come to San Francisco! You 
 meet a Spaniard in a wide hat, an Italian with ink in 
 his hair, a correlative of frogs and soupe-maigre, all in a 
 minute. A California Indian in still shoes, a moon-faced 
 Mexican in partial eclipse and a sort of African by brevet, 
 a Russian with a square chin and a furry look, all in 
 three squares. You elbow South Americans, Australians, 
 New Zealanders. You accost a man who was born in 
 Brazil, who hails from Good Hope, who trades in Hono- 
 lulu. One of the great Chinese merchants with an easy 
 gait, an erect head and a boyish face, is coming around 
 the corner. A man from Calcutta is behind you. " An 
 Israelite in whom is no guile " is before you. The Scotch- 
 man is here with the high cheek bones, the blue eyes, 
 and the cutty-pipe and a word from Robby Burns in his 
 mouth. The Dutch have taken us, and the Irish, do they 
 not " thravel the round wurrld "? Of course, New-England 
 is here, and New York and the South. They are every- 
 where, but show us your Colombians and Peruvians and
 
 SAN FRANCISCO STREET SCENES. 79 
 
 Sea- Islanders, and all sorts of people from the outer 
 edges of geographies and the far borders of atlases, as 
 here. Japanese and Chinese signs grow familiar to you 
 in a week. Sclavonians and Mongolians are as thick as 
 red pepper in East India curry. It is a tremendous 
 Polyglot. 
 
 I write in the " Metropolitan Temple." It is built of 
 pine from " the wild where rolls the Oregon," of fir, of 
 sequoia, the giant redwood of California. Nothing com- 
 posing the structure is familiar to Eastern eyes. We 
 walk upon Portland stone, we drink melted ice from the 
 Sierras, we write upon a portfolio from China, on paper 
 kept in a cabinet from Japan, with a pen of California 
 gold. We step upon a mat from Central America, recline 
 upon a pillow woven of grass from the ocean, eat the 
 eggs of sea-birds with shells clouded like Egyptian mar- 
 ble, sit in the shade of an Australian tree, and swing in 
 a hammock from the Sandwich Islands. 
 
 "Stock three papers for ten cents!" is what the dart- 
 ing newsboys say to you when you land in San Francisco 
 from the Overland Ferry. The swift Mercuries of the 
 press are cleaner faced and better clothed than in the 
 East. They are not gamins in any Parisian sense. They 
 are vitalized atoms of California "stock!" and that is the 
 key-note to everything on The Coast. It is a household 
 word from the top of the Sierras to tide-water. The 
 touchy and uncertain thermometers of California Street 
 are read off in lonely ranches and in country cities. 
 Almost everybody is interested has made money, lost 
 money, hoped money, in mining stocks. He has a bulletin- 
 board on his gate-post. It is as if Wall Street were 
 lengthened and widened to take in the whole of the Em-
 
 80 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 pire State. In San Francisco they deal in the raw mate- 
 rial; bricks, bars, ingots, right from the mine; wealth in 
 the original package; in what the mines promise; in what 
 they perform. East, it is " cash down," it is " stamps." 
 West, it is " out with the coin," " down with the dust." 
 You get forty dollars in silver. There are eighty pieces; 
 forty in the right pocket, forty in the left pocket, and 
 there you are, an ass between two panniers, albeit it is a 
 silver lading. How deftly your Californian pairs out the 
 half dollars! They slip from one hand into the other as 
 the creatures went into the ark, and as if they were born 
 twins. On the Atlantic, money is as sonorous, to use old 
 President Backus's simile, as if you should make a bell of 
 a buff cap with a lamb's tail in it. On the Pacific, it is 
 jingle and ring week in and week out. You pay as you 
 go. A half dollar sheds its scales in no time, and nothing 
 is left of it but " a short bit." It looks larger to you 
 than a withered leaf of postal currency. It is more dig- 
 nified, because its gravity is greater.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO is a city where people are never 
 any more abroad than when they are at home. They 
 support three hundred and fifty Restaurants, where all 
 the delicacies and luxuries of this season or any other can 
 be obtained at prices low enough to throw a Chicago 
 caterer into bankruptcy. Not less than fifty thousand 
 people eat at Restaurants, and live in lodgings; perhaps 
 thirty thousand more at the ninety hotels and the eight 
 hundred lodging-houses and the six hundred boarding- 
 places of the city, besides a herd of five thousand that 
 drift from lunch table to lunch table, like so many cattle 
 grazing in a range. It is a Teutonic paradise, there 
 being forty-two breweries; and as for liquors, there are 
 enough to make a pretty heady punch of the Bay of San 
 Francisco, if only they should play Boston Tea-Party with 
 the stock in trade all at once, and rouse a fearful revel 
 in the sign of Pisces, the Fishes, giving an extra tumble 
 to the porpoises, and putting the sharks hors de combat. 
 They tell of " dry statistics," but here is a bit of the wet 
 variety: there are drinking-places so many, that a copper- 
 lined man can take an observation through the bottom of 
 his drained glass once a day for ten years, and not visit 
 the same place twice! 
 
 And there are two hundred and sixty bakeries, enough 
 81
 
 82 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 to make dough of a small harvest in a week. "Our daily 
 bread " is tumbled out of the ovens by the ton. Seeing 
 the fruit and vegetables everywhere, in a profusion and 
 variety before unknown, you infer that this is a gram- 
 inivorous people; but being nearly run down and made 
 meat of yourself, by uncounted butchers' four-in-hands 
 and dashing carts, a dozen times in a couple of days, and 
 learning that there are four hundred and fifty knighis 
 of the white apron, butcher-knife and cleaver, you are 
 morally certain this community is as carnivorous as a 
 Royal Bengal tiger. 
 
 And then you go to one after another of the thirteen 
 Public Markets, and there you read the whole story at a 
 glance. San Francisco is undoubtedly omnivorous. A 
 stroll through the " California," the " Washington." or the 
 '' Grand Central," will give a dyspeptic man a desire to 
 go out and hang himself. Everything edible that creeps, 
 swims, crawls, runs or flies is here. Forty-pound salmon, 
 the grand fish of the Coast, are heaped in great red slabs 
 like planks of the red sequoia; sturgeon hauled out of 
 the Bay from fifty pounds weight to four hundred; rock- 
 trout with their dappled sides; smelts of slender silver; 
 soles that look as if they grew in slices; those piscatorial 
 infants, the white-bait; calves' heads, their smooth cheeks 
 and chins clean shaven as friars. There is one now with 
 a curious Chinese smile, calf-like "and bland"; mouthfuls 
 of sparrows rolled up in their little jackets and passing 
 for reed-birds; rabbits that simulate rats; lobsters all 
 claws like a legislative bill. Here is a table that runs 
 to tongues, toes and brains. Regardless of the " R's " in 
 the names of the months, oysters are in order the year
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 83 
 
 round; clams likewise, but if they fail it is not so much 
 matter, as morsels of leather well-seasoned will do. 
 
 Shrimps you know shrimps are heaped about by 
 the bushel. They are ten-legged, long-tailed crustaceans, 
 with whiskers enough for one of Campbell's " whiskered 
 pandours." A plate of those vermin is set before you at 
 a restaurant by way of recreation, while you are wait- 
 ing for something to eat. It is all right, but how much 
 more amusing it would be to have them alive! You 
 could plague them with a stick, the precious bugs, and 
 the restaurants could use them again. Here are box ter- 
 rapins about the size 
 of the old Congres- 
 sional snuff-box, with 
 a head at one end 
 and a taper tail at ^^^^ 
 
 the other; sausages JB ^fl&^M^J^n \$ 
 -" the savory meat" jgO ^ 
 
 of the Old Testament ^^ ^^^'^ 
 
 of every color and 
 size, from chimney-black to poppy-red, and from puppy to 
 hippopotamus. Mottled and speckled and marbled and 
 freckled, they are the very mosaic of meat. There is one 
 that looks like an elephant's foot. 
 
 Everything from the gardens of the year round is 
 here. I count twenty-two varieties of vegetables upon a 
 single stand. Upon another are cocoanuts, oranges, lemons, 
 limes, melons, pineapples, plums, figs, blackberries, rasp- 
 berries, strawberries, apricots, pears, peaches, nectarines, 
 tomatoes, grapes, apples, cherries. Now add anything you 
 happen to think of, and it is there. Do you know gumbo? 
 A green, fluted, West-Indies pod, coming to a point like
 
 XI BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 a spontoon. A little persuasion turns it into soup. By 
 its name it ought to come from Guinea. Here are gor- 
 geous flowers; and beneath them cages of dogs and doves. 
 California chickens are mostly of the breed that Pharaoh 
 had when his corn-crop failed, and their corn-crops also, 
 but ducks, geese and turkeys are desirable. 
 
 "JOHN," THE HEATHEN. 
 
 You seem to be in the sign of Libra, the Scales. 
 There is John, the taper-eyed, with his blue shirt and 
 his wapsy trousers, and snubby shoes, and his black braid 
 of stub and twist, thirty thousand of him, going about 
 with a springy pole balanced upon his shoulder, and a 
 deep bushel basket swung from each end, filled with 
 " garden truck." Libra, the Scales, catches the spring of 
 that pole in his knee-joints, and goes teetering about in 
 the most outre and monkeyish manner. If you leave the 
 city and plunge into a canon, you meet John with his 
 pole and his panniers, a peripatetic pair of scales. He 
 is the only man in the world who makes a trunk of a 
 spring-pole. 
 
 John always forgets to tuck in his shirt, and if he is 
 well-to-do he wears two, white beneath and blue or black 
 without. He finishes dressing where the rest of mankind 
 begin. What would you have? He advances backward 
 and retreats forward, and falls upward and rises down- 
 ward. He is the animal man inverted, subverted, per- 
 verted, and everything but converted. Discover how the 
 world always does anything, and that is precisely the way 
 John never does it. Thus, the other day he was arrested 
 for stabbing a countryman, and where do you suppose he
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 85 
 
 struck him? Why, in the sole of his foot, and that is 
 the Chinese of it. 
 
 To me he looks as much alike as a flock of sheep. 
 Shepherds tell me they can distinguish any one in a flock 
 of a thousand by its face, but John is too much alike 
 for me. I pass him on the street, and then in a minute 
 I meet him. To be sure he has changed his shirt and 
 his shoes, but he has kept his face. He took some soiled 
 handkerchiefs of mine one day to wash, which he did 
 not return, and his name it was Foo Ling. So I went 
 out to find him. I succeeded in three minutes. I over- 
 took him, and passed him, and met him. He had those 
 little wipers-away of tears, as white and square as so 
 many satin invitations to a wedding, in his hand, in a 
 towel, in a basket, but he said he was not he, and I was 
 somebody else. It was a fearful case of mistaken identity. 
 The streets were crowded with him, but alas for Foo 
 Ling, it was fooling he was. It was one of his " ways 
 that are dark." If the devil should have his due, why 
 not John? Without him the Central Pacific road would 
 have waited completion many a long day. Without him 
 San Francisco would not be the cleanest-collared and 
 cuffed and bosomed city in America. Its inhabitants 
 are as white around the edges as the brim of a lily. 
 Neither in New York nor Chicago do you see faultless 
 linen so universal. A laborer's clothes may be out at 
 the knees or the elbows, or any other exposed point to 
 wear and tear, but he is quite sure to show a bosom 
 and collar immaculate. John is a laundry. He can wash, 
 iron, crimp and flute fit for an angel. He is handier than 
 Bridget. He is master of suds, an artist in starch, and 
 a marvel to sprinkle. You should see him do it. He
 
 80 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 takes up a mouthful of water as your horse drinks, and 
 out it plays in a spray so fine that were it a breath 
 mistier it would float away in a cloud. People have 
 unfortunate ways of putting things. They say he .s/>//s 
 on the clothes. It. is as little like it as the feathery 
 spray of a garden fountain. People visiting China, as 
 you and I will, look through the Celestial markets for 
 rats. They hunt the file-tailed rodent like Scotch terriers, 
 They expect to find him hung by the heels to a perch, 
 just as good Christians bestride that same roost with the 
 delicate and infantile hinder legs of Batrachians, which 
 are frogs, which are tadpoles, which are polliwogs, which 
 are the verdant scum called spawn. Let us play leap- 
 frog and be happy! Let us suffer him to make a bonne- 
 bouche of hen's feet while we dispose of the gizzards, and 
 serve up his bird's nests at will while we eat pinfeathery 
 squabs with not a bone in their bodies. 
 
 John is a problem that never got into Euclid. We 
 speak slightingly of him, we despise his effeminate look, 
 his insignificant stature, his shirt, his slouch, and the 
 three feet of heathenism in his back-hair. We scout him 
 altogether. But somehow he has gotten into every crack 
 and crevice of the Pacific Coast. Like an invasion of 
 ants, he is everywhere under foot. He is born into this 
 country, not one at a time, but five hundred at a birth. 
 He has made himself useful within doors and without. 
 We eat of his cookery, we wear the garments he has 
 kissed with a hot iron, we ride over the railroads he has 
 builded, and lie upon the pillow he has smoothed. Dogs 
 have been known to take to cats instead of after them, 
 but it is not the rule. Americans have been known to 
 love John, but it is seldom. The sight of him seems to
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 
 
 87 
 
 rouse something of the ugliness that lurks in almost 
 everybody. 
 
 But his position and destiny have assumed a dignity 
 that commands respect. John has gotten into Congress, 
 and inspired a virulent hatred in the breasts of thou- 
 sands. They would organize him out of existence with 
 the Anti-Coolie Societies, and the Caucasian Ordei-s, and 
 the White Leagues. But he is here, spring-poles, baskets, 
 opium, pig-tail, idols and all. He came legally. He 
 
 remains lawfully. He labors assiduously. The only gen- 
 eral sentiment of admiration he inspires is when he dies 
 and goes to China. Sensible men want some of him, 
 but not the five hundred millions behind. Those mighty 
 magnates of hot water, the railroad kings, and the mighty 
 ranchmen who cannot look upon their ranges in a day's 
 ride, and whose flocks and herds are uncounted these 
 men, these monstrous and unnatural products of the 
 Pacific Slope, want all they can get of him. They would 
 elide the true " golden mean " of American society, the
 
 88 HKTWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 white Christians who toil with their hands, and leave 
 Midases at one end of humanity and heathens and slaves 
 at the other a social state that is a libel on the age, 
 a disgrace to man and a dishonor to God. 
 
 "HOODLUM," THE CHRISTIAN? 
 
 Should a skittish horse come suddenly upon the word 
 "Hoodlum," and it looked and sounded to equine organs 
 as it looks and sounds to mine, that horse would take 
 fright and run away. You instinctively infer it names 
 some creature of the cat kind, monstrous and anomalous, 
 as if a puma should swap heads with the great horned 
 owl. The very ivord looks as if it might have a verbal 
 lair all by itself, and prowl through the unprotected 
 language by night. It is never found in a place so rep- 
 utable as Webster's Dictionary. 
 
 The thing it names is a two-footed, human, semi- 
 tropical animal, but he is neither the rowdy, the Five- 
 Poiiiter, the wharf rat, the Bowery boy or the bummer. 
 They are his congeners, but he is a creature of finer 
 grain, of hotter blood, of better breed as breeds go, and 
 infinitely more of a power. He roams San Francisco like 
 the ownerless dogs of Constantinople. He is never alone. 
 He goes in packs. He is from twelve to twenty-two 
 years of age, and seldom gets any older. He doesn't die, 
 but, like the fawn, he loses his spots. I beg pardon of 
 the fawn! 
 
 You see him, a slender, wiry, active fellow with some 
 affectation of style, a jaunty way with his hat, a saucy 
 jerk with his elbow, an alert and saucy eye; a free, let- 
 all-go stride like a panther's; a sharp-edged chin that 
 can pull out upon occasion like a wash-stand drawer;
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 89 
 
 lean in the flank and lean all over. As Christopher North 
 would say, he is " scranky." A fat Hoodlum would be 
 as great a curiosity as a plethoric greyhound. He often 
 wears good clothes, and may be the son of most respect- 
 able parents. There is about one flight of stairs below 
 him in the cellars of human degradation. He has a ready 
 tongue, a ready knife, and a hand that turns to knuckles 
 any minute. Always reckless and shameless, often des- 
 perate, tyrannical by nature, and apprenticed to the devil 
 by his own consent, he makes night hideous and darkness 
 dangerous. No roystering sailors ashore, no bullies on the 
 rampage, can compare with a pack of Hoodlums. 
 
 He is a creature impossible in any country with a 
 New England winter and the homes that are born of it. 
 He is the product of two causes: an out-of-door climate 
 where January and June are all one, and the loose, no- 
 madic life of the Restaurants. Home has neither charm 
 nor restraint for him. He eats where it chances, he sleeps 
 where "the wee sma' hours ayont the 'twal" overtake 
 him. The Chinaman is a heathen at one end of the human 
 race, the Hoodlum is a heathen at the other, and extremes 
 meet. In their knowledge of Jesus Christ they are a 
 match. Should the Hoodlums increase like the wielders 
 of joss-sticks, it would take a standing army to keep the 
 peace. A home-made heathen in a Christian land is an 
 utter heathen. 
 
 But the Hoodlum may partially atone for his damaging 
 existence, by furnishing the only check to excessive immi- 
 gration that exists. John fears him, and rumors of his 
 fame have gone back to the Flowery Kingdom. The rep- 
 resentative of " cheap labor" is the object of his malignant 
 abuse, in part, perhaps, because John will do man's work 
 4*
 
 90 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 at boys' prices, and in part, because of the devil of which 
 the Hoodlum is seized and possessed. He rings John by 
 the cue as if he were a fire-bell. He jostles him from 
 the sidewalk, robs him, and occasionally kills him, to keep 
 his hand in. It is a little as if the government kept a 
 pack of dogs to worry John out of America. 
 
 Yesterday I saw a ten-year-old Hoodlum in a narrow 
 street with a troop of urchins of low degree. He had a 
 pistol and a chin, and just as I passed, he ground out 
 through his set teeth, "I'm a bloody robber!" and fell 
 upon one of the boys and stole his hat. The villainous 
 look on that lad's face was twenty years old if it was a 
 minute. Altogether, San Francisco has two sorts of 
 heathen the domestic and the imported. If she could 
 only trade with China six Hoodlums for one John, she 
 would be doing a living business, and ameliorating in a 
 local way the condition of the human race. As it is, what 
 with debarking from foreign ships and clambering out of 
 home cradles, " the Greeks are at her doors," and on both 
 sides of them at that! 
 
 I have before me a characteristic visiting card that 
 illustrates the possibility of eyes changing color, though 
 the Ethiopian must keep to the shady side and the leopard 
 stick to the old spots. It runs thus: 
 
 BLACK EYES, 
 OB ANY DISCOLORATION OF THE FACE, 
 
 CAREFULLY PAINTED OVER. 
 PARTIES TREATED AT THEIR RESIDENCES. 
 
 What a card for a Donny brook Fair, and what a trump 
 this frescoer of human top-lights would be, to be sure! 
 I know few better places for such a card than the Hoodlum 
 letter-box.
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 91 
 
 PICNICS. 
 
 The weather has a singular effect on the calendar. 
 Thus a California week begins on Monday, and the rest 
 of the days are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 
 Saturday, and Picnic-day. Picnics are as sure as a Sharpe's 
 rifle, and no rain ever wets the powder. A girl can go 
 in satin shoes with impunity, and her "fellow" wear a 
 sky-blue necktie that, if it could rain, would make the 
 front of him look like a blue gum-tree in full leaf. He 
 has as little need of an umbrella as a rainbow. Nearly 
 all the picnics go by water, but never in it. They cross 
 the Bay to all sorts of resorts and parks and gardens, but 
 they never get wet outside. 
 
 Californians are gregarious as pigeons and clannish 
 as Highlanders. Everybody is sorted out, from tinkers 
 to architects, and distributed into Societies, like so much 
 type, apparently to be semper paratus for a picnic, as the 
 "Minute Men'' of Concord were for a fight; and, like 
 printers' types, they sometimes get "set up 1 ' just to carry 
 out the figure, and are carried out themselves. There 
 are three hundred and eighty-five Societies in San Fran- 
 cisco, every one of which is bound to picnic at least once 
 a year, and they bear all the names ever known on the 
 Atlantic seaboard, and some besides. There are " Foresters," 
 " Red Men," " Knights of the Red Branch," " Caucasians," 
 "Janissaries of Light," "Oak Leaf," "Ivy," "Pioneers," 
 " Kong Chow," " Twilight," " Greek Russian Slavonian So- 
 ciety," the names of its officers all ending in rich, as 
 Zenovich, Radovich; and those amiable animals, "The 
 Benevolent Elks" think of amiable elks! and then the 
 Sons of neai'ly everybody Liberty, Golden States, Golden 
 Gate, Golden West, Faderland, Motherland, Revolutionary
 
 92 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 Sires; and closing up the column with Patrons and Sov- 
 ereigns and Grangers and Ranchers that seem about as 
 much in place in the city as a camel would, swimming 
 the Hellespont. This passion for cutting people up into 
 orders is carried almost within range of the atomic 
 theory. If one man could be subdivided into several 
 orders and institutions, by reducing him to vulgar frac- 
 tions, and giving him all sorts of names, such as the 
 order of the Red Right Hand, The Good Liver Club, The 
 True Hearts, The Knights of Shinbone Alley could this 
 be done without killing him outright, they would have 
 put him in a condition to envy the unhappy man who 
 used to stand with his feet apart like the Colossus of 
 Rhodes on the first page of the old almanac, to be butted 
 by Aries, gored by Taurus, roared at by Leo, shot at by 
 Sagittarius, and abused by the whole twelve signs of the 
 Zodiac. 
 
 One of my first experiences countryward was a church 
 picnic, by steamer and rail, to a lovely place called Fair- 
 fax, owned by descendants of the Fairfaxes of old Vir- 
 ginia, and neighbors within breakfast range of George 
 Washington. The boat swarmed with men, women and 
 children. The church sang hymns, and the band played 
 " The Devil among the Tailors." Arrived at the grounds, 
 the crowd scattered away in groups, some to eat, some to 
 swing, some to dance. The band struck up while sinners 
 danced and saints looked on. The instruments of brass 
 and the instruments of ten strings whirled away in the 
 dizz}' waltz, and "Hold the Fort" and "The Evergreen 
 Mountains of Life" floated up from the hollow of the 
 little valley's hand, and were swallowed by the big bas- 
 soon. Sunday-school children ran round and round and
 
 THE ANIMAL, MAN. 
 
 93 
 
 in and out among the whirling sets like squirrels in a 
 wheel. The church drank coffee and the world drank 
 lager, the song went up and the band went on. Nobody 
 quarreled or collided. If JonahVwas in the crowd no- 
 body threw him overboard, for the heavens and the earth 
 were fair and calm as old Ben Adhem's dream of peace. 
 It was a curious spectacle. It was a sort of Happy 
 Family. It was a little as if the leopard lay down with 
 the lamb and didn't eat it, and the little child interviewed 
 the lion without a scratch, and the fatling became a great 
 calf. What sort of vignette for a Millennium Hymn the 
 scene would make, would take an artist's eye to see, but 
 at least it was worth the record, as showing how climate 
 expands latitudes rtntil every degree is a hundred miles 
 long.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 
 
 THE geographies have been amended so that there is 
 but one ocean, and the ocean has but one coast, 
 and the coast is California- the widest, longest, liveliest, 
 richest, grandest coast that ever had an edge in salt 
 water nine hundred miles one way by a thousand the 
 other. It would seem to a modest Eastern eye that nine 
 hundred thousand square miles of nothing but continen- 
 tal selvedge must lap inland territory pretty broadly, but 
 it does not. The world is divided into Europe, Asia, 
 Africa, South America, Madagascar, British America, the 
 United States and California, and the last is like charity 
 it is the greatest. 
 
 " The Coast." That is what they call it, and to him 
 who sees it to-day and remembers it twenty-nine years 
 ago, the sublime assurance of the emphatic phrase seems 
 pardonable, and resentment is succeeded by an amiable 
 smile. A sort of defiant self-reliance characterizes your 
 genuine Californian. He was educated to it in the tough- 
 est and rudest of schools. He found himself divorced 
 from the world and sometimes from his wife by an 
 ox-team trail of two thousand miles through deserts and 
 over mountains on the one side, and a voyage on two 
 oceans through a couple of zones and around Cape Horn 
 on the other. He was about as naked-handed as Robin- 
 
 94
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 95 
 
 son Crusoe before he caught his first goat." From the 
 time he wanted it to the time he got it made everything 
 a year old when it was born into California. What he 
 did, this great city, this marvelous country shows forth 
 on every hand. He fell to and made everything himself. 
 You find San Francisco, in art, invention, production, 
 science, about as self-sustaining as an independent planet. 
 He began with tents. He ended with palaces. His wife 
 wanted silk for a dress. He made it. His daughter de- 
 sired a piano. He made it. His children play "jack- 
 stones " with agates. He grows gold. He cultivates 
 silver. He bottles mercury. He raises stock country- 
 ward and stocks cityward. He has gone to manufactur- 
 ing doctors, lawyers and preachers. He has raised Mil- 
 tons that are " inglorious " because they are not ; ' mute." 
 He has not reared anybody to his prime yet. He hasn't 
 had time. You can raise perfect women in twenty-five 
 years, but men that are going to stand late frosts and 
 blights and early Autumns and Northers, do not get ripe 
 at twenty-seven. They taste of the rind, the husk, the 
 shell, or whatever kind of human fruit they are meant 
 to make. 
 
 The Californian twenty-two carats fine is twenty-nine 
 years old in this year of grace '78. No matter how old 
 he was when he came here. If he came in '49, that's the 
 year of his birth by California noon-marks and calendars. 
 He forgets that he was ever born before, or born any- 
 where else. He forgets what he left behind him, even 
 to the girl, sometimes, and like the last fowl that left 
 the Ark, he never returns. You meet him every day. 
 He tells you he has not been East in twenty years, and 
 he has no idea of going in twenty more. He knows as
 
 96 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 much of the trans-continental railroad as he does of the 
 stage-route to Jericho. 
 
 There is an association of Forty-niners called The 
 Pioneers. " The king can do no wrong," and they all be- 
 long to the royal family, eldest sons, every man of them. 
 They have kept pace with " The Coast," and it has been 
 a round one, but they have not marched abreast with the 
 Eastern world. They are ignorant what gigantic strides 
 the Atlantic coast let us be modest, and bridle it with 
 an adjective and humble it with a little " c " and the 
 inter-ocean empires are making. They came when Cali- 
 fornia was not a State, but a predicament; when it was a 
 Sjuiuish-Russian-Indian-Mexican wilderness, and about as 
 hideous and inhospitable as an Hyrcanian tiger. They 
 spoke of home as "the States," and it has descended as 
 a tradition, and so you hear the suckling California neo- 
 phytes of half-a-dozen years talk flippantly of " the States." 
 The impudent infants should be sent, but not exactly 
 with palm branches in their hands, supperless to bed. 
 
 But for your genuine old Forty-niner, covered with 
 Spanish moss and mistletoe, there is some apology when 
 he says " the States." It is a fragment of his ancient 
 talk. And yet there is an evident relish in it to him, 
 as if California were not in the Union at all, but an in- 
 dependent existence. He scorns its greenbacks, its nickels 
 and its copper goddesses of Liberty. He is impatient of 
 criticism. He thinks you an infant, and therefore speech- 
 less, because you are new to California. Should he find 
 a toad in the center of a Coast boulder, he would doff 
 his hat to him as to a Californian older than himself. 
 
 The hearty, enthusiastic, unreasoning love of Califor- 
 nia that inspires almost everybody in it is refreshing be-
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 97 
 
 cause it is genuine. You cannot be around with it a 
 great while without catching it yourself. It is a sort of 
 condensed abridgment of old John Adams patriotism, 
 bound like a book in the covers of California. They 
 cheer " old glory " with the ardor of a perennial Fourth 
 of July, but it looks grander and lovelier, flaring like a 
 flame of fire in the gales from the Pacific, than drooping 
 from its staff over the dome of the Federal Capitol. It 
 quite startles you to hear a band strike up " Hail Co- 
 lumbia," as if they knew it, and not " Hail California," 
 as if it played of its own accord. The wonder is, that 
 there has not been a Coast Anthem before now, a sort 
 of private " Marseillaise " of their own. 
 
 The climate of the Coast stimulates men and women 
 like wine. It gives them courage that is not Dutch but 
 weather, and confidence that is not conceit but intoxi- 
 cation. It quickens the pulse and the step and the 
 brain. It sends them wild for pleasurable excitement. 
 It strengthens the passions. It keeps everybody under 
 whip and spur. It makes him impatient of patience. 
 You live ten years in five, and it is scored against you. 
 It is a debt with inevitable payment. A man who has 
 not attained his mental growth can come here and shoot 
 up for ten years like a rocket. But alas, when he comes 
 down, it is sudden, abrupt, like " the stick." A man who 
 has reached his law of limitation can migrate to Cali- 
 fornia, and flash up brilliantly a little longer. 
 
 Watch bricklayers, brisk in their motions as busy 
 ants. Those men at the East would move with the de- 
 liberation of an old hall-clock pendulum with the weights 
 just running down. It is the climate. Seventy miles in 
 twenty-four hours at the East, over a satin road in De- 
 5
 
 98 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 (fin her, is a Jehu of a drive. Here sixty miles before 
 sunset hurts nobody. Your horse has been drinking Cali- 
 fornia air. He will do his best, or die a-trying. But 
 he will not last, any more than his master. He will 
 want an extra feed. The driver will want an extra 
 drink. He cannot be a chameleon. He cannot live for- 
 ever on air. He looks in a tumbler for a stimulant. 
 By-and-by he flickers, and it is "out, brief candle!" It 
 is the climate. It sharpens appetite. 
 
 Boys and girls are born with percussion caps on. 
 Touch them and they explode. They ripen early, in this 
 sun and tonic air, into manhood and womanhood. You 
 can see mothers of fourteen, and see no marvel. About 
 forty thousand pupils are enrolled in the fifty-six public 
 schools of San Francisco, and seven thousand in the hun- 
 dred and twenty private schools and colleges. It is quite 
 as difficult to govern the young human California animal 
 as it is to catch up a globule of quicksilver from a mar- 
 ble table with a thumb and finger. Is it a boy? He 
 shouts, runs, leaps, struggles, just as his pulse beats 
 because he cannot stop it. He has opinions, though his 
 beard is a peachy down. He is as positive as a trip- 
 hammer. Is it a girl? She is as volatile as Cologne, her 
 voice is joyous, her step a dancer's, her laugh contagious. 
 She is as dashing as a yacht in a white-cap breeze. 
 
 I live neighbor to the Lincoln School, as fine a struc- 
 ture as you will find anywhere, and set in the midst of 
 a semi-tropical garden. You should see the twelve hun- 
 dred boys and girls "let out" at noon, and then let 
 themselves out. Swallows coursing a mill-pond; ephemera 
 dancing in sunbeams; bees swarming when the hive is 
 full; happy as speckled trout in the spring brooks, Izaak
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 99 
 
 Walton dead and the anglers gone away; not boisterous, 
 but breezy; not rude, but effervescent. You would not 
 be surprised if the mercury in their veins should distance 
 the mercury in the thermometer and stand at 110. 
 Quick-eyed, quick-footed, quick-witted, they are forever 
 on a " spree," they exult in a state of chronic climatic 
 intoxication. They are languid as lizards, clumsy as 
 humming-birds, and idle as beavers in high water. Lazi- 
 ness is tried out of you and blown out of you by cloud- 
 less suns and trade-winds. 
 
 The weather is as varied in California as the mind 
 of desultory man. Three hundred heroes at the Pass of 
 Thermopylae withstood a hostile world. Excluding those 
 that wear wool, there are as many weathers on the Pacific 
 Slope. When the king of Dahomey and an Arctic bear 
 can breakfast together in the morning, and each reach 
 his own climate before decent Puritan bed-time without 
 leaving the State, the man who fails to be suited knows 
 too little to be happy, and the bear should be eaten by 
 the " forty children " who alluded to the Prophet's ca- 
 pillary destitution. All the zones come to California for 
 rehearsal, and then they go home to delight Hottentots 
 and Laplanders, eider ducks and cassowaries, and all the 
 sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth. 
 
 Nowhere in America ai'e the seasons so neighborly as 
 in California. " The impropriety of Winter sitting in the 
 lap of Spring has made a public scandal, but when Sep- 
 tember is on whispering terms with May, and January 
 borrows June's clothes, and July gives all her rainbows 
 to November, it is high time to talk! The Winter is in 
 the Summer and the Spring is in the Winter, and harvest 
 is in seed-time, and Autumn is lost out of the calendar
 
 100 HKTWKKN THE GATES. 
 
 altogether; and the siroccos blow from the North and 
 the cold winds from the South, and you must sail by 
 the almanac or lose your reckoning and get lost in the 
 weather. 
 
 The effect of this loose state of society among the 
 Seasons is delightfully apparent. You never saw such 
 ignorant roses in all your life. They bud and blossom 
 the year round, and never stop to undress or take a 
 wink of sleep. Ripening fruit and baby blossoms show 
 on the same bush at once as they do in well-blest human 
 families. Cherry trees go into the ruby business in April 
 and keep it up until October. The hills are emerald in the 
 Winter. Ireland would glory in them, and the shamrock 
 grow as big as burdocks. The hills are tawny as African 
 lions or Sahara sands in the Summer. The grasses look 
 withered and dry as tinder, but they hold the concen- 
 trated richness of the year cooked down by fire. Turn 
 out an emaciated old ox that resembles a hoop-skirt with 
 a hide on, and though you would make affidavit that on 
 such fare he will resemble a hoop-skirt with the hide off 
 in six weeks, yet the old yoke-bearer will grow fat, smooth 
 and round as a silk hat. The cattle of California are un- 
 excelled for breed and beauty. Go where you will, the 
 splendid " milky mothers of the herd " look handsome 
 enough to sit to Landseer. Rosa Bonheur would be 
 tempted to desert her kind and live with them. The 
 butter of the Coast is as sweet as the dew of June. 
 
 The dry spiry grass you see is hay. You do not 
 think that Balaam's beast would covet it. It was cured 
 without cutting. There is no rain to wash out its 
 strength, and it just stands there, desiccated grass, wait- 
 ing for somebody to eat it. You do not have to tickle
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 101 
 
 it with a fork and toss it about the lot, and comb it 
 with a rake, as they do at the East. Wheat cut green 
 and stacked is used in place of timothy. California is 
 the paradise for laziness and grangers. There's a field 
 of wheat ripe unto whiteness, ripe unto redness. No rain 
 to rust it, no thieves to steal it, no touch to shell it; 
 there it stands waiting for its master. It would stand 
 all summer. It is faithful as Ulysses 1 dog. It is not 
 lugged to the barn, and tugged out of wagons and 
 " boosted " in again. In this field they are threshing. 
 In that field they are bagging, and those plethoric sacks 
 will lie there as safe from rain as a heap of boulders. 
 
 That grain will never know its owner has a barn. 
 
 // 
 
 THE PACIFIC BREEZES. 
 
 For Eastern blood the continent has no Summer cli- 
 mate equal to that of San Francisco. No languid days, 
 no enervating nights, no steam to breathe, no lightning 
 flash to dodge. It is in the route of the trade-winds, 
 that make a friendly call every day for half the year. 
 They come through The Golden Gate like the king's 
 trumpeters, in a hurry, but never hurry enough for a 
 hurricane. More tonic weather passes that gate in the 
 afternoon than all the lungs and windmills in America 
 could dispose of. To the stranger it is at first a little 
 strong. Cold catches him. He growls and barks. He 
 thinks he has that musical instrument called catarrh, but 
 wait awhile, and it will turn into something pleasant; 
 the catarrh is a guitar, and the cheering, invigorating 
 wind welcome as the " one blast upon his bugle-horn " 
 that was worth " a thousand men." Often in the morning 
 it looks like rain and you think umbrella. You fancy
 
 102 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 the dark and angry clouds are threatening, but they are 
 no more clouds than a Scotch mist is a thunder shower. 
 It is only fog from the Pacific that rolled in last night. 
 It will all be neatly reefed by ten o'clock in the morning, 
 like a ship's top-hamper, and out of sight. You see it 
 coming in, leaving the tops of the hills and swinging 
 about below in wreathy, gray gauze, like a woman's veil 
 in the wind. It settles upon the city. You button your 
 overcoat against it. You walk briskly and breast it. Tt 
 does not taste like the fog of "The States." It comes 
 from the salted sea, a sort of pickled relish, as if Lot's 
 wife should become deliquescent; not close and smother- 
 ing, but crisp and bracing. And this fog is the summer 
 rain of the Pacific. The spotted flowers revel in it like 
 speckled trout in brook water. It washes the air out as a 
 dexterous hand wipes a crystal globe. This is all true of 
 San Francisco, but right in the midst of the afternoon 
 zephyr, you can go to Oakland in thirty minutes, where 
 there is not wind enough to flutter a flounce. The sub- 
 urbs are fairly dappled with weather. Take your choice 
 and be happy. 
 
 The tourist to California is anxious about what he 
 shall wear, and the writer being here to tell him, is 
 bound to be explicit. Leave all your Winter clothes at 
 home and bring your Summer clothes. To be emphatic, 
 let me say it again: Leave all your Summer clothes at 
 home and bring your Winter clothes. If a month's travel 
 in the State could not make this vexatious pair of con- 
 tradictions as harmonious as the Four Gospels, then leave 
 all your clothes at home and stay to keep them com- 
 pany. You see furs, feathers and gauzes, shirt-sleeves 
 and overcoats all Summer long, but nobody in San Fran-
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE. 103 
 
 cisco ever has a chilblain or a sunstroke. The mercury 
 ranges from 60 to 75 during the average year, and it 
 never drops down cellar or flies out of the chimney. 
 Once acclimated, people change little but their linen and 
 their opinions during the twelve months. 
 
 WEATHER ON MAN. 
 
 Having always had man on the weather, why not 
 reverse the authorship and have weather on the man? 
 It has become an axiom that " circumstances make the 
 man." Have you not 
 been puzzled, some- 
 times, to think how one 
 of these sayings got a 
 seat among the axioms 
 and nobody objected? 
 And then you felt a 
 little as Hainan did 
 when he saw Mordecai, 
 the Jew, sitting in the 
 king's gate. ' If climate 
 is a circumstance, then 
 the axiom is an axiom. A poet of the rude Northern 
 frozen nations is called a scald, because, perhaps, that is 
 the pleasantest thing a man can think of who has to fight 
 frost for a lifetime; but did you ever hear of a great 
 Laplander or an intellectual Hottentot? Neither refrig- 
 erators nor furnaces are precisely the places to develop 
 standard men. Now California weather will make a man 
 belligerent 'and aggressive. It will put new springs in 
 his temper, and make it as quick as a steel trap. It 
 will take your Eastern neighbor, who used to go about
 
 104 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 with his long gray coat, like old Grimes's, "all buttoned 
 down before," and compel him to unbutton that garment, 
 and exchange a heavy waistcoat for a white vest, and set 
 him sailing down the street like a sloop with a brand-new 
 foresail. He was a trifle too affectionate to the American 
 eagle, especially when that bird was perched upon a coin, 
 but the weather makes him generous, opens his heart and 
 hand as it opened his overcoat. And there is the other 
 man who went about from June to September, his shirted 
 back marked with the visible X of his suspenders like a 
 cask of low-grade ale, and looking for cool places, and 
 what with being dizzy in the sun and lazy in the shade, 
 was quite unable to master anything but fans and ice- 
 water. He would be delighted to look for truth in the 
 bottom of a well if he could only stay there. He is 
 energetic as two hundred pounds of putty. Now this other 
 man comes to California, and the next you know of him 
 he is up and clothed and in his right mind, marching in 
 the blaze of noon as happy as a sunflower, and never 
 dreaming that oranges grow golden in the very weather 
 he exults in, and he mentally adapting the beatitude of 
 Sancho Panza upon the man who invented sleep: blessed 
 be he who invented a San Francisco Summer! But even 
 the perfect weather does not make a heaven. 
 
 San Francisco is "of the earth, earthy." It has two 
 atoms of things that are both in a lively state of unrest 
 in Summer time. They are fleas and dust, and both 
 products of the blessed weather; but the first are only 
 innocent dots of acrobats, the mustard-seed of full-grown 
 circuses, and the last will leave no darker trace upon 
 a lady's garments than a pinch of salt. The first day 
 of your arrival, when you are filling and tacking and
 
 COAST, FORTY-NINERS AND CLIMATE.' 105 
 
 beating up the breeze, and bowing to it as if it were 
 a friend, and blinking at the dust that waltzes at you 
 round the corners, and bears down upon you at an ana- 
 pestic gait, as Byron's Assyrian came, and you winking 
 at it all as if you had just made a joke and were pleased 
 with it, you vow you will go home to-morrow. And 
 when you are hunting from chin to gaiters for the prince 
 of leapers, and assuring yourself that " the wicked flee 
 when no man pursueth " is not the kind of insect that 
 has just doubled the cape of your left shoulder, and 
 taking yourself to pieces at all hours and never catching 
 anything but a cold, you declare you will go home 
 to-night. But the weeks go on, and the winds blow on, 
 and the fleas leap on, and you stay on, at first resigned, 
 at last delighted.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 
 
 YOU can reach China and not " go down to the sea 
 in ships." I went one night and returned before 
 the cock crowed midnight. Missionaries used to sail away 
 to Pagan lands, and drop slowly down into the undei'world 
 behind the great waves that lapped the horizon. Now, 
 they can visit the " Central Flowery Kingdom " without 
 wetting their feet. We boys used to fancy that somewhere 
 or other there was a hole through the globe direct to 
 China, if only we could find it a sort of flue for the 
 fragrant cloud supposed to rise from the world's tremen- 
 dous teapot. I remember looking for it in boyhood, and 
 flushing with a discovery supposing myself a small Chris- 
 topher Columbus. It was not a Chinaman at the bottom 
 of that burrow, but a woodchuck. 
 
 That hole has been found. The city of the Golden 
 Gate happened to be built just around its mouth, and 
 John has swarmed up out of it like swallows from a 
 sooty chimney. Through the courtesy of the chief of 
 police a party of friends, of whom I was one, was fur- 
 nished with passports to Hong Kong or Peking or Nanking, 
 and with a special officer of intelligence, we sailed. Fancy 
 yourself walking along the gay streets of San Francisco 
 in the edge of the evening streets bright with light, 
 pleasant with familiar forms, musical with English speech, 
 
 106
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 107 
 
 and feeling all the while, that under the patriotic flight 
 of July flags as thick as pigeons and as gay as redbirds, 
 you were still at home though thousands of miles away 
 fancy this, and then at the turn of a corner and the 
 breadth of a street, think of dropping with the abrupt- 
 ness of a shifting dream into China, beneath the standard 
 of Hoang-ti who sits upon the dragon throne that tri- 
 angle of a flag with its blue monster rampant in a yellow 
 sea. And it is China, unmitigated, debased, idolatrous; 
 unmoved as a rock in the ocean, with the surges of Chris- 
 tian civilization washing the walls of its dwellings. 
 
 A strange chatter as of foreign birds in an .aviary con- 
 fuses the air. A surf of blue and black shirts and inky 
 heads with tails to them is rolling along the sidewalks. 
 Colored lanterns begin to twinkle. Black-lettered red 
 signs all length and no breadth, the gnarled and crooked 
 characters heaped one above another like a pile of ebony 
 chair-frames, catch the eye. You halt at a building tin- 
 seled into cheap magnificence, and hung with gaudy paper 
 glims. The old, far away smell of the lead-lined tea- 
 chest comes back to you the pale green chest, of whose 
 leaden cuticle you made " sinkers " when you fished with 
 a pin, that used to be tumbled round the world to reach 
 you, with Old Hyson, Young Hyson old Hyson's son, Hyson- 
 skin and Bohea. 
 
 The creak of a Chinese fiddle shaped a little like a 
 barometer all bulb and little body, scrapes through a 
 crack in a door, as if it was rasped in getting out. 
 Lights stream up from cellar stairs. Odors that are not 
 light steam up with them.
 
 108 HETWKKN THK (iATES. 
 
 A CHINESE RESTAURANT. 
 
 You enter the Restaurant. It is the " Banquet Saloon " 
 of Yune Fong. And there is Yune Fong himself, a be- 
 nign, double-chinned old boy who is of a bigness from 
 end to end. He sits by a counter, at which small bits of 
 human China are busy setting words on their heads. 
 Under his hand is a well-thumbed arithmeticon, a family 
 of boys' marbles strung like beads upon parallel wires 
 and set in a frame, wherewith Fong cyphers out your 
 indebtedness and his profits. This floor is a helter-skelter 
 of store-house, kitchen and reception room. China jars 
 and things in matting and things in tinsel and things in 
 packs, and seats as hard as the fellow's perch who was 
 " sitting on the stile, Mary." It is the eating place for 
 the sort of people we are said to have always with us, 
 to wit, the poor. Things have a smoky, oleaginous, 
 flitch-of-bacon look. The lights are feeble, as if there 
 were nothing worth their while to shine on. You climb 
 stairs into an improved edition of the ground floor. The 
 furniture is faintly tidier and better, the table-ware cost- 
 lier. This is the resort of the happier John whose " short 
 bit" is a quarter. One more lift and you are in large 
 and elegant apartments with partitions of glass, a sort of 
 oriental Delmonico's; gilded and colored and flowered and 
 latticed like a costly work-box or a fancy valentine. The 
 furniture is of Chinese wood dark as mahogany at a 
 hundred years old. The chairs are square and ponderous 
 as those at Mount Vernon, their seats inlaid with marble 
 and covered with mat-like cushions; the tables, rich marble 
 mosaics. Lacquered boxes and curious cabinets abound. 
 Musical instruments, of patterns as quaint as any that 
 Miriam ever sang to, hang upon the walls. There is one
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 109 
 
 of them. You can get an idea of it by fancying a paddle 
 of a pudding-stick turning into a fiddle. The Chinese like 
 to have their ears abused while they regale their palates. 
 A carpeted platform at one end of a banqueting room is 
 a couch, and garnished with two cubic pillows of some 
 sea-grass material, about as hard as Jacob's pillow in the 
 Wilderness, and ingeniously uncomfortable. But you can 
 see a ruder sort down-stairs: hard blocks scooped out to 
 fit a kind of wooden dish for a block-head, and nearer 
 like Jack Ketch's execution block than anything else an 
 unhappy man ever lay down upon and fell asleep. 
 
 "WE'LL ALL TAKE TEA." 
 You call for tea, and a .4%^ ^, 
 
 couple of waiters border a 
 circular table with a Zodiac 
 of tiny blue-flowered cups each 
 with a cover, and a China 
 spoon as broad as a boy's 
 tongue. Pale cakes with a waxen look, full of meats, are 
 brought out. They are sausages in disguise. Then more 
 cakes full of seeds as a fig. Then giblets of you-never- 
 know-what, maybe gizzards, possibly livers, perhaps toes, 
 but not a rat. You must be as crazy as Hamlet to fancy 
 you even hear one in the wainscot. Then preserved gin- 
 ger and Chinese chestnuts and prepared rice. Last and 
 greatest, TEA. The drawings are in the cups, and Aquarius, 
 the water-bearer, floods them with hot water, replaces 
 the covers, and then a fragrant breath as from a rare 
 bouquet fills the air. This is tea, genuine, delicate, strong 
 as old wine of the cob-webbed vintage of '36. This is 
 what our grandmothers who chinked up their hearts on
 
 110 BETWEEN THK (JATES. 
 
 " washing-days " with Cowper's " cup that cheers," sighed 
 for, and like the ancient leader, died without the sight. 
 It sets tongues running. The weak are mighty, and the 
 weary comforted. The precious leaf is worth five dollars 
 a pound. This third-floor restaurant is for magnates; it 
 is a region rarefied to " four bits." What you leave of 
 the tea descends to the next floor, takes another dash of 
 hot water and is served up again for "two bits." The 
 unhappy grounds drop another flight of stairs, the last 
 pennyweight of strength is drowned out, and " a short 
 bit" will buy the syncope of a dilution. Everything goes 
 down this curious thermometer in the same way, and, 
 among them, they come within one of eating what has 
 been eaten before. 
 
 THE JOSS-HOUSE AND THE GODS. 
 
 You descend to the fresh air. Fong 'smiles you gra- 
 ciously out; you cross a street and enter a narrow and 
 noisome alley. It is Stout's alley, and the scene of most 
 of the murders in the Chinese Quarters, and the causes 
 are women and gambling. The alley grows dimmer, 
 and full of Chinamen as an ant-hill is of ants. Doors 
 to little bazars, to nooks of sleeping places, to alcoves of 
 shops, stand wide. You count ten in a den where 
 Damon and Pythias could hardly have dwelt a week, 
 unless they were both bed-ridden, without quarreling 
 about cruelty to each other's toes. Here, they are fluting 
 clothes. There, a Chinese tailor is chalking a pair of 
 trousers on a table as if he were drawing a map. John 
 does everything backward. He is the dorsal fin of man- 
 kind. He is a human obliquity. He might have attended 
 a school for crabs. In fact, he is one of " Crabb's Syn-
 
 GOING TO CHINA. Ill 
 
 onyms." Yonder, a fellow is cooking in a dog-kennel of a 
 place. Unmusical sounds from unmusical instruments 
 abound. 
 
 Just here you fraternize with the policeman and 
 pluck his gray coat by the sleeve. You see he wears no 
 star. You ask him if he doesn't have that silver bit of 
 astronomy? He laughs. "Oh, yes; here it is in my 
 pocket; but all the Chinamen know me." And you see 
 they do. They crowd up toward the party, but getting 
 a glimpse of him, they execute a concentric as the water 
 in a mill-pond does when a pebble strikes it. They give 
 us an horizon of shirts with legs to them. The white 
 soles of their shoes show in the uncertain light. It is 
 the only soul about them of just that color. We are 
 lost in a zig-zag of dingy stairs. We are surrounded by 
 dark walls. We look down into courts that are black. 
 Twinkles show faint like fire-flies in a cloudy night. The 
 murky air reeks like Gehenna. Like the city of Cologne, 
 there are seventy smells, and not one is cologne. Within 
 the space of a few squares are twenty thousand Chinese. 
 The place is a live honeycomb, barring the honey. They 
 are packed like sardines in a box. Our guiding star 
 whips out a candle he has bought, strikes a match on 
 the toe of a heathen god and lights it. We are reduced 
 to the glimmer of other days. In a city filled with light 
 and beauty and Christian churches, we are groping around 
 in the dens and cul-de-sacs of a foreign and idolatrous 
 land by the flare of a tallow candle. It is gloomy as 
 grim Charon's ferry-house. 
 
 Up a few steps, down a few steps, round a corner, up 
 a whole flight, along A gallery as dumb as a tomb, we 
 reach the door of the Joss-House, one of eleven heathen
 
 1 1 - BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 temples in San Francisco. It is never closed, and we 
 enter. Floating lights in glass tumblers but dimly reveal 
 the place. "Dim," but not "religious." Gothic flower- 
 supports of white metal, resembling square candlesticks 
 for giants, stand in rows. The inevitable flare of bril- 
 liant red and gold and silver tinsel, and gew-gaws, and 
 huge paper bouquets, and black writing on the walls, and 
 sparkling rosettes all about, as if everything had been 
 washed out in rainbows and the tints proved fast colors. 
 In the great shrines are rows of sinister gods with trail- 
 ing black beard and moustache. One of them, a trucu- 
 lent fellow, in an embroidered night-gown, who might 
 have been modeled from some Chinese- Tartary brigand, 
 is the god of War. Here is a life-size figure holding a 
 small grape-shot between a thumb and finger. He is the 
 deity of Medicine, the Chinese Esculapius, with a most 
 bilious and unhealthy look himself, and that missile is a 
 pill. If it ever found a lodgment in the stomach of any- 
 body blessed with only ordinary powers of deglutition, it 
 must be from the mouth of a howitzer. There is the 
 god of Fortune, with a nugget of gold in one hand, and 
 John sacrifices to him with great fidelity. You pass into 
 another apartment where are two lay figures of young 
 women in gorgeous apparel, canary-colored and gold. 
 They are the goddesses of Love and Beauty but which 
 is which? One of them is watching the bridge of her 
 own nose with both eyes, as if they kept toll-houses at 
 both ends of the bridge, and were looking out, or rather 
 looking in, lest somebody should " run the gates." And 
 the other looks as if she had been dragged up from the 
 Chinese heaven by her hair, and she had no time to fix 
 it; but there she sits with her lifted eyebrows as if her
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 113 
 
 head-dress were sleek as patience and pomatum could 
 make it. 
 
 And now we come to three idols they are the ele- 
 ments. That party with the florid face, like a harvest 
 moon, is supposed to be Fire. Seated next him is the 
 dropsical divinity of Water, and the unethereal neighbor 
 at his right is the deity of Air. As for Earth, there is 
 quite enough of her in the form of dust. Possibly they 
 made a grist of the goddess and sprinkled her over the 
 whole. In a corner low down, is a cross between a small 
 scare-crow and a " Dandy Jack." It is the great Ground 
 Devil, and looks as if he might be his own rag baby. 
 He can raise the mischief, which is the devil, with sick 
 people, if he does not receive proper attention. Before 
 him is a little altar, whereon food designed for invalids 
 must be placed, and whence he adroitly extracts all dele- 
 terious qualities. Thus colic is eliminated from withered 
 cabbage, dyspepsia from toasted cheese, and shark's fins 
 are made to agree charmingly with the eater. Near the 
 entrance is a sort of mongrel Vishnu, seated cross-legged 
 like a journeyman tailor. 
 
 In a large shrine sits the god of Beasts, a sort of 
 Nimrod, and beside him a brindled cur of unamiable mien, 
 who accompanies his master when he goes out upon mytho- 
 logical business. -But, as one of the party remarked, " a 
 little of this will go a great way." 
 
 Not a window visible in this China Closet of gods 
 supernal, infernal and mixed. Doors are open on one 
 side and another, where by the feeble lights you see John 
 watching you, or walking near you-as stealthily as a shad- 
 ow. One scene, framed in a doorway, might have been 
 painted by Rembrandt already: a Chinese Doctor in his 
 5*
 
 114 i;iT\vi-:r.N THE GATI>. 
 
 robe bending over a book, and resembling a piece of 
 dumb bmn/e in meditation. 
 
 And this is what men are left to do! These garish 
 figures are actually worshiped here and now within an 
 hour, by human beings in their blind gropings for superior 
 [lowers. You cannot believe it. Here are the little altar> 
 of sand wherein the small gummy cylinders of fragrant 
 woods, called joss-sticks, are set up and burned before the 
 gods. Here are some now but half consumed. Their 
 worship is of the economical order. They give the divin- 
 ities what they themselves can neither use nor give away. 
 Their board does not cost them a copper cash with a 
 hole in it. 
 
 "TWELVE PACKS IN HIS SLEEVE." 
 
 John has a cunning hand with a good memory. Cards 
 are his affinity.' He does not laugh in his bell-mouthed 
 flowing sleeves, but he shuffles cards into them with the 
 adroitness of a wizard. You see the smoky dens as you 
 pass. The gamblers sit around the table which is classic 
 but fallen, covered, as it is, with grease, " but living grease 
 no more." His features come to a focus like a fox's as 
 he watches the play of the cards. His mouth puckers 
 with expectancy. He is furtive but fierce. His eye never 
 brightens. It snaps its delight when the four bits are his 
 by the turn of the game. He will wager everything he 
 possesses, wife, children, friends, anything but his cue, 
 when the "cash" gives out. He is not fair. He is not 
 square. He doesn't read Latin, and so he misunderstands 
 the difference between meum and tuum. He thinks maun 
 is his and tuum his own, when he can get it. His " pick- 
 ers and stealers" are deft and adroit, and you are daft
 
 GOING TO CHIXA. 115 
 
 if you trust him much beyond the range of an ordinary 
 telescope. He will wear a close cap under a hat, and 
 when, having committed a theft, he is pursued, he pockets 
 his hat and, behold, he is another manner of man. He is 
 John with the skull-cap. His tricks are as old as the 
 dynasty of Hoang-ti. and he plays them well. 
 
 AN OPIUM DEN. 
 
 Blundering our way out we pass a hanging gallery, 
 and, as the song of Captain Kidd has it, "down, down, 
 derry down" stairs that are crooked and dark, into a 
 court black as Erebus, by the one light, but " how far a 
 little candle throws its 
 beams," and the place 
 looks better in the dark 
 than in the blaze of 
 chandeliers. The odors 
 creep up from the din- 
 gy floors as we walk. 
 The royal Dane, had he been of the party, would have 
 repeated a phrase of his talk in the graveyard, " and smells 
 so! Pah!" Our trusty guide went right along with an 
 assured stride. Black figures were stealing about in the 
 gloom. Nobody would wish to be an owl anywhere else. 
 It gets inkier and murkier, but the policeman pushes 
 open a door and lets out a little light. 
 
 We enter a small box about eight by ten, not much 
 larger than some window-panes. As for window, this 
 room has not so much as a snuff-box has. Compared with 
 it the tomb of the Capulets is light and airy as a belfry. 
 A table in the center holds a lamp. The sides of the 
 room are fitted up with stationary bunks. The proprietor
 
 116 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 sits curled up in a lower one, smoking tobacco, for even 
 this cul-de-sac of creation has an owner. You are in an 
 opium den. A guest lies at length upon his shelf, cun- 
 ningly taking up on a wire, drop after drop of crude opium, 
 black as old-time molasses, and by the flame of a little 
 lamp beside him he heats it and rolls it round the point 
 of the wire, until at last it is a little bead the size of a 
 marrowfat pea. The bowl of the rosewood pipe has a 
 cover perforated in the center, with a hole somewhat 
 smaller, if anything, than the room you are in. He 
 thrusts the bead into the aperture, lights it, and then 
 putting a stem like the little end of a fife to his lips, 
 he pulls for a breath of the drowsy god. The drug hisses 
 like a fragment of frying meat, but he draws steadily 
 till the narcotic smoke begins to roll from his mouth 
 and nose in clear blue volumes. 
 
 THE OPIUM-SMOKER'S DREAM. 
 
 His head reposes upon the block. He begins to be at 
 peace. You ask him, "How many smoke?" "Ten mo'," 
 he says. The night's luxury will cost him " six bits," 
 which includes bed, board and bliss. He has visions, but 
 he never tells them. He sees a pagoda of gold that is 
 his, and the gods that are in it are his, and they rustle 
 in cloth of gold, and jewels glitter like restless eyes upon 
 their breasts. For the little insignificant box, he has 
 great jars of opium in his cabinet, and the mouth-piece 
 of his pipe is of amber, and the bowl has the name, 
 which is his, of See Ling, in mother-of-pearl, and he 
 rides in a palanquin with curtains of silk and fringes 
 of gold, which is his, with six coolies to bear him and 
 two maidens to fan him. He dwells by the Kin-sha-kiang,
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 117 
 
 which is the river of the golden sand, and his wife has 
 the feet of a mouse. The fragrance of bird's-nest 
 soup is in his nostrils and the voice of the fowls of the 
 nankeen legs makes music in his ears. His tea is brewed 
 from the chests of the king. And then the visions are 
 all folded in silk that is crimson, and the music of cym- 
 bals is faint, and he lies upon a cloud that is silver and 
 down, and floats gently away, and with a murmur of 
 "blessed be poppies!" the last whiff of forgetfulness gone 
 out, he lapses into a sleep that is dreamless, and strange 
 as the rhythm of Coleridge, 
 
 " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 
 A spacious pleasure-dome decree, 
 Where Alph the sacred river ran 
 From caverns fathomless to man 
 
 Down to a sunless sea." 
 
 The den grows heavy with the ghost of opium. Your 
 head seems inflating like a balloon, as if it were about to 
 make an unauthorized ascension and leave you to look 
 after yourself. The forms of your friends, albeit some 
 of them are " reverend seigniors," begin to sail- off in a 
 solemn waltz. You are a second-hand opium smoker, and 
 so, none too soon, the creaky door is pulled open, and we 
 go out into a darkness that is cheerful compared with 
 the drowsy haziness within, and breathe undiluted what 
 De Quincey calls " the mephitic regions of carbonic acid 
 gas." 
 
 You push open the door of a second den where every 
 head has come to the block of oblivion, give a look and 
 move on. 
 
 There are dens and dens. Once more in a choked 
 alley that seems a Broadway to the dungeon behind, you 
 see a fresh young face, wily as some of those in Rein-
 
 118 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 brandt Peale's "Court of Death," framed in a little 
 wicket window, which is also a wicked window. She is one 
 of more than a thousand women, few of whom bear the 
 least resemblance to what Caesar's wife should be; degraded, 
 >haiiieless and, strange to say, content. Woman must have 
 M>nu>thing to cling to. She is naturally religious. She 
 believes in an ideal world. From before Ruth's time 
 >h- has craved something to trust. Recall the monsters 
 of the Joss-House, and tell me if a woman kneeling at 
 the shrine of such pitiful idols, with not a touch nor a 
 trace of the classic grace of Venus, or the severe purity 
 of Diana, or the manhood of Apollo, can be anything 
 herself but a wanton and a wile? And the girl you saw 
 is as much a slave as ever gathered the snow of a cotton 
 field. There are dens with a "lower deep" than the 
 gloomy chambers of Papaver. 
 
 "THE ROYAL CHINA THEATRE." 
 
 With a sense of relief we slip out of the alleys that, 
 with their narrowness and darkness and abomination, seem 
 to catch us by the throat, but we have by no means got 
 back to America. We are in China still. Entering a 
 well-lighted hall, garnished on one side with all sorts of 
 celestial tit-bits and relishes, we pay our four bits and 
 enter what great gorgeous letters over the proscenium 
 give a kind of typographical shout at us and name " The 
 Royal China Theatre," and the royal is less apparent than 
 the China. 
 
 It has a gallery, but we go into the pit or the dress- 
 circle, or what, with the black heads and the black blouses 
 and the black hats, looks most like a parquet filled with 
 mourners at a funeral. Not a trace of color in that
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 119 
 
 audience, not a streak of white. It is a case of total 
 absorption. Nothing lacking but weeds and weepers. 
 
 The play is in full caper. I use the frisky word after 
 considerable meditation. It is the right one. The play 
 is a compound of tragedy, comedy, farce, caravan and 
 circus, and the last was the best. I think celestial 
 Thespians' strongest theatrical hold is their feet and legs. 
 And the name of the play was a compound of pork and 
 carbonate of lime, for it was " Horn-Mun-Sow." I know 
 what it was about, but I never mean to tell. They began 
 it at seven o'clock, and they played right through to one 
 in the morning, which is nothing for them. A drama 
 has been produced at that theatre consuming three weeks 
 in the performance, seculars and Sundays, in sessions of 
 five hours each; a solid week of histrionic distress. 
 
 The price of admission to the theatre is graduated by 
 the time you endure it. First of the feast, four bits; 
 ten o'clock, three bits; midnight, two bits; and when it 
 gets down to the very toes of tragedy or the heel-taps of 
 comedy, it is a dime. 
 
 Apparently it was a troupe where the women were all 
 men and the men were all women, though you doubted 
 at last whether either were either. Of course there was 
 no curtain to fall upon anything, and the actors entered 
 from apartments at the sides. Of course the orchestra 
 was not in front and below the stage, but upon it and 
 beyond the grand stride-ground of sock and buskin. 
 What would you have? 
 
 
 
 "THE PLAY'S THE THING." 
 
 If you can fancy a flock of gorgeous cockatoos in a 
 state of anarchy, and nobody to read " the riot act, " all
 
 120 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 chattering in falsetto not an honest, manly buss tone 
 the whole night; if you can suppose the chief of a l>;iml 
 of robbers, with the tail of a bird-of-paradise waving from 
 the back of his head, and a pair of white wings at his 
 shoulder-blades, and a fan in his hand, and whisking about 
 in an embossed and brocaded petticoat, with a cackle of a 
 voice, as when a hen lays an egg or sees a hawk or tries 
 to crow, and a face painted to counterfeit a death's-head 
 moth, and finished out with the beard of a billy-goat; 
 if you can picture a bench of high officials in the full 
 " pomp and circumstance of" a state council, all at once 
 setting off in pirouettes and pigeon-wings, and whirling 
 like teetotums, and swinging round like boomerangs, and 
 frisking away in fandangoes, attacked with Saint Vitus's 
 dance, spouting a tragic passage and executing a double 
 shuffle in the same minute; hopping off in a coupee, which 
 means doing your walking on one leg, and then, with the 
 knee of the other a little bent and the foot lifted, advanc- 
 ing upon nothing with a continuous and imaginary kick; 
 swinging two swords like the remaining arms of a dilap- 
 idated windmill; then abasing themselves with their brows 
 upon the floor of the sanded stage like worshiping Orient- 
 als; then snapping erect like so many spring-bladed Bowie- 
 knives, and all appareled in variegated macaw, then you 
 will have a genuine spectacular Chinese astonishment. 
 
 After that, a battle, when, with the most wonderful 
 crowing and cackling that Reynard's advent ever roused 
 in a populous barn-yard, they flew at each other like 
 enraged and rampant butterflies, with a blending and 
 confusion of tints as if the seven primary colors had 
 been struck with a chromatic Babel, and would never in 
 all this world be sorted out into rainbows again.
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 121 
 
 Had you fallen down and worshiped the whole thing 
 it would have been no sin, for it was the semblance of 
 nothing " in the heavens above or the earth beneath or 
 the waters under the earth." 
 
 After that the entire talent broke to pieces and ex- 
 ploded like fireworks into wheels and rockets and flying 
 leaps. They turned into acrobats, and the circus began. 
 And it was truly wonderful. Fancy a man throwing 
 himself from the height of a dozen feet and falling flat 
 upon his back and as straight as a rail upon the uncar- 
 peted floor. The dull thug as he fell was unmistakable. 
 And then he was not padded, unless with a mustard 
 plaster, for he was about as thin as a Johnny-cake. Or 
 fancy three or four of them in the air at once, turning 
 over and over as if in pursuit of their toes. How they 
 could be wheels and not turn on an axle and not be 
 driven by wind or water or something, nobody can tell. 
 
 THE ORCHESTRA. 
 
 But that orchestra ! Hogarth's enraged musician never 
 heard its match. There were ticks and clucks and jingles 
 and squeaks, and tinkles of bells, and a frog-and-locust 
 interlude, and emaciated fiddles; but when the battle 
 began they all struck out like Sandwich Islanders in the 
 surf, into a roar of gongs and a clash of cymbals shining 
 and ringing like the shield of Achilles. Sometimes the 
 tune seemed to be "The Arkansas Traveler" or "Old 
 Rosin the Bow," and then those instruments leaped over 
 the musical bars and ran away. The music and the 
 acting were alike a marvelous jumble. It was as if a 
 medley had swallowed itself. 
 
 I am inclined to think that this fashion of mingling 
 6
 
 122 HKTWEEN THK (JATKS. 
 
 heterogeneous elements, a kind of miniature " chaos come 
 again," is contagious. Thus, the last Independence Day 
 was observed with splendid pageantry and fine literary 
 exercises at the "California Theatre." They had "The 
 Star-Spangled Banner," and Drake's bugle-voiced address 
 to the Flag, but between the "Long may it wave o'er 
 the land of the free and the home of the brave" and the 
 solemn, almost sublime, words of the Declaration, begin- 
 ning " When in the course of human events," something 
 was sandwiched; and what do you think it was? Not 
 "Yankee Doodle," or "Hail Columbia," or "The Red,. 
 White and Blue," but the little Julietish song of " Good- 
 by, Sweetheart " ! Could they do anything better in 
 China? 
 
 While I have only made a faithful record of the dra- 
 matic scenes and sounds, with not one touch of exaggera- 
 tion, a fact to which one Doctor of Divinity, two traveling 
 missionaries and one neophyte can bear witness, yet it must 
 be frankly admitted that, on reading it over, I hardly 
 believe it myself, but it is severely true for all that. 
 
 Out at last and for good and all, we cross from China 
 into America, under a starry sky, and breathing an air 
 fresh and free from beyond the Golden Gate. It was like 
 emerging from a total eclipse into broad and blessed day, 
 and I recalled the words of Tennyson with all the vivid- 
 ness of poetic creation. It was as if I had written the 
 lines myself: 
 
 " Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day, 
 Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay! " 
 
 Harems in Utah and idols in San Francisco idols set 
 up like ten-pins, and no man bowls them down. W T ho 
 says this is not emphatically the land of latitudes? There
 
 GOING TO CHINA. 123 
 
 have been ages when the Crusaders would have effaced 
 them from the continent, like a writing from a slate, with 
 a wet finger, albeit the finger was wet with fresh blood. 
 We sailed to Pagans, and now Pagans sail to us. They 
 have dropped into Christendom like a great black diamond. 
 They are anthracite. 
 
 We have regarded John as a sort of overgrown boy, 
 a kind of cushiony creature. You can thrust your finger 
 anywhere into his character. You withdraw it, and it 
 retains no print of it, any more than the water into which 
 you plunge your hand. Within that apparently yielding 
 characterlessness is a spine of heathen iron, and tough as 
 the worst of it. A bridge made of such material would 
 last the world out. And as for that rigid, jointless spine, 
 who can wonder that it exists? Here, now, is a man who 
 represents and believes a religion that runs back to pre- 
 historic ages; to whom the name of the Chinese Moses is 
 as familiar to-day as the name of Jesus Christ in Bible 
 lands; whose eye brightens at the syllables Kung-fu-tse, 
 as at a welcome household word. It names Confucius to 
 Chinese ears, a man who died twenty-three hundred and 
 fifty years ago, whose descendants, in undoubted line, live 
 to-day, the eightieth generation from the great philosopher 
 who died before Socrates began to teach, and his works 
 remain "even until this day." Is it any marvel that a 
 religion indurated through the ages, unyielding and change- 
 less as if absolute truth, wrought into the life, thought, 
 custom and tradition of this man John, should harden 
 into a firm and almost sullen disbelief in all the world 
 besides? That there should be hardly a vanishing point 
 of contact between him and the out-world races, to make 
 him a full and free-born member of the human family?
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MISSION DOLORES AND THE SAINTS. 
 
 TO-DAY there are one hundred and ten churches, 
 chapels and missions in San Francisco, giving one 
 place of worship to every three thousand people, exclusive 
 of " the strangers within the gates," and services are 
 conducted in French, Spanish, Russian, Scandinavian, 
 Italian, German, Hebrew, Welsh, English and Chinese. 
 You should hear the Chinamen in full tongue in a Sunday 
 school. After that you can tell where the idea of a gong 
 came from. It is as original as a tremendous echo; and 
 sounds as if the names of all the rivers had got away 
 and ran in together Yang-tse-kiang-Hoang-ho-kiang-ku- 
 Kin-sha-kiang-Ya-long-kiang-D/<7-.Do^y/ 
 
 It was one of those perfect San Francisco days with 
 which the year is almost filled, when the sun and the 
 ocean conspire to sweeten and temper the air with beams 
 and breezes, when the hills grow friendly and draw near, 
 and so we went to the Mission Dolores, founded by the 
 Spanish Friars on the 9th of October, 1776, when much of 
 the land on which the city stands had not yet come out 
 of the sea, and the shore was a wide waste of dunes. 
 
 Here, one hundred years ago, civilization's farthest 
 outpost, half church and half fortress, was established, 
 and its patron Saint Francis was to give the Yerba Buena 
 of the old maps the new name of San Francisco. Built 
 
 194
 
 MISSION DOLOEES AND THE SAINTS. 125 
 
 about by spacious structures of modern date, faced by the 
 Convent of Notre Dame, the old church remains like a 
 rusted hatchet struck into some sapling in the elder day, 
 and grown around by the living column of a stately tree. 
 Here two ages meet. You see the recent redwood dwell- 
 ing, and the old adobe house of brick baked without fire 
 standing by its side, whose walls resemble the swallows'- 
 nests that dotted the rafter-peaks of ancient barns as 
 with cottages of mud. You see roofs fluted with red tiles 
 resembling organ-pipes that have tarnished and rusted in 
 a thousand rains and suns. 
 
 And there is the old chapel, with its columned front 
 fair to see as a white nun, and there, in three square 
 port-holes, hangs a chime of three bells brought from 
 Castile many a year ago, rung, perhaps, within hearing of 
 the sunlit towers of my Chateaux en Espagne ah, those 
 castles in Spain! and now green with rust. Those bells 
 rang out the old century, rang in the new. You enter 
 the low-arched doorway into the chapel, a hundred feet 
 from altar-place to threshold; and where are the hands 
 that set the keystone, and where the priests that blessed 
 the place, and where the hidalgos that stood around? 
 The hands held flowers that drank them up. 
 
 "The good swords rust; 
 Their souls are with the saints, we trust." 
 
 But here are the walls of stone and unburned clay, 
 four feet thick, and here the mullioned windows, woven 
 with fan-light sash like spider's web; and here the Spanish 
 linen canvas with its pictures of The Last Supper and 
 the saints; and here two grand shrines of painted wood 
 from Spain, with figures of Saint Francis, Saint Joseph and 
 all ; there the Madonna and the Christ that came over the
 
 126 !1IT\VEEN THE GATES. 
 
 st-;i. And beyond is a heavy arch bra ring the legend: 
 " How terrible is this place. This is no other than the 
 house of God and the gate of heaven." You sit in a 
 wooden chair as hard as stone and older than our Fourth 
 of July. Above you is the gallery floor tessellated with a 
 paint-brush a puncheon floor hewn out with broad-axes. 
 Here, for a hundred years have matin prayer and 
 vesper song and grand high mass been rung and chanted, 
 said and sung. Here, priests from Spain, from Rome, 
 from France, have lifted hand and blessed the people, 
 while Indians and Mexicans and old Peruvians stood 
 around. Here brave nuns have breabhed their Ave Marias 
 in the wilderness. Vanished all, like light from dials 
 when the sun goes down. Think of the long-dead day 
 when a Spanish guard was stationed here to protect the 
 Mission. And the desert is a city and the city a mart, 
 and Spain has ceased to be the Motherland, and Mexico 
 her Daughter-in-law, and no blue-blooded Castilians come 
 to their outlying dependency any more. The face of the 
 world is changed as if fire had swept and God created 
 it anew. 
 
 THE OLD GRAVEYARD. 
 
 The graveyard of a hundred-and-one years adjoins the 
 church. You pass under the cross that surmounts the 
 gate, and are in the city of " the houses that shall last 
 till doomsday." The earth is rich with the uncounted 
 dead. You tread upon them in the alleyways. There 
 are hundreds and then hundreds. Nameless Indians with 
 their heads to the rising sun lie here by bands and tribes. 
 The old sexton unearths them sometimes wrapped in the 
 hides of wild cattle for shrouds. Soldiers of the blue and 
 the scarlet, English, American, Russian, Spanish, Mexican,
 
 MISSION" DOLORES AND THE SAINTS. 127 
 
 have bidden " farewell to the big wars," and gone into 
 camp together. Descendants of Spanish willows vainly 
 weep over alley and grave. Irish yew and English haw- 
 thorn are ever " wearing of the green." Trees in ever- 
 lasting bud and bloom give Christmas roses, and bouquets 
 for June. The ivy's glossy leaves caress the graves. How 
 rich and rank they grow! Let us hope the dead have 
 gained the crown, for behold, the crosses they have left 
 behind. And still they come! There goes the sexton 
 with his spade. The place is full of angels, altars, lambs, 
 tombs, urns and shrines, in wood washed blank of letter 
 and device, in marble and in granite. You stand by the 
 grave of the first Spanish Governor of California, and you 
 read: "Aqui yacen restos De Capitan DON Louis ANTONIO 
 ARGULLA, Prima Gobernador del Alta California." He lies 
 in the sacristy of the old church, the granite chamber 
 where they kept chalices and censers for frankincense and 
 wine; a right stout lodging, and time-proof as the globe. 
 Reading monument after monument, you feel as if in a 
 foreign land. The names are no "household words" of 
 ours. Here is a slab bearing the name, "James Sullivan," 
 the " Yankee " Sullivan of whom the world has heard, 
 and the words, " who died by the hands of the V. C. 1856." 
 That V. C. is graven upon other marbles here, and means 
 Vigilance Committee, and revives the memory of wild and 
 lawless times. Following the name are these significant 
 words: "In Thy mercy Thou shalt destroy mine enemies!" 
 At last, beside the old adobe wall, the sexton shows 
 an unsuspected grave, no slab nor mound nor coverlet of 
 grass. Beside it is another, with turf subsided like a 
 tired wave. It is surrounded by a bleached and sagging 
 fence of pickets. Over these two graves a small historic
 
 1_'X BETWEEN THE GATKS. 
 
 war has been waged. Within six months after the Sign- 
 ing of the Declaration they had two funerals; an Indian 
 and a Spaniard were buried here. Now, which was buried 
 first? One has one grave, and one the other and which 
 the honor of the first inhabitant? Over what trifles will 
 even wise men fight! The name and story of each had 
 fallen out of human speech and memory as long ago as 
 gray-haired men were in their swaddling bands. What 
 matters who or when? The poet Montgomery wrote the 
 epitaph for the broad world's men: "THERE LIVED A MAN." 
 
 As you turn to leave the place, the marble figure of 
 a suppliant woman with lifted hands and sad and sight- 
 less eyes turned heavenward, impresses you like a spoken 
 word. So are these all beneath the sod, all but the lifted 
 hands. Speechless, helpless, front-face to Heaven, here 
 they lie and wait. God save the world! Let us go out 
 at the time-stained gate, and into the ever-flowing tides 
 of living creatures. We had almost forgotten the- glad 
 sun and the crystal air, and even the roses the sexton 
 gathered from some graves to give us, seemed to shed a 
 sad, funereal fragrance, as of crape, and the vexed and 
 troubled earth that, for the graves they make within it, 
 has little rest. 
 
 Quick! There's a Valencia street car. "So dies in 
 human hearts the thought of death." 
 
 THE SAINTS. 
 
 California geography has the true old Mexican and 
 Castilian stamp upon mountain, town, vale and river. It 
 is genuine as the silver Spanish quarter of other days. 
 To be sure, it does not bear the pillars of Hercules, but 
 the Saints have stepped down from niche and shrine, and
 
 MISSION DOLORES AND THE SAINTS. 129 
 
 seated themselves in the open air. Thus you have San 
 Quentin, with a prison on his shoulders, Santa Rosa, the 
 city of the holy roses, where we saw a rose-tree twenty 
 feet high, with a sturdy trunk, and starred like the Milky 
 Way with a thousand full-blown flowers; San Jose, with a 
 city in his lap. Then there are San Benito, San Rafael, 
 San Diego, San Pedro, San Leandro, San Juan not the 
 Don, San Mateo, San Andreas, and the rest. Sometimes 
 they take to the water, as San Joaquin River and San 
 Pablo Bay. Then Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa 
 Cruz and San Francisco. The principal part of the popu- 
 lation of the Calendar seems to have been lured out-of- 
 doors by the weather and never gone in again. Then if 
 they are not saints they are angels, as Los Angeles, and 
 if neither the one nor the other, then an Island in the 
 Bay talks English and says "Angel," and a city and a 
 river cry out in concert, "Sacramento!" Altogether, if 
 a man meant to make a compact sentence unburdened 
 with adverbs, he could say, California is a country where 
 the places are all Saints and the people are all sinners. 
 
 The names the miners gave their camps and claims 
 are almost always hooks to hang a history on. Hell's 
 Delight and Devil's Basin are an antipodal oifset to 
 Christian Flat and Gospel Gulch. Slapjack Bar and Nut- 
 cake Camp commemorate some dainty dishes. Shirt-tail 
 Cafion and Petticoat Slide belong to the wardrobe, while 
 Piety Hill probably christened a vantage ground that no 
 Christian ever went to if he could keep away. 
 
 It is easy to see how, as among the old Saxons, names 
 grow out of callings. Thus in Sonoma county there are 
 four John Taylors, and not one of them "John Taylor 
 of Caroline." Three are known by the way they
 
 1 HKTWKKN TIIK OATHS. 
 
 made their fortunes, and the roster runs thus: Whisky 
 John, who never drinks; Sheep John, who is bold as a 
 lion; Hog John, who is no miser; and John. Abolish 
 books and records, and let these names go down tossing 
 carelessly about in a traditionary way for a couple of 
 generations, and the children of the first would be 
 Whiskies; of the second, Sheep, if not lambs; of the 
 third, Hogs, if not pigs; and the fourth, undoubted 
 descendants of plain John Taylor.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 
 
 IF you wish to be acquainted with California, fall in 
 love with its valleys, smell its flowers, taste its fruits, 
 know its people, breathe its air, you must not sit in a 
 railroad car contemplating somebody's back-hair, or won- 
 dering whether the observer next behind you sees any- 
 thing wrong in the nape of your neck; but you must go 
 in a big covered wagon as strong as a mill, with a 
 pleasant company, and such a friend and Palinurus as I 
 had, in the person of a gentleman who can preach a 
 sermon, give a lecture, edit a paper, build a temple, found 
 a college, and run a railroad. But none of these abilities 
 would have mattered the crack of a whip if he had not 
 known how to drive, and how to " suffer and be strong." 
 He could drive, he did suffer, he was strong. It is curious 
 how many-sided a man may be, a human dodecagon, if 
 you will, and yet be put in a place any minute where he 
 is as useless as the half of a pair of shears. 
 
 Crossing San Francisco Bay, all snug and stowed, full 
 of lunch-baskets and expectation, we struck into the Sonoma 
 Valley, bound for the Petrified Trees and the Geysers. 
 Though it never rains here except by programme, yet it 
 rained. They tried to persuade me it was a fog, but a fog 
 that has a body to it and tumbles all to pieces in rattling 
 saucy water, inspires the hope that there will be no such 
 
 131
 
 132 i:i.l\Vi:i:V THE GATES. 
 
 thing as California rain until I am safe beyond the moun- 
 tain^ As a boy would say, it was a /mV rain. The 
 wind blew it straight out, and the couple on the front 
 seat were blue likewise. Those behind, all snug and dry 
 as chickens under a hen, were as merry as grigs. When 
 the water goes drip, drip, upon your nose from the fore- 
 piece of a cap, and spatters from that promontory into 
 your eyes, and runs down your indignant bosom, you feel 
 like praying for a longer visor or an abridged nose, but 
 if anybody thought good words in bad places, nobody 
 said them. 
 
 It had only been a day since I was wishing for the 
 fragrance and the music of a dear old June shower, 
 bound about its forehead with a rainbow as with a fillet; 
 the flowers nodding sweet approval and the leaves lap- 
 ping it like tongues that are athirst, and here it was, 
 all but the fillet, and I was not content. It is hard to 
 tell precisely what we do want. But it is due to the 
 blessed Coast to add that you might live on it for ten 
 years and see no such misplaced rain. The winters, with 
 their long and amiable rains, would have been a paradise 
 to the frogs of Homer, and they would have broken forth 
 in Greek more eloquently than ever: " brek-ek-ek-koax- 
 koax." But riding through the valleys in the summer, 
 where it has been as dry as the shower on the old cities 
 of the plain, you will marvel at the glossy green and 
 fresh look of shrub and tree, as if everything, like the 
 rose of the " English Reader," had been washed, 
 
 "just washed in a shower, 
 That Mary to Anna conveyed"."
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 
 
 133 
 
 A DEAD LIFT AT A LIVE WEIGHT. 
 
 At last, on a slippery grade, the near-wheeler sat 
 down, inserted two feet between the spokes of a fore- 
 wheel, two more right under the vehicle, and had he 
 been as well off for legs as a house-fly, and had another 
 couple, they would probably have got into the carriage. 
 As it was, they were distributed about like the multiplied 
 codicils of a legacy. That wagon was emptied as green 
 peas pursued by a thumb-nail fly out of a pod, and there 
 they stood like so many 
 bedraggled poultry, all 
 but one mother and 
 two chickens who scud- 
 ded away through the 
 driving rain to a dis- 
 tant cabin for help. I 
 wish to place it upon 
 record just here, that 
 in fifty or sixty years 
 that mother will " with 
 the angels stand," for if anything will dispose a woman 
 to wickedness it is when she gets damp around the 
 ankles, and her skirts swash about her footsteps like a 
 frantic dishcloth, and her watery gaiters squeak as she 
 walks like a morsel of cheese curd. When we overtook 
 her the bright smile that she wore should have kindled 
 a rainbow. 
 
 There lay twelve hundred pounds of horse and no 
 derrick. The party stood about like monuments dripping 
 in the rain, while the many-sided man addressed himself 
 to the stern reality of the occasion, or to be accurate, 
 of the wheeler dormant. He bowed himself like Samson
 
 134 HETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 upon the pillars. He emulated the " I am thy father's 
 ghost!" of Hamlet, and did that horse's "tail unfold." 
 It was a stern pull, a long pull, and a pull in detail; 
 and that beast, suspended like several swords of Damocles 
 upon hair, swung slowly round as if he were on a rail- 
 road turn-table, scrambled up looking as if the wagon 
 had been drawing him, not he the wagon, and we were 
 once more under way. The misery of it was the music 
 of it, and various versions of the story were retailed 
 about to beguile the long day we sat under the rainy 
 eaves of the sky, and I hereby entail it on the heirs and 
 assigns of the Star who played " the heavy part." 
 
 The next morning was a delight. The valley swept 
 out twelve miles to the mountains that were draped in 
 their Sunday blue. For the first time in my life I walked 
 among the peach's first-cousins, the almond trees, the 
 orchard of Ecclesiastes, but the blossoms had ceased to 
 shine, and the limbs were full of fruit. Five varieties ot 
 stately oaks stood around the house, but the live-oak was 
 the grandest. Spanish moss hung in festoons and lambre- 
 quins of gray lace from the limbs, and solemnly swung 
 in the morning air. They gave a weird and graceful, 
 but a sad look to the landscape, and reminded me of faded 
 mourning, draping some old manorial hall for the dead 
 lord or the lost lady. 
 
 "0, the mistletoe bough!" and there it is. All about 
 upon the oaks hang globes of the Druidical parasite, like 
 orreries of green planets, and I felt that I was in a 
 foreign land. I had seen a parasite in the army that 
 showed gray on the blue blouse, but failed to show well; 
 and a parasite at the table of his friends; and never one 
 before that kindled a spark of poetry; but those little
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 135 
 
 emerald worlds on the oaks lighted the way through the 
 halls of deserted years, and with the Hebrew backward 
 step I walked near enough to hear a voice, clear as a 
 meadow lark's, strike up, when that old song was new, 
 
 "The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, 
 The holly-branch shone on the old oak wall,-" 
 
 but the cry of "All aboard ! " scared the voice away, and 
 the light of the green planets went out. 
 
 The children of the party gathered a heap of moss 
 that would fill a bed fat enough for a Mohawk Dutchman, 
 in the vain hope of carrying it home. Do you know that 
 children are capital baggage to take along upon a journey? 
 They ballast the grown people, and keep them on an even 
 keel. It took two to steady our craft. They are full of 
 exuberance as picnic satchels are of luncheons, and you 
 can take a little out now and then, when you feel old 
 about the heart, to make you young again, and nobody 
 will miss it. Let their names be " entered of record " : 
 CARUIE, the lassie with the gentle grace of patience, and 
 KNAPP, the lad who was never caught napping. May they 
 live to be gray as the Spanish moss they coveted. 
 
 The contrasts of scenery in California are as wonderful 
 as if you should enter a house by one door and leave it 
 all wilderness and winter in the front yard, then go out 
 at another to find it all summer and flowers in the garden. 
 I had such a transition within an hour. We climbed along 
 the edges and shelves of rugged mountains, above rivers 
 in everlasting quarrel with ragged rocks; below heights 
 walled up with stone ruins from the beginning, and fin- 
 ished out with the shaggy, russet backs of a thousand 
 dromedaries; meeting nobody but horsemen with lariats 
 swinging at their saddles; seeing no human dwelling;
 
 136 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 (raring night would come down upon us and no " pillar 
 of fire" to guide. A lew rattling downward dashes, and 
 we descended into Knight's Valley, with its homes and its 
 harvests, its fruits and its flowers, its hroad parks peopled 
 with the weeping oaks. Fancy a fragile, feminine English 
 willow, drooping, swaying, married to a husband to match 
 her, and that husband would be the weeping oak. It is 
 the blended grace and strength of the vegetable world. 
 A sturdy trunk, a broad crown, a dense foliage, and then 
 that pendent fringe of green, almost sweeping the ground 
 as it swings in the wind. The level rays of the sinking 
 sun touched everything with the hazy glory of a gold-dust 
 air. You wonder how many years it is and how many 
 degrees away, since you were cautiously creeping along 
 the brinks of cafions, and it was only an hour ago. 
 
 Santa Rosa is a city lost in a flower-bed. You can 
 find it by climbing a rose-tree as high as a house, and 
 obeying Sir Christopher Wren's marble injunction, " Look 
 around ! " It has a congregation of three or four hundred, 
 that, like Zaccheus, worships in a tree, only his was a 
 sycamore tree. It is the Baptist church, a quaint edifice 
 of unpainted wood, pleasantly suggesting a rural chapel 
 in England, and you think of the ancient yew-tree and 
 the rooks that should be calling. That house was made 
 of a single redwood; and the interior, from the floor to 
 the ribbed ceiling, was once wrapped in the same bark 
 jacket. 
 
 And then you cross a street to see a friend of childhood, 
 a bush that grew by the roadside and showed its sweet 
 white umbrellas of flowers in spring, and its dark red 
 berries in fall, whereof a wine was brewed, harmless as 
 the milk of old Brindle; a bush of whose wood you made
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 137 
 
 your first "deadly weapon," the pop-gun the elder of 
 the East. And here is a tree more than four feet in 
 circumference, and shading the eaves of a two-story dwell- 
 ing. It is the elder of the old days. 
 
 You traverse the Santa Clara Valley, where adobe 
 dwellings linger still, through Alameda avenue of poplars 
 and willows planted by Jesuit hands a century ago, to 
 San Jose, and from the vantage-ground of the Court- 
 House dome you see the horizon of mountains rising, 
 sinking, receding, nearing, like the billows of the sea, 
 and just one little way through, down the royal road you 
 came; and circled by that turbulent horizon, you look 
 down upon a thousand square miles of semi-tropic beauty. 
 You see the sinless inhabitants of the Indies, Australia, 
 Mexico, the Sandwich Islands and Peru, from the stately 
 palm with such a far-away look that it would hardly 
 surprise you to see a castled elephant move out from its 
 shadow, to the painted leaves of Brazil, appearing as if 
 leopards and tigers had lain down upon them and printed 
 them off in duplicate. 
 
 You look down upon the plaza which is the public 
 square, rich as the National Conservatory with foreign 
 loveliness. You gaze away at the checker- work' of ranches 
 which are farms. The mallows the humble thing that 
 grew about your feet in the East, with its tiny blossoms 
 no bigger than a vest button, the dairy plant of childhood, 
 whence you used to gather the little green " cheeses "- 
 is grown into a tree, and the birds'-eyes of flowers have 
 flared out like wild roses, and challenge you on tip-toe 
 to reach them. Booted boys swing by vines an infant 
 could have broken. You look at familiar things through 
 
 a mysterious magnifier. Like urchins you have not seen 
 ~ 6*
 
 1 :^ BETWEEN THE OATKs. 
 
 in ten years, they have .all grown out of your knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 A Yankee examines the soil and despises it. He pre- 
 1't-rs the hillsides of Stonington. The man from Illinois 
 prairies, who lugs a couple of pounds of mud into the 
 house to his wife every time it rains, remembers his 
 level acres in their total eclipse of Ethiopian richness, 
 and ^regards with contempt the tawny, dusty landscape 
 before him. He shall see it in winter time, when the 
 Lord works miracles with the treasures of His clouds; 
 when the miracle at the wedding in Cana, where " the 
 conscious water knew its God and blushed," grows familiar 
 and annual, and the water is turned into the wine of 
 the vine, yea, into bread and to wine. He shall see an 
 electric energy in this soil that will startle and charm 
 him: at night that the grain has visibly grown has 
 made a Sabbath-day's journey toward the new harvest; 
 at morning he shall see that the plants that went only 
 budded to bed have blossomed out in the dark. He won- 
 ders if Jonah was not here before Jason, and if seeds 
 from his gourd yet remain. Why not? Grains of wheat 
 three thousand years old, taken from the robe of a mum- 
 my, were sown and were grown, and were molded into 
 bread. 
 
 And writing of times so long gone they get new. 
 You may see at the United States mint in San Francisco 
 a golden spoon, of as quaint and delicate workmanship 
 as any of the trinkets of Her Majesty of Sheba. Its bowl 
 is a leaf, and its handle the wreathed stem it grew on. 
 It is frail and exquisite enough for the tea-set of young 
 Cupid. Now the numismatist, if that is the man and 
 I have riot mistaken the name, declares he has evidence
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 139 
 
 that the spoon was among the belongings of Solomon! If 
 so, have those pennyweights of pale gold come back at 
 last, after all the centuries, to their native land? Did 
 Solomon's ships ever beat up the Pacific coast, and lie off 
 and on in sight of the sands of San Francisco? As the 
 Spanish would say, Quien sabe? 
 
 " Cherry ripe ! " her lips do cry, and here you are in 
 one of the great cherry orchards of California. The trees 
 are shaped like little Lombardy poplars, with dense dark 
 foliage growing down the trunks like green pantalettes. 
 You see thousands of them of as uniform height as the 
 Queen's Highlanders. The inevitable John is picking the 
 fruit and white men are boxing it for market, in black, 
 red and gold tinted mosaics. They handle each cherry 
 tenderly as if it were glass. Twenty tons have been 
 forwarded, and they will gather thirty more during the 
 season. By the little hatchet of Washington, fifty tons 
 from a single orchard, and not a cherry too many, at 
 the highest of prices. What an Eden for the robin to 
 rob in! 
 
 One or two of the party who disposed of a dollar's 
 worth of rubies at a sitting, suffered a slight unpleasant- 
 ness that could have been covered by an apron without 
 being alleviated. Those cherries tasted like the little 
 book that John the Revelator ate, " sweet as honey," 
 but alas ! 
 
 There is a thistle. At least it would be in the East, 
 and the farmer would be after it with the hoe of destruc- 
 tion, but here it has expanded and brightened into a 
 brilliant scarlet flower, large and handsome enough to 
 trick out a general's chapeau with a feather. Now, if a 
 New York girl had that thistle she would welcome it tc
 
 140 111 1 \VEEN THE GATES. 
 
 her flower-garden, give it a new name ending in "tV," 
 like her own, and make a prince of it. 
 
 The air is sweet with the yellow glory of the Scottish 
 broom and strange with the odor of the Australian euca- 
 lyptus, with its leathery leaves held both sides to the 
 light; a tree that does not grow soberly, but springs to 
 the height of fifty feet while your boy is reaching three. 
 The valley is Elysian, the day is Halcyon, as we set forth 
 for a mountain ride. The grain in gi'een, yellow, white 
 and gold unrolls on every hand. We pass farm after 
 farm rich with the evidences of high cultivation, and not 
 a laborer in view; home after home with their broad 
 verandas, and window and door wide open, and not a 
 soul in sight. Horses by scores, cattle by hundreds, sheep 
 by thousands, and not a master or a shepherd visible. 
 Flowers that seem to be keeping house, their pleasant 
 faces toward the road; vines that show the gentle lead 
 of woman's hand, and not a chick of a child or a flirt 
 of a petticoat. It is as if everybody had gone in a 
 minute, "died and made no sign." Notwithstanding the 
 lovely landscape and the bright air, a feeling of loneli- 
 ness " o'ercomes you like a summer cloud" and an im- 
 ported cloud at that. You are in a land where weeds 
 are in the minority, and Nature does the work. The 
 country in the wildest places, where man never scarred 
 it with plowshare, seems to be a thousand years old. 
 You cannot abandon the notion that this field has been 
 tilled and that grove planted by human hands. 
 
 ON THE HIGH SEAS. 
 
 The road grows narrower and more rugged. We go 
 down ravines that spread out into little bays of greenery.
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 141 
 
 and then commit suicide by throttling themselves into 
 gorges. We begin to climb. The mountains grow 
 saucier and wilder. They act as if they would be glad 
 to shoulder us out of existence. The ledge of a road is 
 notched into precipices that tumble a thousand feet down. 
 It looks like a clock-shelf. It is now rock at the right, 
 abyss at the left, and now rock at the left, abyss at the 
 right. The mountains are executing a solemn darjpe, and 
 as they cross over and back we are lost in the mazes of 
 the measure. Tall trees lift their crowns almost within 
 reach, as if they grew from the under-world. Somewhere 
 below, their roots are holding on with the clutch of a 
 mighty hand. Rocks hang poised midway above, only 
 waiting for the passage of the carriage to let all go, and 
 be aerolites. You fancy the tremendous ricochet when, 
 with thunder and fire, they shall crash down the gulf, 
 through splintering of timber as of hurricanes, and rush- 
 ing of leaves as of driving rains. Then come the zigzag 
 lifts one after one, and when you reach them you have 
 reached the last letter in the alphabet of free-and-easy 
 traveling. They are the Z's of all thoroughfares. 
 
 You see that little nick on the brow of a loftier Alp, 
 like the scar of a sabre-stroke on a trooper's forehead. 
 That little nick is the road you are going! It is getting 
 to be nervous work. In places, you can drop a lead and 
 line plumb down from the wagon's side into the sunless 
 depth. All along, fearless flowers, the Indian pinks, the 
 wild roses, the honeysuckles, the violets, the azaleas, the 
 blue-bells, the giant asters, cling within reach of your hand 
 on one side, and smile in their still way as if they said, 
 'Who's afraid?" but on the other thin blue emptiness. 
 The old familiar horizons, that have always clasped you
 
 142 r.i T\VI:I:N ni K GATES. 
 
 and kept you from being lonely in the wide world, have 
 grown iilicnated and deserted you. See them retreating 
 away at your left and behind you, slipping off from the 
 planet and revealing something of what Satan showed 
 the Savior, " the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
 them." And what a stormy world it is! And you climb- 
 ing a mighty surge and looking across a tumbling ocean 
 of troubled mountains. You feel as if you were some- 
 how escaping from yourself into the rarer atmosphere 
 a kind of dying without death. Here and there little 
 cities, the spangled breast-pins of civilization, glitter in 
 the troughs of the sea. It would not surprise you much 
 to see them riding the next wave that comes. Russian 
 River ti'ails along like a streamer lost overboard. The 
 shaded greens and blues of oak and evergreen, and vines 
 and flowers, are " worked down," as painters say, like an 
 ivory picture. Yonder is old Saint Helena, in whose 
 shadow you traveled for hours, and then climbing over 
 his hip slipped down on this side of him. You thought 
 him mighty, but every ravine is dwindled to a wrinkle, 
 a mere bit of deeper color, and altogether he is shriveled 
 down to the haystack in the home meadow. Here are 
 tawny sweeps with the green spray washed off, and 
 you think of streaks of lurid light from a sun you can- 
 not see. There, tall cliffs in ethereal robes azure as a 
 bluebird; yonder, the horizon has broken utterly away, 
 and the world dim and dimmer is flowing through like 
 the floating of a veil of gossamer. Pine Mountain in 
 his dark cloak is in sight. He is a monk among them. 
 High up the acclivities are scars, as if received in some 
 old bombardment. They are entrances to the quicksilver 
 mines. The roads to them are hair-lines in the distance.
 
 VALLKY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 143 
 
 THE HOG'S BACK. 
 
 Five miles across, and apparently within the toss of a 
 stone, is the Hog's Back, a spine of a mountain bridging 
 the valley from side to side, and standing at an angle of 
 forty degrees. Some hirsute keeper of swine must have 
 named this gigantic highway. It is complimentary to the 
 hog, but a libel on the mountain. Think of a mastodon 
 weighing a hundred million tons forever crossing the 
 valley and never leaving it, his gray sides and ridged 
 back lifting vast and bare amid the visible thunders of 
 the gorges for have you not seen mountains that looked 
 thunder as you watched them, as if any moment they 
 might give tongue and go bellowing down the world? 
 and then think of riding after a four-in-hand lashed out 
 to the reckless, rattling gait of the wild steeds of the 
 pampas, down that lifted and angry spine, with a sway, 
 a swing and a sweep, the slopes falling away like a horse's 
 mane from the ridge, and no more chance of a halt than 
 if you were riding a cannon-shot. If you can do it and 
 not feel a cold wave shudder down that spine of your 
 own, you are fit to sit upon the box with Phoebus, when 
 he drives his golden chariot down the sky. 
 
 The road comes to emphatic pauses before and above 
 you. It runs out into the air every little way, and dis- 
 appears like a whiff of yellow dust. You meet it coming 
 back with a bewildered look on the other side of a gorge, 
 as if it were lost or discouraged, and were making the 
 best of its way home. You are sorry for the road and 
 a little sorry for yourself, but you double back on the 
 trail as if the dogs were after you in full cry, and follow 
 on. Some of the party are afraid to look down and 
 afraid to look up, but nobody is reluctant to look off. It
 
 144 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 is going to sea without leaving the shore. At intervals 
 there are ticklish turnouts projected over the precipice, 
 with exactly as much railing to them as there is to rape 
 Horn, where you doubt whether you want either the rock 
 side or the air side. What if we meet somebody on the 
 tape-line of a road between! And we do! Around that 
 headland come a pair of noses, and there is a simultaneous 
 cry of "team!" The witch of Endor would have been a 
 more welcome apparition, for we could have driven tlir<>i/l> 
 her and not broken a bone. The noses' owners tugged a 
 wagon into sight with a man and woman in it. It looked 
 like a dead-lock. Were it not for somebody else the writer 
 might have been there yet. You should have seen them 
 lift that wagon, woman and all, and set two wheels of it 
 just over the edge of the precipice. Had so much as an 
 eye snapped with the cpaick winks some of us executed, 
 and started those horses, that woman might better have 
 been dropped from the talons of an eagle into its nest, for 
 then she would have been some comfort to "the young 
 eagles when they cry. 1 ' She was as indifferent as a lay- 
 figure at a dressmaker's. It seemed to me like threading 
 a needle with only one chance to do it, and a stitch lost 
 a life lost. But they hemmed the edge, and as she rode 
 around the rocky elbow, that woman's square flat back 
 was as full of expression as her face. They were a match. 
 Then we made a plunge down the road, and began to 
 learn our letters on the other side of the mountains. It 
 was the mightiest hornbook that ever went without covers. 
 The many-sided man had a foot on the brake, for they 
 drive with brakes and not with reins in California, and 
 the horses traveled around the outer edge of visible things 
 with great humility. In these tremendous ups and downs
 
 VALLEY RAMBLES AND A CLIMB. 145 
 
 I think the downs have it. There is such a tension of 
 feeling about the ascent; such a twanging of violin strings 
 in the nervous music, as the keys go around and the wheels 
 go up ; such a thinking that you are climbing away from 
 home and out of the solid world; that you are losing 
 your standing-room on the planet every long and creeping 
 minute, as you take the bold diagonals of the mountain 
 stairs; all these things temper the grandeur with a touch 
 of awe, and render the exultation something too solemn 
 for delight. But your eyes are couched in the clearer 
 air, and the winds sweeping from crag to crag again, the 
 broad-winged free-comrnoners of Heaven, inspire you with 
 a kind of Independence-Day elation. You set Byron's 
 live thunders to leaping, The Vale of Chamouni subliming, 
 " The waters coming down at Lodore," and the Waldensian 
 Song in full chorus; but you are not apt to do it until 
 you have gotten a couple of miles nearer the earth's 
 center of gravity, and are regaling yourself with coffee 
 and tongue-sandwiches by the roadside. 
 7
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE GEYSERS. 
 
 HAVING ridden for hours the mountains' heavy seas, 
 ;ill at once, with slackened trace and tightened 
 rein and brake hard down, we begin to sink without 
 drowning. It is something like driving a four-in-hand of 
 nightmares. Down we go, a thousand feet a mile, now 
 circling a hill, now balancing as if on the left wing and 
 now on the right; then with swift dashes and pounces, 
 another thousand feet another mile, and then a final 
 plunge, and we bring up with a rattling of bolts, a jin- 
 gling of chains and a sense of satisfaction at the mouth 
 of Pluton Caflon, and in front of a spacious hotel, with 
 its broad hospitable verandas, and its doors and windows 
 all set wide in welcome, like so many pleasant faces 
 under two rows of broad-brimmed hats. In all California 
 you will find no house of refuge combining more of rest- 
 ful comfort, courteous attention, lavish abundance, and 
 the neatness of a young Quakeress. Amid great oaks and 
 beautiful flowers stands the very inn the poet Shenstone 
 would have loved. 
 
 So this is The Geysers. You have descended to it 
 with a bold flight, and it is seventeen hundred feet yet 
 to the level of the Pacific. You are in a nook of the 
 world. Around you the mountains lift three and four 
 thousand feet above the sea, and watch each other across 
 
 146
 
 THE GEYSERS. 147 
 
 the three-mile chasm. Before you is a gulf with zigzag 
 paths hidden beneath a luxuriant wealth of foliage. Laurel, 
 oak, fir, madrona, vine, shrub and flower, are fairly wran- 
 gling together in their rivalry to see which shall grow the 
 fastest. You take an alpenstock and a guide, a garrulous 
 old fellow, who has looked into volcanoes and groped in 
 caves, and turned his memory into a laboratory for all 
 sorts of loose mineral specimens and facts. You settle 
 down in your holdbacks, and walk on your heels. The 
 mountain shows its elbows all along, as if' to nudge you 
 off the path. You come to a rustic bridge across a lively 
 stream of clear cold water. It is the Pluton River. 
 There are "books in the running brooks" that swell it, 
 and, what Shakespeare never saw, the speckled trout; for 
 if he had, he would haye named it on some of his lords' 
 and ladies' bills of fare. The flash of its dappled beauty 
 might have diverted Ophelia from her " rooted sorrow," 
 and even my Lady Macbeth forgotten for an instant that 
 " damned spot," as she freed with her little hands the 
 rich flakes from their crisp and golden binding. There 
 are " sermons in stones " withal, for the Pluton lifts its 
 voice in loud and cheerful talk as it runs on. A stealthy, 
 speechless river, like a spy in moccasins, never commanded 
 my admiration. 
 
 You stand upon the bridge and look. The mountain 
 seems shut before you, and no "Sesame" at hand where- 
 with to open it. But you listen. The rumble of a grist- 
 mill, the tumble of a water-power, the hissing of an 
 engine, the bubble of boiling caldrons, the jar of a dis- 
 tant train. It is as if the murmuring echoes of a live 
 world were locked up in the heart of these mountains, 
 and the disembodied voices were clamoring for escape.
 
 1 Js BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 You listen as at the sealed den of some mountain mon- 
 ster with eyes that light his gloomy cavern. You hear 
 the craunch as he grinds a bison's bones, and his heavy 
 snuffing breaths of satisfaction as he rolls them over. 
 
 A sudden turn, and the mouth of the caflon swallows 
 you before you have quite made up your mind that 
 " Barkis is willing." You follow the crooked trail and 
 reach the Geyser River, warm for water but cool for tea, 
 that seems in a tumultuous hurry to get away, for it 
 tumbles down the giant stairs like the rabble rush of an 
 unruly school. The great green bay-trees, that flourish 
 like the wicked, roof you in. The crooked way grows 
 narrower and wilder. You enter, a craggy grotto of 
 romance, and from ledge to ledge pursue your upward 
 way. The California fashion of giving everything to the 
 devil prevails here a fashion "more honored in the 
 breach than in the observance." The air begins to smell 
 like the right end of a lucifer match. You are in the 
 " Devil's Office." It is an apothecary shop. Epsom salts 
 hang in crystals from the walls of rock; rows of mineral 
 springs, some of sulphur, some of salt, a trace of soda 
 here, of iron, there, of alum yonder, each more unpalat- 
 able than 1 the other, no matter which end of the stock 
 you begin at. Here is a stone pot of eyewater that, like 
 the widow's cruse, never gives out. People think it 
 strengthens the eyes, and " as a man thinketh so is he." 
 
 GOING UP THE CANON. 
 
 The narrow caflon opens like a fan. Leaf and shrub 
 disappear. It is getting serious and sulphurous. Rock 
 and earth break out with a most extraordinary rash. 
 The whole family of sulphur, ates, ites and ets, black,
 
 THE GEYSERS. 149 
 
 yellow, white and red, are everywhere. All tints of copper, 
 all shades of iron, strong with ammonia, white with mag- 
 nesia, gray with borax, crystal with alum. It is as if 
 there had been a universal wreck by earthquake of all 
 the chemical warehouses in America, and the debris had 
 been tumbled into this canon right over an everlasting 
 furnace, and kept hot, like the restaurants that promise 
 " warm meals at all hours." The rocks that bound the 
 narrow gulf are as full of holes as a bank-swallows' vil- 
 lage. Puffs of steam issue from them like breath from 
 the lazy nostrils of slumbering mastodons. You are 
 climbing all the while from crag to stepping-stone, up 
 rude stairs of rock, around sharp angles, by boiling cal- 
 drons, over streams of smoking water. The ground is 
 hot under your feet. Volumes of steam rise in everlast- 
 ing torment. Here at your right, in a room without a 
 door, and no place for one, somebody is churning. You 
 hear the dull thud of the dasher. You stand by a stone 
 hopper whose jarring, rumbling jolt assures you they are 
 grinding a grist that nobody has sent you for. As for 
 the miller, he is not in sight, and you are not curious. 
 His punch-bowl is even full, his alum kettle on the boil, 
 it makes your mouth pucker to smell it ; his arm-chair 
 of solid rock is empty, and you occupy it, the only thing 
 among his possessions you seem to covet, except his ink- 
 stand, a broad, liberal piece of furniture filled with a 
 liquid as ebony as " Maynard and Noyes' best black." 
 We come to the miller's family kettle, the Witches' Cal- 
 dron, twenty-five feet around, with a temperature of a 
 couple of hundred degrees, and filled with a tumbling 
 ocean of smut tea. It is the busiest place you were ever 
 in; a paradise of a kitchen for an imps' boarding-house.
 
 150 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 Under every foot of ground, behind every rock, within 
 every crevice, something is frying, simmering, boiling, 
 gurgling, steaming, fuming. You think the spoons for 
 supping here should have long handles. 
 
 Here is the escape-pipe of a Geyser steamboat. It 
 rejects tin- >ticks and stones you throw into it, and blows 
 off steam at times with great resentment. They set it to 
 playing a boatswain's whistle, but it piped "all hands on 
 deck " so relentlessly by night and by day that the weary 
 guests at the hotel, a half mile distant, petitioned that 
 the miller's trumpeter be permitted to lick his lips and 
 smooth them out of pucker for a long vacation. 
 
 The soles of your feet burn. Some chemical rodents 
 and mordants are gnawing at the leather. And then you 
 go up a flight of stairs cut and nicked in the face of a 
 rocky promontory, and climb to the top of a stone column 
 with a pulpit upon it a hundred feet high, and rugged 
 as any a persecuted old Covenanter ever preached from. 
 A flag-staff is set up therein, but the flag that floated 
 there grew as yellow in the brimstone as a pestilence 
 signal, and frittered away. 
 
 Not satisfied with endowing Satan with everything, 
 they have proceeded to ordain him, for this is the Devil's 
 Pulpit. You gaze down from the lofty look-out upon a 
 winding hall sloping rapidly away toward the bottom of 
 the cafton, and showing the unrailed galleries and slip- 
 pery stairways whereby you came, and all one blotch of 
 confused colors like a wagon-painter's shop-door. You 
 look through spirals, wisps and clouds of steam, of whiffs 
 from rocks that have sat down on themselves and fallen 
 to smoking their pipes. Your mouth tastes as if you 
 had lunched from a box of matches. You smell as if
 
 THE GEYSERS. 151 
 
 you had been out in Sodom's brimstone rain without an 
 umbrella. You feel as if you had escaped from Tophet's 
 open mouth; and if not quite so intensely, then as if 
 you had been basted with brimstone for the cutaneous 
 effects of that uneasy animal called acarus scabiei. How 
 much more harmless a thing may be when disguised with 
 words of which nobody knows the meaning! 
 
 The scene is weird. Macbeth's witches, amjloody's 
 witches, would be at home there, and set about making 
 broth of " eye of newt and toe of frog " without so much 
 as a hint from the miller. Leaving the pulpit, you go 
 down over the shoulder of the mountain by a pleasant 
 shady way to Temperance Spring, an artery of splendid 
 water that the roots of the big trees have vainly tried to 
 hold in their crooked fingers. You are in a cool and un- 
 suggestive atmosphere. Some crimson linnets are singing 
 in the trees, but no bird ever flew into the grim cathe- 
 dral or rested in the blotched cloisters of the canon you 
 have left. You halt at the Lovers' Post-Office, where a 
 rustic seat and a bended tree and a gracious shade invite 
 you. The great hollow of an oak is filled with cards and 
 letters deposited there by travelers from all the world; 
 you read names from New-Zealand, Australia, Brazil, 
 Hong Kong. It is a cousin of the Charter Oak of old. 
 
 Then catching up the broken thread of the trail, you 
 descend into the unshapely dish of a dead volcano. You 
 walk on the lava beds where the earth yields noiselessly 
 to your foot. A cane is thrust into it as easily as into 
 so much bakers' dough, and when withdrawn a puff of 
 steam lazily follows. It would hardly surprise you to 
 hear a discontented snore at the disturbance. One of the 
 ladies cries " Don't," and you don't. The volcano may not
 
 1.-.2 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 be dead, but sleeping; let us treat it with respect. We 
 walk amid the gray Hour of calcined rocks that would 
 have held an inscription for a thousand years, but they 
 came centuries ago grists to this mill. True it is, " the 
 mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding 
 small." You walk across the debatable ground of the 
 crater with the tiptoe feeling with which you used to 
 teeter into church in prayer-time, and come on the side 
 of the volcano to a hot sweat-and-mud bath where the 
 Indians used to bring their sick to be healed. It must 
 be the original office of Dr. Thompson, the ancient prince 
 of steam-doctors, and himself in high esteem. The mill- 
 er's tea-kettle with its rattling lid above, and its rush of 
 steam and its tumbling brewing below, is the last of the 
 miller's hardware that we visit. The orderly strata of 
 the rocks are torn and twisted out of shape, like a book 
 of tattered leaves. Bleached, encrusted, spangled like 
 nuggets, resembling petrified honeycomb, slate, sandstone, 
 everything, all tumbled out together. 
 
 People come here and take a hurried look. They lift 
 their skirts, and worry about their boots, and fresh from 
 Icelandic Geyser pictures with their hundred feet of col- 
 umned water, they think this but a wreck of a chemist's 
 kitchen. But let them linger; see that mountain fairly 
 cleft from peak to lowest depth; watch these rocky books 
 rent from their covers and tumbled into heaps of chaos; 
 sift through their thoughtful fingers the pale affrighted 
 dust of stone, ground fine as pollen from a flower; strug- 
 gle around these quaking, trembling, rumbling, stifling 
 crags and peaks, like a little steamboat shaking with the 
 ague of an engine too big for its body; think of these 
 mountains " rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," riddled
 
 THE GEYSERS. 153 
 
 with fires and forces no man can estimate; imagine the 
 intensity of the agencies that keep this wreck of matter 
 glowing, and these rocks bubbling like the sap in the 
 sugar-camps in spring; fancy what ruin would be wrought 
 were these safety-valves to shut; go to the bath-house 
 beside the Pluton, and grope in the chamber gray with 
 clouds of steam, or plunge into water hot from the boilers 
 of a thousand years; think, see, and do all this, and you 
 are inspired with a reverence for these reserved powers 
 that mutter beneath your feet. See the trees that stand 
 like tall hall-clocks upon the very rim and wreck of vol- 
 canic ruin, and time the long-gone day when its grim 
 thunders ceased, for lo, they have grown grand since 
 these giants always turning over fell into restless sleep! 
 
 BEAUTY IN THE CANON. 
 
 But even the grimmest deep of the canon gives birth 
 to beauty. I first saw the steam's white plumes droop- 
 ing and drifting away over a mountain shoulder, and 
 touched with the morning sun. There was the suspicion 
 of a bow of promise on the clouds. I saw them again 
 when the day went down the western slope. There was 
 a flush of glory on the smokes of the old camp-fires. 
 
 And all around this place are nooks and alcoves, 
 picturesque and beautiful. There is one, "The Lovers' 
 Rest," a sort of shrine beneath the laurel's royal roof, 
 where sun and shade play hide-and-seek together, and 
 floor the alcove with curves of green and gold. It hangs 
 like a balcony above the Pluton River, whose voice comes 
 up with laughter from its rocky street. Vines drape the 
 trees, and wild flowers smile from rugged clefts and swing 
 above the water. Gray rocks lie quietly about like flocks
 
 l.M UKTWKKN TMK (-VTES. 
 
 in the fold at night. A moxintain clad in broidered uni- 
 t'uriii st:inds guard to kvp the grim-mouthed canon out. 
 You could not tell it is within a thousand miles. 
 
 It was just here that an anniversary overtook us so 
 strictly personal that the writer hesitated to name it, until 
 he remembered it was an offense he could commit but 
 once in a quarter of a century. His Silver Wedding-day 
 found him and his at the Geysers, and their kind fellow- 
 mountaineers made it memorable with cordial words and 
 plt-asant deeds, and under the shade of the laurel, the 
 voice of mountain birds and Geyser river clear and strong, 
 the air bright with sun and sweet with flowers, the sev- 
 enth of June straight down from Heaven, the wedding 
 feast set forth, the valued friends around, these lines, 
 written where the miner's wash-bowl used to be in the 
 old song, " upon my knee," were read, and then " The 
 Lovers' Rest" was left to its loveliness and loneliness, 
 and the wedding guests are scattered from the Atlantic 
 to the Pacific. " Here's a health to them that's awa' ! " 
 
 Five and twenty years ago 
 
 And two thousand miles away, 
 With a mingled gleam and glow 
 As of roses in the snow, 
 Shines a day! 
 
 Only day that never set 
 
 In all this world of sorrow, 
 Only day that ever let 
 Weary, wayside hearts forget 
 To-morrow. 
 
 All the world was wondrous fair 
 
 To the bridegroom and the bride, 
 With the lilacs in the air 
 And the roses all at prayer 
 Side by side. 
 
 In the door stood golden day, 
 
 Washed the noon-mark out with light, 
 Larks half sang their souls away 
 Who dreamed the morning would not stay 
 Until nigkt?
 
 THE GEYSERS. 155 
 
 Dim and bright and far and near 
 
 Is the homestead where we met 
 Friends around no longer here, 
 Rainbow light in every tear 
 Together yet! 
 
 Ah, the graves since we were wed 
 
 That have made that June clay dim- 
 Golden crown and silver head 
 Always dying, never dead, 
 
 Like some hymn- 
 Some sweet breath of olden days: 
 
 Lips are dust on goes the song! 
 Soft in plaint and grand in praise. 
 Living brooks by dusty ways 
 All along! 
 
 Wandered wide the loving feet, 
 
 Some have made the lilies grow, 
 And have walked the golden street 
 Where the missing mornings meet 
 From below. 
 
 Night the weaver waits to weave, 
 
 Facing north I see unfurled 
 Shadows on my Eastern sleeve- 
 Crape of night, but never grieve 
 For the world. 
 
 Now, dear heart, thy hand in mine, 
 
 Through clear and cloudy weather, 
 Crowned with blessings half divine 
 We'll drink the cup of life's old wine 
 Together. 
 
 In this " Lovers' " perfect " Rest," 
 
 Beside the Geyser river, 
 Where mountains heap the burning breast 
 Of giants with the plumy crest 
 Forever, 
 
 New friends grace this Silver Day, 
 
 Apples gold in pictures fair, 
 Bringing back a royal ray 
 From the everlasting May 
 Over there. 
 
 We lift the prnyer of tiny Tim, 
 "God bless us every one!" 
 Crown life's goblet to the brim, 
 While across ils Western rim 
 Shines the Sun.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST. 
 
 ELIGHTFUL as it is to go a-gypsying by private 
 J ' conveyance, you want a touch of the four or six- 
 in-hand broad mountain stages, good for a dozen and no 
 crowding. I had such an experience with W. C. Van 
 Arnim, a knight of the road, not a brigand, but master 
 of the whip and ribbons. He can play on the reins as 
 if they were harp-strings. He gathers them up until he 
 feels every mouth with his fingers, and is en rapport, as 
 the mesmerizers say, with all of the six. Then that whip 
 throws out fifteen feet of lash with an electric explosion 
 at the end of it done up in a silk snapper, and he flicks 
 the near leader's ear as accurately as you can lay an 
 argumentative point on one thumb-nail and secure it 
 with the other. The team gives a step or two of a dance, 
 and is off. It plunges up the pitches like a charge of 
 cavalry. It dashes around the capes as swallows over a 
 mill-pond. The leaders have doubled a cape that juts out 
 above a precipice. The wheelers are making straight for 
 the chasm at a swinging trot. The leaders are nowhere. 
 You clutch the seat as the man overboard grasps a hen- 
 coop, and shrink to the rock side with a pinched feeling 
 of apprehension. 
 
 And yet it is wonderful to see the earth letting itself 
 down two thousand feet, and holding on with scarred 
 
 156
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST. 157 
 
 fingers and rocky knuckles to the shelf you are riding 
 upon. You look down. It has taken a river with it, and 
 never spilled a drop, and there it is hurrying along as if 
 nothing had happened. You look across the aerial gulf 
 all free and clear to another world beyond. ' Sometimes 
 you feel a disposition to fly, and sometimes you feel as 
 if you should fly in spite of yourself. You thought all 
 this since we lost the leaders, for a man thinks fast when 
 he is going to be hanged or drowned, or tumbled from a 
 precipice. Those leaders are headed for a point at right 
 angles to the stage. They must not pull a pound, and 
 you see why should they draw, the hind wheels would 
 be swung around over the gulf, and so you watch the 
 driver as he fingers out a pair of reins and hauls them 
 taut. The next pair are slackened upon the wheelers' 
 backs. 
 
 Yonder are four great S's in a row, two boldly curv- 
 ing toward the gulf, and two hugging the mountain with 
 the convex side. We strike the first and swing in on a 
 scurrying trot ; the next and sweep out ; and so till we 
 have dashed off the S's. It is alcove and column, column 
 and alcove; we whirl around the cornices and dodge into 
 the recesses, but the gulf fits the scallop like a glove. 
 There is no getting rid of it. 
 
 You say to Van Arnim in a deprecatory way, a sort 
 of pray-don't-laugh*at-me air, " Isn't the road pretty nar- 
 row?" giving a furtive look at the- wheel under your 
 hand, that rims along the very selvedge with a little 
 crumbling craunch. 
 
 " I have all I can use," is the common-sense reply, as 
 he touches up the off leader. By-and-by we meet a 
 heavily-laden wagon in the narrowest of places. Its
 
 1".^ BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 driver sees our cavalcade of horses, halts square in the 
 road as who would not? and nervously jerks the lines 
 tli is way and that, and his horses swing their heads from 
 side to side like a garden gate with a boy on it, but the 
 bodies never move an inch. 
 
 " Well," says our driver in a generous way, " which 
 side of the road do you want? Take your choice, and 
 get out of the middle of it." That sounds fair, but 
 then . At last, after some backing and sheering and 
 muttering, the wagon is shelved, and the stage just sways 
 astride of the gulf's brink and pulls through. Who ever 
 heard of breaking a precipice to the saddle! And so, up 
 and down, in and out, over and under, we go. It is as 
 graceful as flying. 
 
 The road from the Geysers to Cloverdale is like the 
 undulations of a strain in Homer. I think a Grecian 
 could learn to scan it. And there were curious things 
 on the way. Perched upon a tree over the road is a 
 specimen of the peacock of the West a rare bird, and 
 larger than an ostrich. This one had been repeatedly 
 shot at by ardent tourists, but they never ruffled a 
 feather. It is perched there yet. It is a formation of 
 a redwood limb, and a most remarkable portrait, even 
 to the tail and the detail of Juno's favorite poultry. Far- 
 ther on, at the left of the road, is a lean mountain, 
 its spine showing sharp as a wedge, and gaunt as a 
 starved wolf. 
 
 At the end of this spine, about five hundred feet in 
 the air, is the profile of a Turk. The face is about 
 five yards long face enough for a vender of lightning- 
 rods. The low forehead, the aquiline nose, the mous- 
 tached lip, the imperial on the chin, and even the eye-
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST. 159 
 
 lashes, are plainly seen without the help of keen optics 
 
 " To see things not to be seen." 
 
 The whole is surmounted by the folds of a turban wound 
 about with Oriental grace, and Nature has thrust a little 
 evergreen in it for a plume or for a joke, either or 
 both. What innumerable rains have trickled down that 
 patient nose, is the first thought; and the second, what 
 touches of wind and water have shaped those features 
 into everlasting immobility; of what earthquake shock 
 was that old man of the mountain born, who keeps end- 
 less watch and ward over the brawling canon. It might 
 have been there when King Alfred was making lanterns. 
 And it is less than a dozen years since the Turk swelled 
 the census by one. When the laboi'ers were building 
 the road, the foreman used to watch the cliff as you 
 would the gnomon of a garden dial for the time. The 
 sun struck a little promontory at eleven o'clock, and 
 one day, in an instant, he discovered the whole face, 
 and found it was the tip of another man's nose across 
 which he had been taking sight for noontime. 
 
 We rattle down the last declivity of the mountain, ford 
 the Russian River, and are again within lightning-stroke 
 of the world; for yonder is a telegraph wire, and this is 
 Cloverdale and dinner, where the food was cooked first, and 
 the guests were cooked just after they arrived. The land- 
 lord, who called himself a double-headed Dutchman, which 
 means he was High and Low, if not Jack and the Game, 
 had hidden his thermometer for the comfort of his pa- 
 trons, but it would have read the temperature up to par 
 in the shade, if it could read at all. 
 
 The day we reached the Petrified Trees was a glarer.
 
 160 HETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 The sun blazed steadily down upon a responsive earth 
 that blazed back again, and we were between two fires. 
 It is the cemetery of dead redwoods, solemn as the cata- 
 combs and looking older than the pyramids. It is a 
 graveyard where every fallen giant is struck with a rocky 
 immortality. You are back in the Stone Age. You look 
 upon the seamed, arid and naked hills covered with un- 
 lettered monuments, for the face of some Sphinx that has 
 been staring the centuries out of countenance with its 
 unspeculative eyeballs. You are met by Evans, the Pet- 
 rified Charley of the tourists, whose fathers were subjects 
 of the Great Frederick ; a tough old sailor aforetime, 
 who having tossed about upon all seas has anchored here 
 and turned Sexton. His home is a bit of a ship's cabin, 
 snug and holy-stoned. His slender-waisted fiddle and 
 some nautical instruments garnish the walls. The bunk 
 where he "turns in" is neat as a new tablecloth. His 
 companions are a dog, " Rascal," and a venerable, inquis- 
 itive and aggressive goat, called " Billy." 
 
 Now there was a lady in the party as active as an 
 antelope and enduring as young hickory. In the best of 
 senses she would make a " daughter of the regiment," 
 that would carry the boys by storm if the enemy failed. 
 Sparkling with vivacity, ready to scale a mountain or 
 catch a chicken, she was an antidote to the blues and a 
 dyspepsia exterminator. Baron Munchausen would have 
 delighted in her, not because she told stories, but because 
 she told facts as if they were fictions. " Billy " was 
 especially deputed to meet this lady, and they met. The 
 meeting was touching in the extreme. She sprang from 
 the wagon and grasped him saucily by his venerable 
 beard a salutation to which he sternly replied with
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST. 
 
 161 
 
 bowed head, she having given him the cold shoulder an 
 instant before. She indulged in a slight retrospect, and 
 Billy gave her a lesson in disjunctive conjunctions begin- 
 ning with " but." For a man who owns no cow, Evans 
 has an abundance of butter. The lady sat down upon the 
 impression her lesson had made, and meditated. I could 
 hardly abridge my story without omitting the abutment. 
 
 A kind of reception-room or, to carry out the figure, 
 a receiving- vault is filled with curiosities of redwood 
 mortality. Here is 
 a coiled snake, the 
 blood-vessels distinct, 
 every detail perfect, 
 struck with petrifac- 
 tion while taking a 
 nap. Twigs, walking- 
 sticks, knots, bark, all 
 as stony as if Medusa 
 had given them one 
 of her lithographs of 
 a look. There is no 
 revelry here. You 
 would as soon think 
 of waltzing with a mummy that had dined once or twice 
 with one of the Pharaohs.- Around us are wooded moun- 
 tains that shorten the sunshine a couple of hours every 
 day, relieving the place of a whole month of glow and 
 glare in a year. 
 
 You climb rocky paths, and up and down over knobs 
 and knolls of bare earth, grass and shrub, and reach the 
 cemetery, a rough area of twenty acres, where three hun- 
 dred stone redwoods sequoias lie heads down from 
 7*
 
 It.J BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 North to South at an angle of 35, the roots all being up 
 the mountain sides, and unpleasantly suggesting apoplexy 
 had there been any blood or any sap or anything alive 
 in centuries. Some of them have been exhumed from 
 the ashen and thirsty soil by the industrious old Sexton, 
 and some i-esemble long graves with their covering of 
 tarth. The old man regards these stolid logs as a shep- 
 herd so many pet lambs. He sees grains of gold in them 
 where you only see streaks of gray. They are his bread- 
 winners. He lives with them summers when you visit 
 him; he lives with them winters when nobody visits him. 
 Like the hero of Juan Fernandez he has a goat and a 
 dog, but no " man Friday," and no more wife than Mungo 
 Park had in the African desert. He pinches in an affec- 
 tionate way the corrugated bark of these tumbled mono- 
 liths that once had life, as if they could take a joke. He 
 picks up a few little stone chips and gives you, but he 
 is prudent, for he sees thousands like yourself who will 
 come for more chips. 
 
 You clamber upon a fallen monarch with its thirty- 
 four feet girth and sixty-eight feet exhumed. Here are 
 the bark, the scars, the knots, as in life, and its rings 
 chronicle a thousand years! In its glory it must have 
 been two hundred feet high. Where are the birds to fit 
 this monster the birds that nested in its branches 
 and what their length and strength of wing and talon? 
 The breezes that waved its foliage may have been dead 
 five centuries when the little fleet of Admiral Columbus 
 felt for wind with their mildewed sails in 1492. 
 
 Some of the trees were scathed by flames before they 
 put Insurance Agents at a discount and became fire-proof, 
 and here are blocks of charcoal turned to stone. Noth-
 
 THE PETKIFIED FOREST. 163 
 
 ing was spared by the solemn, silent spell. The scene 
 brings back the fable of the enchanted palace of Arab 
 story, where all was stricken with a paralysis of mar- 
 ble. Several trunks are divided into sections of equal 
 lengths, and about right to build the generous fires of 
 our grandfathers; the yule logs of old English Christmas 
 Eves Some say they broke in falling, driving, drifting, 
 but there is too much "method in the madness." Those 
 trees were severed by human hands. Whose hands? God 
 only knows. By what gales of the elder time, blowing 
 
 out of the fierce North, were those gigantic corpses of 
 ashen gray uprooted and swept South? Did a volcano 
 shroud them in immortality? Did a cloud from some 
 mysterious alembic chill and deaden them to stone? If 
 these desolate heaps of flint and pebbly sand and thin 
 pinched soil were once a volcano's troubled mouth, the 
 furnace fires went out perhaps before the Conqueror's 
 curfew rang in Saxon England. What a rocking of the 
 cradle there must have been when the earth quaked, and 
 lava put these trees in fiinty armor, and transfused their
 
 164 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 veins with dumbness! If Agassiz could have been pil- 
 grim here before he went abroad, we might have known 
 
 You pick up chips that are rocks, write your name 
 upon bark as upon a slate, and your first feeling as you 
 traverse the graveyard is disappointment. ' But the grand- 
 cur of the scene grows upon you as you look and think. 
 Here is something out of the common reckoning. The 
 silence of the place is eloquent as speech. These head- 
 long trees are the heroes of old elemental wars. They 
 are dead on the field. They are pre-historic giants. 
 
 Young oaks, but older than the Declaration, have 
 crowded up through the shattered and helpless dead. 
 They exult amid the wrecks of a grander time, like 
 young Mariuses amid Rome's ruins. They are the living 
 dogs, and are they not better than the dead lions beneath 
 them? Then, all at once, it occurs to you that these 
 redwoods are the fallen columns of classic temples, " God's 
 first temples." What would you not give to know the 
 story of this necromantic place! Did any eye that ever 
 wept in human sympathy behold the transformation ? 
 Did mortal music ever ring amid the columned arches of 
 this wood? Who sang, what tongue, what theme? 
 
 You turn from the rent and rigid earth, no springs 
 of living water at your feet, no shadow overhead; from a 
 spot where some mysterious force in the gone ages cried 
 "halt!" to life and life, with pulses turned to rock and 
 pliant limb to adamant, obeyed. Life halted, but death did 
 not succeed it; death which is change, which falters at 
 time's touch into dust that is driven to and fro of winds 
 in helpless, hopeless atoms. They are old as the hills, and 
 yet were born into the knowledge of modern man but
 
 THE PETRIFIED FOREST. 165 
 
 sixteen years ago. You are glad to get away from Na- 
 ture out of business; Nature that has closed accounts 
 with life and time. 
 
 Altogether, to a thoughtful man, the Petrified Trees 
 are the most impressive things in California. They over- 
 whelm your vanity with gray cairns of what once danced 
 in the rain, whispered in the wind, blossomed in the sun. 
 We need not go to the realms of spirit to apply the 
 words of Hamlet. The royal Dane would have said them 
 here had he walked in this graveyard: "There are more 
 things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed 
 of in our philosophy!"
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 HIGHER AND FIRE. 
 
 THE Russian River Valley is fertile as Egypt and fair 
 as Italy. It is two hours from San Francisco, but 
 two weeks nearer the Equator. We halted at Healdsburg, 
 a pleasant town that gave us a welcome warm enough to 
 cook an omelet. "Sotoyome" names a hotel, but as it 
 means valley of flowers, it might well christen the whole 
 region. We stopped at the " Sotoyome." There is a funny 
 little affectation of grandeur in the way of announcing 
 arrivals at modern caravansaries. Thus you read that 
 A 13 has " taken rooms " at the Cosmopolitan. You call 
 on A B, and you find him in number 196, fourth floor 
 back, quite above the jurisdiction of the State, and higher 
 than you have ever gotten since you took the pledge; 
 one chair, one pillow, and eyed like a Cyclops with one 
 window; a room as hopelessly single as Adam seemed in 
 his bachelorhood. But "rooms" is statelier, and we all 
 enjoy it except A B, who skips edgewise to and fro 
 between trunk and bed, as if he were balancing to an 
 invisible partner. 
 
 The Russian River, which is not a rushing river in 
 Summer, courses its way oceanward. This country has a 
 history. As late as 1845 the Russians laid claim to it and 
 erected a fortress and raised wheat, and placed a tablet 
 upon Mount Saint Helena that shows his blue-caped shoul- 
 
 166
 
 HIGHER AND FIRE. 167 
 
 der at the eastward, and inlaid an engraved plate of 
 copper bearing some household words from Moscow, and 
 pronounced it a goodly land and desired it for their own. 
 Meanwhile the Spanish Governor down the Coast was 
 fulminating with his Toledo blade, because of the inroad 
 of the furry bears of the North. The subjects of the 
 Czar have gone, but they left their name on the river. 
 
 Thermometers run highest in low latitudes. Once find 
 out that people Atlanticward go into country places to 
 get cool, and you may be sure that on the Pacific they 
 will travel in the opposite direction for the same purpose. 
 They do. We had left blankets by night and flannels 
 by day for several degrees of the temperature that all 
 Christians pray against. That ambitious young man, 
 Longfellow's Excelsior, must have fired the mercury with 
 a passion to look down upon him. It ran up the degrees 
 as the nimblest member of Hook-and-Ladder Company 
 Number One climbs a ladder at a fire. It stood on the 
 hundredth round in the shade, and everybody shed his 
 coat and jacket. Like an onion, he came off rind by 
 rind. He husked himself like an ear of corn. 
 
 I sat under the vine and fig-tree of a friend it was 
 a Smyrna fig and full of fruit, and I fancied I was in 
 Smyrna. "In the name of the prophet, figs!" His first 
 look at a fig-tree takes a man back to the day when, 
 with his two unclouded eyes even with the counter, like 
 a pair of planets just ready to rise, he produced a cent 
 and demanded a fig. There were more cents'-worths of 
 comfort in that drum of figs than in a whole orchestra 
 to-day. The tree was Eve's live clothes-line. She found 
 her aprons on it, though she never hung them there. Its 
 name has been upon the Savior's lips. It is a Bible tree.
 
 168 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 It is strange to see it growing by the roadside, with its 
 dark green grape-vine leaves and its pear-shaped fruit. 
 You smile to find the little figs, each with its own apron, 
 come right out of the tree complete from the first, and 
 no announcing flourish of blossom. Once a fig, always a 
 
 fig- 
 
 Oranges were ripening near by. I made believe I was 
 in Florida. The thermometer went up to 106, and I saw 
 a cactus that had grown by diagonals, until the topmost 
 pin-cushion was eighteen feet from the ground, and edged 
 with a fringe of pink tassels of flowers, and I dreamed I 
 was in the Bishop's garden in Havana. The silver marrow 
 in that glass spine stood at 110, between two thicknesses 
 of trees and a vine. A thermometer is a damage in hot 
 weather. It heats and aggravates the observer with a 
 sort of metallic maliciousness. I put it in the sun to 
 kill it. There it stood, straight as a bamboo, not ten 
 feet from my chair, and grew to 140 in six minutes, 
 and was as sound as ever. I brought it back in my 
 wrath and watched it go down, and so did a crimson 
 linnet who sat on a cherry-tree, with his wings at trail 
 arms and his mouth open. The volatile god sank to 110 
 and stood still. I thought of going for a piece of ice 
 to make him reasonable; thought if I could only see that 
 glittering column at a comfortable ninety, I should be 
 more comfortable myself. There was a pomegranate in 
 bright blossom at my left, and a nectarine doing its best, 
 and I was away in Palestine in a minute. That thermom- 
 eter embraced the opportunity to try another round, and 
 stood at 112. 
 
 A tree with its fruit of violet green was not far off. 
 It was an olive. Noah had seen a branch from another
 
 HIGHER AND FIRE. 
 
 169 
 
 just like it, borne back by the bird to the boat that was 
 waiting for land. It has ever been the emblem of peace 
 since it brought joy to the heart of the first Admiral 
 that ever floated. What are olives in pickle and olives 
 in oil to the living tree ! And while I was gone to Italy, 
 the mercury watched its chance and the premium on quick- 
 silver was fourteen per cent. It 
 stood at 114. I looked between 
 the trees upon the plaza and saw 
 the hot air dancing up and down 
 in the sun as if, like some old 
 Peruvian, it was a worshiper of fire. 
 I thought I would go to the next g 
 corner, took an umbrella and went 
 two rods. Nobody could tell which 
 was the hotter, the sun or the earth. ._? 
 The ground flared like the throb- 
 bing breath of an engine with the 
 furnace door open and its red vitals 
 inflamed by a gale of forty miles 
 an hour. Then I knew I was in 
 Arabia, and looked out for some 
 stray sheik with a fleet of the 
 " ships of the desert." It always 
 appeared to me a piece of cruelty 
 to make a beast of burden of a camel, when the poor 
 animal has to carry the most of himself packed in bales 
 upon his own back. It is an ungenerous indorsement. 
 
 As I went that two rods, and it seemed as if my 
 umbrella would wilt like a poppy, I understood for the 
 first time the dignity of the African potentate, one of 
 
 whose titles is " Lord of the Four-and-Twenty Umbrellas. 1 ' 
 8
 
 170 BETWKKN TIIK (iATES. 
 
 I knew why he has so many. It is the census of his 
 entire wardrobe. With the air at 145 and the earth 
 you walk on trying to get as hot as the sun, one poor 
 little parasol is worthless. What you want in such a 
 country is a pair an umbrella at each end: one to keep 
 the earth off, and one to keep the sun off. It was some 
 comfort when the lightning came along the wire with the 
 word that at Cloverdale, sixteen miles distant, the mer- 
 cury was 118 and everybody alive but those that were 
 dead before; and that at Skagg's Springs, where people 
 go to be happy, it was 100 at bed-time, and bed-time 
 was postponed till morning. 
 
 It helped me, too, when a lady of our party, a moral 
 niece of George Washington, and as incapable of telling 
 a lie as her uncle was, assured me that it has been hot- 
 ter out of the place that the Three Worthies occupied, 
 and in this region also, than we were being " done 
 brown" in; that she saw a little prisoner of a ground- 
 squirrel, whose cage was hung In the sun against a wall 
 and forgotten, actually melted to death by the blaze, like 
 a candle in the fire. 
 
 How much better we can bear other people's sorrows 
 than our own! How resigned we are at their bereave- 
 ments, and how nobly we withstand their temptations! 
 If, with the same set of qualities, we could only be 
 " other people," what a model of human kind every one 
 of us would be! 
 
 Some fruit was baked on the sunny side, some flowers 
 wilted, but altogether those furnace days spurred vegeta- 
 tion into a Canterbury gallop. And the wind blew out 
 of the North, and the harder it blew, the hotter it grew. 
 It was as enlivening as the Sirocco. It was the Sirocco 
 if it was not a Simoom.
 
 HIGHER AND FIRE. 171 
 
 Going that two rods, I saw two young human animals; 
 one had legs like a pair of parentheses ( ), and an abridg- 
 ment of a blue calico frock; the legs of the other were 
 straight as the arrows of Apollo, and her dress was bright 
 and gauzy as a June cloud. The first was a Digger 
 Indian's papoose, with beady eyes, a crafty look, hair cat- 
 black and " banged." The last had eyes blue as a lupin 
 and clear as a China saucer, wavy hair almost the color 
 of corn silk, and the complexion of a sea-shell. I felt 
 in the case of the papoose that it would hardly be a sin 
 to set a trap for it, and yet the dusky mother flung it 
 over her shoulder and nursed it as if it were worth 
 saving! What numberless degrees between the pet and 
 the papoose, and where shall we look for the link? They 
 were both fire-proof, played bare-headed in the sun and 
 were not consumed. 
 
 A band of Digger Indians in the valley gave an 
 opportunity for the pursuit of Natural History. Several 
 squaws were pursuing minute specimens of it also, as, 
 like deck-passage ideas, they swarmed the heads of the 
 papooses. But there is no room for anything in the 
 hold. I saw foreheads belonging to stalwart fellows that 
 were barely an inch high, and the hair grew boldly 
 down, like a bison's, almost to the brink of the eyes. It 
 is surprising that John has not caught one of them and 
 made an idol of him. 
 
 We hear of people dying violent deaths. Under the 
 impulsive temperature of some California valleys, I think 
 it may be said that the animal and vegetable world live 
 violent lives. Something bit my hand under a snug kid 
 glove one of those torrid days. It was a vicious bite, 
 sharp as a trout's. The glove came off, and there was a
 
 172 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 little beast that looked like a flax-seed, but the hot weather 
 had given him the voracity and vivacity of a shark. He 
 didn't mean anything. It was only his incisive way of 
 speaking to me. 
 
 We boys, you know, used to thrust a sprig of live- 
 forever in the crack of the wall to see it grow, and 
 thought it wonderful that a poplar whip or a currant 
 slip would furnish its own root, and go into the business 
 of independent living. In California you can thrust a 
 peach limb in the ground, and it will turn into a tree. 
 An old resident on the Pacific Coast and an older friend 
 of mine, set a bit of a budded branch in the earth one 
 November, and the next July it bore a peach as large as 
 a big fist. A cast was made of the prodigy, and when 
 I saw it a sentiment of gratification possessed me that 
 my cane is tipped with an iron ferrule, lest it should 
 take root while I halt to greet a friend, and give me 
 trouble! If there is one place better than another for 
 people given to lying, it is California; for no matter how 
 strange the story they tell, it is pretty sure to be verified 
 somewhere in the State. Example: A calla-lily may be 
 in full chalice out-of-doors, and the ocean fog may case 
 its leaves in ice till it looks like a lily of glass and frail 
 as a damaged reputation. But that lily is no more 
 harmed by it than it would be by a summer dew in 
 New York. The sun comes up and the ice melts, and the 
 flower is as fresh as ever. And thus you have a sort of 
 January-and-June Millennium. 
 
 There is no gradual shading out of anything in Cali- 
 fornia. The rapidity of the contrasts is the wonder of 
 them. A boy is a man, a girl is a woman, before you 
 know it. You are kept in ceaseless astonishment because
 
 HIGHER AND FIRE. 173 
 
 everything young is so old, and everything old is so 
 young. It is quite impossible to tell what anything will 
 be till it is. 
 
 In San Francisco there is no long-subsiding Eastern 
 twilight, that goes down like a great maple-and-hickory 
 fire, to a bed of glow, then red shadows, then memory, 
 then the dead past, then night, without startling you. 
 It is the turn of a wrist. Day is shut off and darkness 
 turned on. You wake up in the night, and all at once 
 it has got to be day. There are no twilight lovers on 
 The Coast. The whispered momentous nothings, that 
 seem to . require a little toning down of the light in 
 other countries, are uttered here in broad day, without 
 so much as the protection of a parasol. It is an open- 
 handed, open-spoken, open-hearted land. There are fewer 
 back-doors than elsewhere. Vice goes in and out of 
 mansions whose tenants' names are done in silver upon 
 the panels of the front entrance: "Rose," "Jenny," 
 "Kitty"; but not the names their mothers called them 
 by, and a "rose by any other name smells" just the 
 same. People see more and look less than in lands 
 nearer the North Pole. 
 
 Elsewhere people covet the shade. Here they sit in 
 the sun. The beautiful parks where trees shed grateful 
 shadows are not resorts, unless they can find some happy 
 spot just ready to take fire with the noontide blaze. 
 They are baskers, and when the stranger thinks it a 
 perfect temperature, San Francisco goes countryward to 
 boil its blood down in a semi-tropical kettle, and make 
 it a little thicker and richer. 
 
 And it was at Healdsburg that we got into the 
 kettle!
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 
 
 MY rooms front a massive building of British Colum- 
 bia and California granite. Its severe and classic 
 fa9ade with six huge stone columns like fluted and petrified 
 pines, and its ponderous doors of iron, contrasts too vio- 
 lently with the light and uncertain architecture of a city 
 of wood. There is rock enough in the steps to make a 
 score of Plymouths, a geological fragment that, according 
 to the euphemism of the poet, "welcomed our sires." It 
 was about such a greeting as the royal boy with his 
 clever sling and a paving-stone from the brook Kedron 
 gave the giant. 
 
 The building is called by one of Juno's nicknames. 
 Like the modern young woman that can afford it, she had 
 several surnames her mother never knew the half of 
 them, and one of them was Moneta, corrupted by her 
 intimate friends into " Mint." When the Caesars and the 
 gods were in power, money was coined in her temple at 
 Rome, which was handy for her when Jupiter fulminated 
 about her pin-money. From this bit of Latin history 
 anybody can see that it is the United States Temple of 
 Juno of which I am writing. It is one of the largest 
 and most complete in the world. 
 
 Sometimes the gray front, as you watch it, takes a 
 yellowish tint as if a marked case of jaundice had struck 
 
 174
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 175 
 
 through three feet of stone from the bilious treasure 
 within. It is the reflection of a cloud overhead. You 
 look up and see plumes of golden smoke floating from 
 one tall hat of a chimney, and silver ones from another. 
 There is a laboratory suspicion in the air as if there were 
 trouble in the acid family, and Nitric, Sulphuric and 
 Muriatic were quarreling with somebody. To talk of 
 gold and silver smokes from a mint is no cheap magnifi- 
 cence. That smoke starts for the outer air with precious 
 things that do not belong to it. Silver and gold get 
 wonderfully volatile when you crowd them with fire, 
 and become " the riches that take to themselves wings 
 and fly away." Before that smoke escapee, they tire it 
 out by compelling it to travel a zigzag hall of a flue, 
 and drown it two or three times in reservoirs on the 
 way, so that the precious particles tangled in its folds 
 may drop down in the water, and leave the impoverished 
 vapor to take care of itself. A mint chimney is a sort 
 of pipe for Midas to smoke. 
 
 The precious metals are baking, boiling, frying, in the 
 furnaces below. To call the smoke golden is no fancy. 
 Little fortunes go up in those cloudy volumes sometimes. 
 The dust that had .settled upon the asphalt roof of the 
 Philadelphia Mint in a quarter of a century was recently 
 removed, and almost a thousand dollars in gold and silver 
 that had fallen out of the smoke were obtained. But 
 then you have seen plain blue smokes issuing from a 
 man's mouth, that in three years carried off a thousand 
 dollars, though not a dime of it ever fell anywhere. 
 
 I watched the Mint several days before I ventured 
 to go into it, lest it might make me covetous, or avaricious, 
 or discontented with the sort of postal-currency fortune
 
 176 
 
 BETWEEN" THE GATES. 
 
 I possess. There was always something going up and 
 coming down that cruel pile of stone steps. Every day, 
 Express wagons and huge drays with elephantine horses 
 came and went. They brought tons of silver bricks and 
 loads of gold bullion. They drew away hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars in coin. I saw the great horses 
 gather themselves up for a scratch of a pull when they 
 started the solid load on the level pavement. Every day, 
 men and boys with shouldered canvas bags of coin went 
 
 up and down. A bag of bullion on a shoulder is as 
 common as a gold epaulette was in the Mexican war. 
 Every day a wooden spout, a great eaves-trough, was 
 laid from the top of the steps to the waiting wagons, 
 and bags of silver and boxes of gold were shot down 
 the trough with a metallic chink sweeter to most ears 
 than the chimes of old Trinity, until the great dray was 
 packed as snug with bags as ever was a miller's wagon 
 with flour. I noticed that pedestrians hastening by came 
 to a halt and helped me watch; that horsemen drew rein
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 177 
 
 and looked; that eddies of people whirled around the 
 wagons and stood still, like friends reverently regarding 
 the face of the dead; that little girls and boys ran up 
 and down the steps beside the auroduct that word is 
 private property the treasure-spout, and touched the 
 bags as they tumbled their way down, as if there were 
 healing in them like a touch of the king's garments. 
 Gold and silver inspire pr-ofound respect. They are the 
 better part to most men as they are the better part of 
 some men. It may be true that "a fool and his money 
 are soon parted," but it is equally true that a fool married 
 to his money ought to be divorced. 
 
 For twenty-five years the Pacific Slope furnished four- 
 fifths of all the gold produced. For twenty-seven days 
 of July, 1877, there were one hundred and sixty-five 
 meltings of $60,000 each, giving sixty-six hundred ingots, 
 or almost ten millions of gold. During the four years 
 ending July, 1877, thirty-five hundred and twenty-two 
 tons of silver were received, and eight hundred and twen- 
 ty-three tons of gold. The coinage for 1876-7 reached 
 fifty millions of dollars. 
 
 But you do not wait for me, but cross over to the 
 Mint. 
 
 ALADDIN'S CAVE. 
 
 You climb the pyramid of steps and enter halls and 
 rooms that with their stone floors, walls and ceilings are 
 rocky as the Mammoth Cave. Everything reverberates. 
 The voice has a sepulchral ring. If you can fancy a 
 vehement ghost calling the cows, you know how it sounds. 
 Your gentle-spoken friend talks so loud you cannot hear 
 him. You are in the mill where money is made. You see 
 the raw material, fresh from the mines, piled around like
 
 178 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 bricks in a kiln. They are bricks. Here is enough in 
 this vault to build a stone wall of gold around your gar- 
 den spot. It is an Emerald bull, but it gives the idea. 
 The precious metals run to brick here brick without 
 straw. Ah, if the poor Israelites had possessed such ma- 
 terial to work, there would have been no complaint in 
 Pharaoh's brick-yard. Here are four gold cubes. They 
 weigh about ninety pounds apiece. You can carry a 
 couple for the gift of them, and you would have fifty thou- 
 sand dollars. Yonder are two pieces of hardware from 
 Mexico. They are gold and silver together, and shaped 
 a little like blacksmiths' anvils before their horns are 
 grown. They are awkward things to handle, for they 
 have no bails to them, and they weigh more than five 
 hundred pounds apiece. They are made to be robber- 
 proof, for if Mexican bandits attacked the train, they 
 could not very well get off with such hardware at their 
 saddle-bows. 
 
 You get used to the solid real of poor Clarence's 
 dream " great heaps of gold " in an astonishingly short 
 time. The avaricious man who sees blocks of silver piled 
 as high as his head, and double bricks of yellow gold 
 heaped about, is apt to swallow a little, as a hungry dog 
 does when he sees his master eating a good dinner and 
 never tossing him a bone. But the ordinary soul grows 
 familiar with it at once. You see a million in one little 
 windowless chamber, a half million in another. You see 
 it in grains, dust, ingots, chips, nuggets, bars. You see 
 scalloped sheets of silver and gold, resembling the tin- 
 ner's scraps when he has been cutting out the bottoms 
 of little patty-pans. Out of them came the birds called 
 eagles, and the bantam poultry of fives, trade dollars,
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 179 
 
 halves, and the chickens of quarters and dimes. You see 
 little iron-wheeled one-man-power trucks called coaches, 
 drawn about from room to room. Here are two laden 
 with gold bars.- You are engine enough to draw the two 
 en, train, and your freight is worth $250,000. You see 
 every day silver sufficient to make a new sarcophagus for 
 St. Alexander Newsky, at Moscow, the solid silver trinket 
 that weighs three thousand two hundred and fifty pounds. 
 Nothing here puzzles you like values. They are con- 
 densed into a wonderfully small compass. You are in 
 the gold ingot room, and you pick up a bar about a foot 
 long, an inch and a half wide, and three times as thick 
 as the snug-setting maple ruler with which you used to 
 be ferruled. You could slip it up your sleeve if that 
 gray-eyed man, who would be your " man of destiny " if 
 you did it, were not looking at you. You mentally cut 
 it into eagles as you hold it, and it turns out sixty of 
 them, but the melter quietly tells you it is worth fifteen 
 hundred dollars. I laid mine down immediately. Dia- 
 monds never impress me at all. When I hold one that 
 is worth twenty thousand dollars, it inspires no respect. 
 I am not well enough acquainted with the pure carbon, 
 but gold in any unfamiliar shape perplexes me. You see 
 little wedges of gold weighing five or six pounds, that 
 could split a tough knot of financial difficulty for you 
 without a blow of the beetle. Here is gold in amalgam. 
 Quicksilver, or lead, or something base, lurks in it. Every- 
 thing that lurks is base. It has about the glory of yel- 
 low ochre, and looks a little like a cake of beeswax. The 
 average weight of a silver bar is twelve hundred ounces. 
 If you can get away with one, you have stolen thirteen 
 hundred dollars, but so long as it is bullion it is an ele-
 
 180 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 l'h;mt. You cannot pocket it, nor chip it for daily use, 
 nor put it in your hat. You dislike to leave it at home, 
 and you cannot take it abroad. You can do as " the 
 People" did set it up and worship it, and make a calf 
 of yourself. It is merchandise. 
 
 IS IT WORTH IT? 
 
 Go down into the mine for treasure.* Consider the 
 blasting, the digging, the groping in the sunless dens of 
 Plutus. Think of the slippery Grecian god, lame in the 
 feet and slow to come to you; swift in the wing and 
 fast to fly from you; blind in both eyes and weak in 
 the head. See the cradling, the panning, the crushing. 
 Hear the craunch of the quartz mills that grind the 
 golden samp. See it subjected to fire and water, moulded, 
 weighed, stamped, packed on mules, borne in great wagons 
 through gorges, down mountains, until at last, the next 
 heaviest thing to sin, it is delivered at the Mint, to be 
 turned into the magic something that will off-set all the 
 products and possessions and covetings of man, from a 
 violin to a vote. There are four things it will not pro- 
 cure, because they are never for sale: honor, honesty, 
 happiness, and content. 
 
 And here we will take it at the door of the Mint 
 and follow it through sultry baths and glowing fires, and 
 crushing presses and gentle touches, where strength han- 
 dles it, and science assays it, and law adjusts it, and skill 
 finishes it into the sparkling clean-cut disc at last, and 
 we shall say that the stricken coin is the perfection of 
 human handiwork, and shall almost doubt whether it is 
 worth the toil and time and danger it has cost. 
 
 You enter the Receiving Room, where the precious
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 181 
 
 metals in every form, from ponderous brick to little 
 packages of scraps, grains and dust, broken rings, trinkets, 
 everything in gold and silver, are received, weighed, 
 checked and recorded. Before the counter stand miner, 
 Chinaman, messenger, agent, with bags and purses, each 
 waiting his turn. If he comes to-morrow, he can get 
 the value of his venture in coin of the realm, sparkling 
 and bright. Here they can weigh the hundredth of an 
 ounce. No sooner do a few grains of gold enter here 
 than they are beset and followed and watched every step 
 of their travels, by check, tag and way-bill, " up-stairs, 
 down-stairs and in my lady's chamber"; when they go 
 into the little iron boxes, when they are locked in the 
 little trunks; when they tumble into the crucible; when 
 they come out of the fire; when they flow into the mould; 
 when they plunge into the water; when they roll out 
 into ribbons; when they are cut into wheels. 
 
 In twenty-seven days there have been nine hundred 
 and sixty-seven deposits. They involve eleven thousand 
 six hundred and four records, entries, checks, tags. They 
 appear in all sorts of books, big and little, expressed in 
 all sorts of ways; their chemical biography is written 
 out, their weights and values are computed. They assume 
 Protean shapes. They are solids, they are fluids, they are 
 almost. volatile. They boil as water, they float as vapor, 
 they bend as steel. They change colors as chameleons. 
 There is a glass of green liquid it is silver. Here is a 
 little bottle of red wine it is chloride of gold. It would 
 cost eighty dollars and a life to drink it. 
 
 You follow a brick of gold into the Melting Depart- 
 ment. Here is weather for you! The twelve furnaces 
 are glowing all about you. The iron eyelid of one of
 
 IS'J BETWEEN Till: SATBB. 
 
 them is thrown xip, and the very essence of fire winks at 
 you. When you are 108 it is your last fever. When 
 the steam is 212, away dashes the locomotive. But here 
 is a crucible in the heart of a fire urged to a volcanic 
 glow of 2112. In the crucible is gold, and the gold 
 boils like a tea-kettle. If you are curious to know what 
 the salamander of a crucible is made of, it is sand and 
 plumbago. The air you breathe before the furnace dooi-s 
 is 130. The men, some of them are giants, are stripped 
 like athletes. Sweat rolls off like rain. The floor is 
 stone, and carpeted with iron lattice. Every day this is 
 removed, the dust swept up and saved for the precious 
 particles that may be in it. There is no such thing as 
 a trifle in this mint. A grain of gold inspires as much 
 respect as an ingot. 
 
 WASHING DAY. 
 
 Gold and silver are in unsuspected places. They are 
 in the air, in the water, under foot. There is little you 
 can call " dirt " in most parts of the Mint without being 
 guilty of a misnomer. And just here we may as well 
 gossip by the way about the curious domestic fashions 
 within these walls. For one of them, they wash their 
 clothes once a year! The rough dresses of the men in 
 the furnace rooms, and out of which they husk, them- 
 selves daily after the work is done, never leave the Mint 
 after they enter it, until they have been washed span- 
 clean. The aprons worn by the seventy ladies to whom 
 you will be presented by-and-by are also washed in the 
 Mint laundry. The method of washing is unique. They 
 just put them in the furnaces, and they are cleansed in a 
 twinkling. A ten-dollar suit may be worth five after it
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 183 
 
 is burned up, and an old apron bring money enough to 
 buy a new one. When they take up carpets they do not 
 chastise them with whips and broomsticks, after the man- 
 ner of good housewives, filling their lungs with dust and 
 the premises with confusion, but they just bundle them 
 bodily into the fire; and it is generally calculated that 
 the destruction of an old carpet, after three years of 
 wear, will about buy a new one. A mint is the only 
 place in the world where a conflagration produces its 
 own insurance money. The ashes of these clothes and 
 carpets are carefully gathered, sifted and washed* and out 
 come the truant gold and silver they contain. This will 
 seem strange to nobody who remembers how the Pillars 
 of Hercules on the old Spanish quarters were worn away, 
 particle by particle, by thumbs and fingers. 
 
 MIDAS'S KITCHEN. 
 
 But we are yet in the Melting Department, which is 
 a melting department. They take the pots of fluid gold 
 and silver out of the fires with tongs. They pour them 
 into iron moulds. They stamp them with a number. 
 They refresh them with a bath. They scrub them with 
 diluted sulphuric acid for soap, as zealous mothers wash 
 their children on Saturday nights with Colegate and water. 
 They are ingots at last. Here a man is sweeping up the 
 dust and ashes before a furnace. He is scraping out the 
 dross from the empty crucibles. They are ground under 
 a pair of iron grindstones, called a Chile-mill. It looks 
 like an awkward cart forever starting to go somewhere 
 and never going. The crushed rubbish is swept out into 
 copper wash-bowls, water is let on, and the old twirl of 
 the pan clears the metal from dust and disguise. It is
 
 Is I BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 the process of the early miners. The " color " begins to 
 sho\\-. White and yellow particles sparkle in the basins. 
 It " pans out " well. And that is melted and follows the 
 bar as a jolly-boat tags a frigate. 
 
 BRICKS AND HOOP-POLES. 
 
 Here are gold and silver bricks. Two little chips 
 have been nicked out by the assayer and tested. He 
 knows their fineness to a thousandth. They are parceled 
 out each with its little red copper cake and crumbs of 
 alloy, that look good enough to be eaten. They come 
 out of the furnaces and turn into ingots which are rul- 
 ers. They are the color of Gunter's Scale, but four times 
 as thick. You follow them to the drawing room. 
 
 A wry-mouthed machine, looking as if an effort to 
 laugh was distressing it, is waiting there for a bite at 
 one end of each ingot. The monster being satisfied, the 
 unfortunate ingots are then run over and under by two 
 cylinders, that draw them into hoops three and a half 
 feet long and one and a half inches wide. You fancy 
 Bacchus's private keg might be girded with them. They 
 are locked up in copper tubes, that might be the corpses 
 of telescopes, thrust into ovens and baked till the yellow 
 gold is white with wrath and caloric. They are relieved 
 with a cold bath, which comforts you, and then are drawn 
 into splendid ribbons, richer than any in the window of 
 the Queen's milliner, and worth, some of them, five hun- 
 dred dollars a yard. Not satisfied yet, the workmen 
 throw them into another annealing fever, to warm all 
 the brittleness out of them. Then they anoint the silver 
 ribbons and wax the gold ones, that they may run with- 
 out complaint between a pair of steel rollers that travel
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 185 
 
 as true as a consistent Christian, and are at last finished 
 to a mathematical nicety. You follow the ribbons as 
 you have often done before you ever saw a mint follow 
 them to the cutter, where the little white and yellow 
 wheels are riddled out that keep the great world rolling. 
 You may talk of machinery, but the motive power of the 
 commercial world is a wheel without steam, axle, crank 
 or patent, that you can carry in your pocket. 
 
 The wheel of the magnificent engine in the Mint, the 
 heart of all its mechanical motions, and as good as a 
 team of two hundred and forty horses an engine that 
 looks like the portico of a Greek temple that wheel 
 weighs forty-five thousand pounds, and the double eagle 
 in your pocket has more power than the wheel. 
 
 The little wheels are called planchets, but they resem- 
 ble big blind buttons more than money; of course I mean 
 buttons with no eyes. You watch the four cut'ters that 
 play like the tick of French clocks in a race. See the 
 silver for dimes dance out like rain drops, two hundred 
 and sixty in a minute. Watch the double eagles rattle 
 <xwn in a golden shower, at the rate of fourteen thou- 
 sand an hour, two hundred and eighty thousand dollars 
 in sixty minutes. Yonder, smooth-faced quarters glitter 
 like the scales on a whitefish. 
 
 The planchets pursue their pilgrimage to the wash- 
 room, that, with its copper tubs and steaming suds, is a 
 great laundry ^ Here their stupid faces are washed, then 
 shuffled into pans filled- with sawdust from the German 
 linden, as country girls wash their faces in bran to get 
 off the tan. Then they are shoveled up and borne away 
 to the Adjusters. There are seventy of them and they 
 are ladies. There they sit in long rows before tables, 
 8*
 
 186 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 with a little pair of scales before her, like so many 
 _'M<l(lesses of justice, only they are not blindfold, as you 
 may know by the glance of their eyes. Each is armed 
 with a - file. She weighs each piece. If too light she 
 casts it aside. If too heavy she cunningly twirls it be- 
 tween a fore- finger and thumb and touches the edge so 
 delicately with the file that it would hardly rasp away 
 the dust from a butterfly's wing. An instant touch 
 brings the piece to the standard. The dust of the filings 
 falls upon an apron and into a zinc drawer. At the 
 year's end the contents, finer than pollen, are made into 
 a bar. Thirty ladies will adjust two hundred and twenty- 
 five thousand dollars in a day, and thirty-five will bring 
 forty thousand trade dollars to the standard. The trade 
 dollar is a large silver coin, as handsome as a medal, 
 chiefly used in the traffic with China, and worth nearly 
 a hundred and nine cents. Women's fingers grow won- 
 derfully swift. Three ladies sit in that corner who assort 
 the .planchets, throwing out the defective ones, at the 
 rate of twenty thousand half dollars in eight hours; sixty 
 thousand pieces for the trio. 
 
 You follow the planchets to the milling machine, where 
 they are squeezed in a half circle of a waltz so vigorously as 
 to raise the edge on the two sides of the coin. In the Mint 
 vernacular it has ceased to be a planchet and becomes a 
 blank, takes another washing to make it tender-hearted, 
 md here it lies at last with a face and no more metal- 
 ic lustre in it than an ivory button. It has been fright- 
 ened white by an acid, and is ready for the great trial 
 of its life. It is to be coined. There stands the machine 
 to give " head and tail to it," endow it with the angel 
 of Liberty on one side and the eagle on the other, and
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 187 
 
 fit it with its corrugated edge like one of Queen Eliza- 
 beth's collars, all in an instant with a single motion, and 
 a pressure of one hundred and seventy-five tons. A pair 
 of automatic steel fingers seizes each piece, passes it for- 
 ward to be stamped at the rate of eighty a minute. 
 There the half dollars come sparkling out, pressed into 
 brilliance and beauty. They have ceased to be blanks. 
 They are money at last, and eagle and angel are ready 
 to fly. You stand by a stamping machine that has been 
 kissing gold for twenty- four years, into double eagles. 
 In that time it has osculated four hundred millions of 
 dollars into being. You saw it kiss a blank just now 
 with all the perfection of its first touch. And that 
 gentleman with silver in his hair has superintended for 
 all these years these tremendous salutations, and he is 
 as true as the dies of steel. 
 
 Yonder is a counting board. It resembles a great 
 motherly washboard. It holds a thousand quarters in 
 the furrows between the little ridges. The coins are 
 shoveled upon it, and the operator just shakes the board 
 this way and that, and the glittering discs arrange them- 
 selves in columns as if they were alive. The board is 
 filled and he has counted a thousand in a minute; sixty 
 thousand an hour. 
 
 Nothing impresses you so forcibly as the relentless 
 pursuit of gold and silver, from rock to coin. Science 
 with its most delicate manipulations is put upon their 
 track. Silver is united with gold in a union apparently 
 indissoluble. Nitric acid is sent to look for it. It eats 
 it out of the gold, leaving its hiding place as porous as 
 a sponge, and you have nitrate of silver. It is yet as 
 far oft' from being the familiar metal as a dish of soup
 
 l^S HKTWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 is from being a soup-ladle. You set chloride of sodium, 
 \\liirh is Lot's \\ife after she was halted into a monument, 
 which is common salt, to catch that acid. The silver tum- 
 bles down in a milky sediment. You have chloride of 
 >ilvi-r. You put zinc on the track to work out the salt. 
 You have a white curd. You drench it and dry it, and 
 you have a crumbling brown sand, with the precious 
 look of an ash-heap, for your trouble. Unscientific man 
 would feel humbled at this "dust to dust" ending of the 
 whole thing. But that dirt is silver at last. It is put 
 into an iron hoop and receives a pressure of four hun- 
 dred tons in a hydraulic press. It comes out a thirty- 
 five pound cheese with the dingiest, dustiest rind you ever 
 saw. The dairyman scrapes it with a knife, and there is 
 the shining metal. It is a silver cheese. It is worth 
 four hundred dollars. It goes into an oven to be baked, 
 There is moisture in it that if not banished would make 
 a way for itself in the furnace and explode like a shell. 
 The baking done, the cheese is sent to the Melter. He 
 brings it to its right complexion. It becomes a bar. 
 The bar is an ingot, and the ingot travels away on the 
 road we have gone, to be money. At first a fugitive, 
 then a liquid, then a sediment, then a whitish cloud, then 
 a curd, then plain brown earth, then a cheese, then the 
 standard metal nine hundred strong. Who says Proteus 
 is a myth? 
 
 The assay room is the Detective Office of Science. It 
 puts cheap rogues of chemicals together with suspected 
 silver and gold. When the rogues fall out, the treasure 
 is detected, analyzed, rated. You see pellets as big as a 
 June pea in the bottom of little bone-ash cupels, which 
 are nothing more than tiny flower-pots, about right for
 
 A MINT OF MOXEY. 189 
 
 Lilliput. You see little green and red liquids bubbling 
 away in rows of glass flasks. You see them patiently 
 standing in sand baths. Everything is done to extort the 
 truth, and the truth is pure gold and clean silver. 
 
 WEIGHING LIVE STOCK. 
 
 You see scales, the most delicate pieces of mechanism. 
 The wave of a butterfly's wing could blow the truth 
 away from them. They hang in glass houses of their 
 own. I said to Alexander Martin, Esq., the Master Melter 
 and Refiner, who kindly exhibited the balance, and dain- 
 tily picked up little weights of silver with steel fingers, 
 six of which could be packed in a dewdrop, " Let us weigh 
 an animal! Let us go hunting. Let us catch a fly." 
 We captured a victim and drove him upon the scale as 
 if he were a bullock. A weight was put in the other 
 dish, and our mammoth made it kick the beam. The 
 long, slender index depending from the balancing point, 
 and describing an arc on the graduated ivory when the 
 scales are moved, swung through ten spaces when the 
 monster was put aboard ! The brown house-fly pulled 
 down the dish at thirty-one thousandths of seven and a 
 half grains and he was only in good flying order at 
 that ! Then one wing was lifted upon the scale, and it 
 astonished us to see what a regiment of heavy figures it 
 took to tell how light it was, that bit of an atmospheric 
 oar. 
 
 Have you never thought that things may be so enor- 
 mously little as to be tremendously great ? We go to 
 the Assaying Department, where they weigh next to noth- 
 ing and keep an account of it. Here are scales where a 
 girl's eyelash will give the index the swing of a pendu-
 
 190 BETWEEN THE GATI>. 
 
 lum. The smallest wri^ht is an atom of aluminum, tin- 
 lightest of the mini-nil t'amily. that you could carry in 
 \our oyt- and not think there was a beam in it. Its 
 weight is -fy of T ^-u of of ^f of one ounce! It would 
 lake ninety-six hundred of those metallic motes to weigh 
 a humming-bird. 
 
 "THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN." 
 
 To go out at the door of the department of dust and 
 ashes is an inglorious exit, but you are in the basement, 
 surrounded by sheet iron pails and barrels filled with 
 cinders, ashes, and broken crucibles. It looks like the 
 wreck and refuse of a fire. A pair of great iron wheels, 
 an overgrown Chile-mill, is grinding dirt. If not that 
 article, then you are no judge of it. It is a mill where 
 the grain is trash and the grist the ashes of mortifica- 
 tion. The courteous millers are clothed with them, but 
 dispense with the sackcloth. They are the sweepings of 
 the floors, the scrapings of the crucibles, lumps of. slag. 
 Possibly Dickens' golden dustman would offer one pound 
 ten for the total contents, barrels and all. Stray gold 
 and silver have been searched out and chased all over the 
 building, until it is fairly run to earth in the cellar. 
 Here the refuse is ground, drowned, sifted and washed, 
 until the last precious grain that will come to terms here 
 has surrendered. The remainder is barreled, and probed 
 and tested as they try butter in the firkin, and then sold 
 to smelters and refiners. In the year 1876-7 five hundred 
 and forty-three barrels were sold, producing gold and sil- 
 ver worth seventeen thousand dollars. Some one said to 
 a card player with hands heavily shaded, " If dirt were 
 trumps, what a hand you would have!" Here dirt is
 
 A MINT OF MONEY. 191 
 
 trumps, and you leave the Mint with an increased respect 
 for dust and ashes. 
 
 As, standing in the engine room, you admire the ele- 
 gant power that graces it for, after all, what is hand- 
 somer than steel when wielded or fashioned in a good 
 cause? perhaps you see a tablet on the wall, bearing a 
 medallion portrait, a name, some words of birth and death. 
 It is the record of the one sad event that forever con- 
 nects itself with the Opening Day. John Michael Eck- 
 feldt, whose name you read, was the man who devised, 
 arranged and adjusted much of the exquisite mechanism 
 you have seen, and perfected its connections with this 
 noiseless giant here; mechanism so wonderfully ingenious, 
 faithful and true, that it fills this great building with 
 the wit and force of two thousand busy men. 
 
 He had brought it all up to the starting point. Band, 
 shaft, axle, all in place. It was an untried problem. It 
 had cost him toil, anxiety, sleepless thought. Would it 
 spring to harmonious life at the word of command, or 
 would it jar horrible discord? Ten o'clock one morning 
 would have seen him a glad, exultant man. But the 
 more delicate and subtle machinery of his brain gave 
 way too soon. At eight o'clock that morning, he had 
 gone beyond all earthly triumphs, and here these wheels 
 revolve to-day, these engines do their perfect work. It 
 is the one story of human sadness linked with all this 
 heartless mechanism and these glittering piles of gold 
 and silver with their chill and pulseless touch.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 BOUND FOB THE YO SEMITE. 
 
 BOUND for the Yo Semite! In the Indian tongue 
 the Great Grizzly Bear, but a zoological blunder, 
 for among the zodiacal wonders of California it is " Leo 
 the Lion." Hardly had I reached the Coast before they 
 began to say with all sorts of rising and falling slides 
 known to wonder, surprise, persuasion, indignation: 
 "What! Not yet!" " Not been to the Yo Semite?" 
 "Not going to the Yo Semite?" "Leave California and 
 not see the Yo Semite!" I saw there might be a virtue 
 in not being a pilgrim to this Mecca of the mountains, 
 and a chance for a bit of originality, but being equal to 
 neither, I went. 
 
 Through the courtesy of Mr. Secretary E. H. Miller, 
 jr., of the Central Pacific Railway, which means three 
 thousand miles by rail and steamer, and Mr. 0. C. Wheeler, 
 an officer of the same great thoroughfare, who cleared 
 the way with all sorts of " open sesames " known to liberal 
 souls and gentlemen, we could have gone like the travel- 
 ing preachers of the first century of the Christian era, 
 with no scrip for the journey, nor " two coats apiece," 
 unless a linen duster, the kind of shirt that strikes through 
 your clothes and appears upon the surface like a case of 
 well-developed nankeen night-gown, be a coat within the 
 meaning of the sartorial statute. The great steamer El 
 
 192
 
 BOUND FOE THE YO SEMITE. 193 
 
 Capitan took us across the Bay of San Francisco like a 
 sea-gull. The Central Pacific train bore us swiftly to 
 Merced, where the capital hotel El Capitan gave us " rest 
 and shelter, food and" a fan. Merced is the place whence 
 we leave for the Sierras, though, except in one direction 
 where a dark blue looming behind us, a sort of everlasting 
 outlined night, betrayed Mount Diablo a hundred miles 
 away, there is no suspicion of a hill. It is the grand 
 valley of San Joaquin. 
 
 After a toaster of a night, the morning sun blazed us 
 awake before light, as an Irishman would say. The bulg- 
 ing hats of wasp's-nest gray, the leathern saddle-bags, 
 the strapped blankets, the Babel tongues, proclaim tourists 
 from many lands. We have a special coach with a four- 
 in-hand, and a four inside, and crack, dash, in a feu-de- 
 joie of a style, and a cloud of tawny dust, away we go, 
 and out upon a plain about as flat and dry as a Fifth- 
 of-July oration. Nobody could dream that this thirsty, 
 dusty, stone-pelted plain would glow with green in the 
 October rain, but it will. You wonder where the ground 
 squirrels, about the size of an Eastern gray, that track 
 the desert everywhere, get their plumpness with such a 
 dust-and-ashes fare, but somehow fatness has slipped out 
 of their side pockets and lined their whole persons. You 
 wonder whether the poor hare in the distance, that one 
 of a brace of dogs has just run down to death, is not a 
 little glad for his tragic taking off. You wonder where 
 the hounds got their viciousness and vim. The wind is 
 astern and the dust travels with us, gets into the stage 
 and rides. The sun beats down and the earth strikes 
 back. Everybody's face is covered with maps of inky 
 rivers. We are a four-spot of dirty spades. For once 
 9
 
 194 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 we "see oursels as ithers see us," for we all look alike. 
 One or two of us are in good order. We have equatorial 
 dimensions. We clamber in and out of the coach like 
 seals up and down a rock. The curtains smell of leather, 
 the wood-work smells of paint. The rough road jolts 
 depravity out of us. Amiability is smothered like the 
 little princes in the tower. It costs nothing to be good 
 when it costs nothing, and so there is nothing to credit 
 on the book of your behavior. The frequent fording of 
 dry creeks does not appear to refresh us. These rough 
 M< Adams seam the rolling plain, showing where the water 
 and the warble go in the rainy time. Big pebbles worn 
 into spheres lie in the dimples of the landscape, suggest- 
 ing " the pocket full of rocks " the old miners told of. 
 
 We meet a freighter with two wagons en train, and by 
 the count of the ears drawn by twelve-mule power. Our 
 driver is "a whip" of twenty-two years' sitting. He is 
 lean and long should he grow longer he will be leaner 
 and one of the kings of the road, and his name is 
 Buffalo Jem. He is full of strong horse sense and knowl- 
 edge of human nature. He measures his passengers as 
 accurately as he does the length of his whip-lash when 
 he flicks the off leader's nigh ear. If you ride in the 
 stage make friends with the driver. It pays. 
 
 We are stumbling over the toes of the. foot-hills. 
 "Jem " is full of quaint phrases. He says " the horses 
 pant like lizards." Watch that nimble fellow as he halts 
 a minute on a rock, his sides palpitating in the sun, and 
 you will see how true is the driver's simile. He picks 
 up his rhetoric as he goes along. 
 
 A jarring, rumbling sound proclaims a stamp-mill for 
 trampling gold quartz into powder. It is the Washing-
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 195 
 
 ton Mill. It has twenty iron tramplers. They are churn- 
 dashers. Chinamen, clothed principally with perspiration, 
 are shoveling the quartz to be trodden. Water is let in 
 upon it and thirty tons flow out in a chalky stream every 
 day. It is a place filled with din, dirt, gold, silver and 
 discomfort. 
 
 Domes begin to rise beyond us as if somebody had 
 been mowing the big hills and heaping them into cocks 
 for easy handling. The earth is burrowed all along, 
 carved with ditches, hollowed into caves, scooped out in 
 cellars. It is the visible route of the old gold hunters. 
 If these ghastly scars could talk, what tales of hardship, 
 heart-ache, death, they all would tell! There is a lonely 
 grave this minute, surrounded by a fence. He that lies 
 there was waited for by somebody beyond the mountains 
 as if she could never give him up. He was mourned 
 for as if she would always wear the willow. He was 
 forgotten as if she never loved him. And it is well. It 
 seems to get hotter. It really grows rougher. Have you 
 noticed how a man in a sultry day will take off his hat, 
 look into it for an instant as if he expected to find some- 
 thing refreshing, then don it with a disappointed air, only 
 to doff it again? So my vis-a-vis interrogated his hat 
 and said nothing. But a disappointed air is better than 
 none at all in a dead calm. 
 
 The landscape is getting full of tombstones. The 
 rocks are set up on edge by thousands; tablets and 
 monuments. The gray slabs, mossy, sculptured, stained, 
 need some Old Mortality to work upon them. You listen 
 for the clink of his hammer and chisel through the 
 silence. You look about for his shaggy pony snorting 
 the powdery earth from his nostrils as he nips for a
 
 196 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 spire or two of yellow grass. These stones were set up 
 in a convulsive time; crowded from the ledges where 
 they lay by the shouldering lift of some Lieutenant of 
 Omnipotence. Lo, a grander than the graves of dead 
 Covenanters are here! They are the tombs of giant 
 forces that have fallen on their faces in the region where 
 they raged, and here they hold their monuments above 
 their prostrate heads in dumb abasement. The splendid 
 sky of California bends over a scene desolate and lone, 
 and you feel that some clouds trailing their dim shadows 
 along, and weeping rain as they go, would soften the 
 ghastly outlines of the picture. 
 
 We pass the dismantled buildings of the first mining 
 settlement in all the region; a store with nothing but a 
 pretentious front, like the shirtless man that wears a 
 "dickey"; the dry and broken race-way; the gold mine 
 on the mountain, with its disused road, tacking up the 
 acclivity like a ship that beats against the wind. We 
 plunge down at a roystering rate into rugged Bear Val- 
 ley, a pleasant hamlet in the green pocket of the moun- 
 tains. We have struck the great Mexican land grant to 
 Fremont, " the Pathfinder " of the old days. Two thou- 
 sand feet above us, his Jessie had her summer residence. 
 
 At last, dusty as a caravan of camels, we dash into 
 Mariposa, aforetime the rendezvous of the miners who 
 possessed the town on Saturday nights with bags of gold, 
 long knives and great oaths, swarming down from those 
 burrows you see on the frown of the mountain, but now 
 as deserted as the home of the nursery woodchuck that 
 perished in a spasm " over the hills and a great way off." 
 It is nothing but a shuck of a town, the kernel eaten out 
 long ago. From the door of the excellent hotel I count
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 197 
 
 thirteen mountain peaks investing it so closely on every 
 hand that it puzzles me to. tell how we ever got here, 
 and it puzzles echoes to get out, or to get quiet. The 
 roosters begin to blow their " shrill clarions " here about 
 three o'clock in the morning, but how long they keep it 
 up nobody knows, for every height and hollow and cliff 
 and cation begins to crow at the same time, and it takes 
 two hours for all those crows to escape from this horizon. 
 
 Pack-horses laden with grapes that " set the children's 
 teeth on edge," come shambling into town. We meet 
 grown girls from the hills bestriding their horses as 
 manfully as the Colossus of Rhodes. We see the dirtiest 
 Piutes with neither second story nor garret to their black- 
 thatched heads, go stealing about. 
 
 They have queer ways in the mountains. Wells, 
 Fargo and Company are the great express, mail and 
 money carriers of California. You see their green wood- 
 en, padlocked boxes on every stage. The post-office and 
 saloon may be attended by the same clerks, and highway- 
 men are euphemistically called " road-agents." There was 
 some talk we might meet them, and I rather hoped we 
 would, for it would be something quite out of a book to 
 be bidden " stand and deliver." It would have been a 
 cheap and bloodless entertainment. 
 
 At Mariposa I saw some of the productions of the 
 region. They have a pleasant collection of them at the 
 hotel. Here is a thistle with a blossom two feet and a 
 half in circumference. Scotland should transplant, adopt, 
 and name it the noli me tangere gigantea of California. 
 Next, a family of scorpions, dark-brown creatures two 
 or three inches in length. They are so many pairs 
 of slender forceps a sort of devilish sugar-tongs the
 
 198 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 handles fringed with legs. Yonder is a hairy-backed 
 tarantula, the size of a large quail's egg, and a spread 
 of eight lovely feet that would stand easily around the 
 edge of a teacup. Its house is an ingenious chamber 
 lined with white satin and closed by a door with a hinge 
 to it, the hardware being made of hair from his own 
 blessed back. That door shuts after him as snugly as 
 the lid of your grandmother's snuff-box. Near the taran- 
 tulas is a yellow-winged fly with a black rapier, the sworn 
 enemy of the spider, and so, ex-officio, the friend of bare- 
 footed humanity. It is the tarantula-hawk, that pounces 
 upon his victim and makes a needle-cushion of him at 
 sight. Here is the vine of the mountain laurel with its 
 long thorns, often used for shawl pins. There is a tradi- 
 tion that the Savior's crown of thorns was made of this 
 armed plant, and as it hangs upon the wall, bare of leaf 
 and verdure, its weapons cruel and unsheathed, it resem- 
 bles the delineations of the crown of Calvary, as painted 
 by the old masters. 
 
 And now leaving Mariposa we begin to climb. We 
 have passed the foot-hills. We are nearing the Sierras. 
 The everlasting sun blazes relentlessly. Oh, for a little 
 shadow, a dash of rain, a touch of gloom, to relieve the 
 glare. The glory grows oppressive. I have no envy for 
 the mountain with " eternal sunshine settling round its 
 head." The air is aromatic with the resinous pines. It 
 sweeps right across from mountain throne to mountain 
 throne. It has never been breathed. It tingles in your 
 veins. It is a sort of inspiration. Bevies of mountain 
 quail scud gracefully along in the road before us. The 
 ears of Jack Rabbit, supported by a body and four feet, 
 sprout beside the track, shut back like a knife-blade at
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 199 
 
 hearing the wheels, and away it bounds, ears and all. 
 Loquacious magpies talk baby-crow as they flit about 
 with plumage done like a legal document, " in black and 
 white." The wheels run fragrant and still on the carpet 
 of pine needles. The ground is strown with huge cones. 
 Shadows fall gratefully upon the quivering road. Buz- 
 zards sit motionless upon the limbs of burned trees, the 
 only charcoal sketches in all the region.- 
 
 The trunks of great pines are thickly tattooed with 
 holes like a New Zealander's skin. It is the work of 
 those wild carpenters, the woodpeckers, that drill each 
 hole and drive an acorn into it. It is a boarding-house, 
 but not for birds. A worm fattens upon the acorn, and 
 when he is in edible order the carpenter disposes of him, 
 and a rare morsel he is. This gathering grain and 
 housing it out of harm's way, and fattening stock upon 
 it for home consumption what does it lack of being the 
 thing called reasoning? There are house-building, har- 
 vesting, sheltering," feeding, and waiting, five consecutive 
 steps, and then a feast! 
 
 We look across the world that lies embayed in the 
 green surges of enduring Summer, two thousand feet 
 below; across from height to height. Earth is one great 
 rough emerald with uncounted shades. Three kinds of 
 pines run skyward, the yellow, the contorta, the sugar 
 and the last is the grandest. Imagine a tree as full of 
 plumage as a bird of paradise, straight as an arrow, shot 
 into the air two hundred and fifty feet, and only halting 
 for orders. Think of it surmounted by a great living 
 umbrella of green, and cones a foot in length and resem- 
 bling roasting ears pendent from its sleeved arms; a tree 
 that talks to you of the most vigorous and luxuriant life 
 you ever imagined, and you have the sugar pine.
 
 200 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 TAKING A MOUNTAIN. 
 
 Now stand with me upon this daring promontory, 
 Point Lookout, where a turn in the road and a lull in 
 the timber reveal the sunken world. There, far below, the 
 Merced River, like a thread of silver clue; makes .Qut its 
 winding way. You gaze down upon the tops of forest mon- 
 archs, with their feet in the water. They are two hun- 
 dred feet high, "but they crouch like asparagus. Beside 
 their crowns, another rank is rooted upon the mountain 
 side, and towers away two hundred and fifty more. 
 Above it, still a third line scales the precipice in this 
 excelsior struggle of the serried woods. A fourth, a fifth, 
 begin where the third and fourth have ended, and upon 
 the tops of all the five you look down as upon currant 
 bushes from a chamber window! The summit of the sixth 
 is even with your eyes. The seventh two hundred feet 
 aloft. The eighth is in the van. The mountain is taken 
 at last, and see where the ninth is a broom to sweep 
 the cobwebs out of the sky. What magnificent apparatus 
 for measuring heights and distances is here! Nine regi- 
 ments of giants have grown their way up more than two 
 thousand feet from lower earth to mountain, and from 
 mountain-top to sky. 
 
 That silent assault of the woods upon the heights I 
 shall never forget. They had been ages making it, and 
 they carried them all at last. See where the green ban- 
 ners toss triumphant. Give one ringing, human cheer 
 for the giant mountaineers! Tally one ! Tally two ! 
 Think how they measured off the centuries as they grew. 
 
 There are oaks, black and scrub; here a firfthere a 
 Douglass spruce, yonder a chestnut. You miss the elm 
 and maple, those "glories of the East, but what would you
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 201 
 
 have? A thin veil of blue smoke spiritualizes the scene, 
 tones it down from the yellow blaze of day. Four lines 
 of mountain ranges, one beyond another, seem to have 
 been marching down into the valley, and just halted as 
 you look, in the act of passing each other in grand 
 review. Indeed, the martial splendors of this day excel 
 all "pomp and circumstance" of human war. 
 
 A MOUNTAIN CHOIR. 
 
 Thee is a hush upon the heights. The signal of the 
 cicada's cousin sounds loud and clear. And now, at last, 
 you hear the everlasting music of the pines; the mourn- 
 ful sighing of which the poets sing; the pedal base of 
 mountain choirs, rolling up from the depths, rolling down 
 from the heights ; the lingering ghosts of winds long 
 gone and died away. It is solemn as all the funeral 
 anthems of the world in one. Of a truth, it is like the 
 music of Ossian, " pleasant but mournful to the soul." 
 
 Beside the way are groups of neat, symmetrical little 
 pines, resembling a choir of Sunday-school children, that, 
 standing all by themselves, sing a tiny note or two into 
 the great anthem. Listen, and you shall hear the fine 
 treble of the young pines, like the music of a small bird's 
 wing as it flutters on the edge of a storm. 
 
 You see that varnished tree, smooth as a tomato and 
 a rich maroon. It is so crooked you think it must be 
 doubting whether or not to. grow all ways at once. It 
 is a Samson of a tree. It has come up through that 
 solid rock, cleft it as it came, and with its claret-colored 
 arms seems struggling like the Old Testament lion -tamer 
 to wrench its jaws more widely apart than ever. Yonder 
 is another rock-splitter. You can almost see the struggle
 
 202 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 between the vegetable and the mineral. But life will 
 win. A banyan tree, they say, is lifting the temple of 
 Juggernaut. The name of the maroon is " Manzanita." 
 "Two to one the tree will come out best in the fight!" 
 says a passenger. It is the liveliest picture of still life 
 imaginable. You almost look for an outburst of audible 
 quarrel. Somehow it suggests the statue of Laocoon. 
 On the bark of the conqueror some gallant tourist, when 
 they halted in the shade, carved the name ''''Maggie Pres- 
 ton.'" Did he marry her, or "oh! are ye sleeping, 
 
 Maggie? " 
 
 "THE AYES HAVE IT." 
 
 We met the out-coming stage and exchanged drivers, 
 taking George Monroe everybody's George a capital 
 fellow and a born reinsman, for our Jehu. We halted 
 at a watering-place for man and beast, called Cold Spring, 
 where, under a dingy veranda, sat and stood as motley a 
 group as ever wore clothes. Grizzly men under worn-out 
 straw bee-hives of hats; greasers that "tried out' 1 with- 
 out fire; thin-flanked hunters in belt, knife and rifle; 
 dogs dozing about, working their mouths in dreams of 
 barking that never came true; shaggy ponies and hammer- 
 headed horses that drooped alike at both ends. There was 
 no premium on dirt in the crowd. It was too plenty. 
 Not one of them spoke a word while the stage remained, 
 but just watched us. They counted ears, beginning with 
 the horses eight eqwts, fourteen homo, total, twenty- 
 two; and then noses, eleven; and then eyes, twenty-two. 
 After that, they seemed to be gathering up the ayes and 
 noes and 'ears in an unparliamentary way in one grand 
 total, fifty-five. When they were done we were finished. 
 You could feel their silent eyes sliding all over you like
 
 BOUND FOR THE TO SEMITE. 203 
 
 drops of cold rain trickling down your back. They might 
 have been harmless as doves, but I was privately glad 
 when George swung himself up to the box, whirled his 
 whip from the top of the coach with a pistol-shot at the 
 end of it, and away we went like the king's couriers. 
 
 DOWN THE MOUNTAINS. 
 
 After a succession of ups and downs, we came at last 
 to the descensus Averni of the journey, and George made 
 it facilis. When we struck the summit and rolled over 
 the verge have you ever shot the rapids of the St. 
 Lawrence? well, when we went over the dam, that whip 
 began to fire platoons, and those four horses hollowed 
 their backs and their ears blew flat upon their necks, 
 and we met the great pines and redwoods going up the 
 mountain as if bound to storm something on the top of 
 it. George talked to the four-in-hand one after another, 
 to the tune of " get out of the way, you are all un- 
 lucky," and that is it to a minim. That team couldn't 
 run away. It had all it could do to keep the road clear, 
 for the stage went of itself. Wheels, axles, chains, bolts, 
 rattled like a fanning-mill in a fever. The chaff of dust 
 flew out behind us as if we were kicking the mountain 
 to atoms, the curtains blew out like wings. We all sat 
 still as mice. One passenger said it was " splendid," but 
 his voice sounded as if he had whistled it through a 
 key-hole. The Man-not-Afraid always makes one in a 
 full coach. He is the hero that has slid down a rainbow 
 without tearing his trousers. 
 
 Most mountains have elbows, some of them like Bri- 
 areus, a hundred, and they hold their arms akimbo like 
 a nervous woman with a big washing. The mantel-
 
 204 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 shelves of roads ai*e built along the edges of these arms 
 out to the angle zig! in to the shoulder zag! There 
 were about fifty elbows to that grade, and the horses 
 m;ide for every one of them at a dead run, as if the 
 centrifugal force had got away with them. They struck 
 " the crazy-bone " and George reined them in just in 
 time it was crazy-bone pretty much all the way and 
 
 then shot into the 
 pocket of the arm-pit 
 like a billiard ball. 
 First you wince to the 
 right and then to the 
 left, as the stage swings 
 and sways. Given an 
 old-fashioned rail fence 
 
 straight up a hill, at 
 an angle of about forty 
 degrees, and then scare 
 a red squirrel down 
 the top rails from the 
 summit to the bottom, 
 and you will know 
 how we went. But 
 we reached the last 
 pocket as safely as if we had been so many young kan- 
 garoos in the maternal pouch, and we had made the five- 
 mile run, and taken the chances, in twenty minutes, 
 which is a geometrical tumble of five miles endwise at 
 the rate of fifteen miles an hour. Now seven men will 
 rise up and solemnly say they descended that grade in 
 ten minutes. No tombstone can possibly object to bear
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 205 
 
 an inscription to that effect, with their names appended. 
 There are liers and liars. 
 
 The arrival at Big Tree Station Washburne's a 
 delightful place, ended the most luxurious mountain ride 
 I ever enjoyed, and " the evening and the morning were 
 the third day." After luncheon the company took a 
 mountain trail as narrow as the path whereon they call 
 the cattle home, for the Mariposa grove of giant se- 
 quoias, the biggest vegetables in the known world. It 
 was a ride of fourteen miles, the return through the 
 dense green darkness of the pine woods, with a very 
 timid moon that did not dare to light the way. My next 
 best friend braved the journey like a heroine, and return- 
 ing ambitiously desired to be placed on some "standing 
 committee" for life. 
 
 THE BIG TREES. 
 
 The California Indians have a saying that other trees 
 grow, but the Great Spirit created the sequoias out of 
 hand. It is the savage way of calling them miracles. 
 And they are, for how a tree from twenty-five to thirty 
 stories high, and with room, if hollowed, to shelter three 
 hundred guests, and leave stabling quarters on the ground 
 floor for a dozen horses, could have pumped from the earth 
 and inspired from the air material enough to build itself 
 along without waiting, is incomprehensible. To be sure, 
 some of them have been a thousand years going up, and 
 others a score of centuries, which would date them back 
 to the time when Julius Caesar was drubbing the Druid- 
 ical savages of Great Britain. It gives you a queer feel- 
 ing to look at a tree in full plumage that might have 
 been flaunting its green needles when there was not as
 
 206 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 much as a neck of land in the known world between 
 Liverpool and Honolulu. 
 
 Whoever expects to be astonished at a big tree will 
 be disappointed. When your imagination has climbed 
 two hundred and fifty feet of tree, an additional hundred 
 or two will not matter a carpenter's rule to it, nor add 
 a cubit to the grandeur of the vegetable. The truth is, 
 our imaginations have got so snugly fitted to the average 
 of great trees, that they are no match for monsters, and 
 ten chances to one we will find the faculty we are so 
 proud of perched in the first fork for a rest. " I had to 
 look twice before I saw the top of it," is the careless, 
 colloquial way of describing a great height. Like many 
 another random phrase, there is method in it and philos- 
 ophy withal. We must look many times to realize how 
 far off the plumes of a sequoia twenty-two rods high 
 really are. The bark is a sort of Indian red from one to 
 three feet thick, resembling butternut-colored shoddy. 
 
 Riding along through woods where all is stately, you 
 know a sequoia without an introduction, and everybody 
 calls out, " There's a big tree ! " It is not as handsome 
 as the pines, it is corrugated, it lacks the symmetry, 
 and you wonder it is dumb. If ever a tree should have 
 a tongue, it is the Sequoia gigantea, the king of the red- 
 woods. Somehow it seems to you such vastness should 
 appeal to more senses than one. Years ago, I wrote sev- 
 eral lines with bells on their toes, about what was mis- 
 named a California oak, to the effect that some Vandal 
 girdled it and it never knew it for three years, but grew 
 right on as if nothing had happened. I have detected 
 the blunder. The oak was a giant sequoia. I saw the 
 tree in the Merced family. It was struck by lightning
 
 BOUND FOE THE YO SEMITE. 20-7 
 
 two years ago, and twigs three feet in diameter blocked 
 the stage-road. It was scorched and rived, but it lived 
 and was in full feather when I saw it. The pumps were 
 manned so mightily, the tides of life yet flowed up the 
 majestic column. The news had not reached the green 
 eaves, dim, misty, and so far away. It did not know 
 that it ought to be dead. Fourteen horsemen ringed 
 that tree like the zodiacal signs, and no crowding. Set 
 the "Father of the Forest" upright, that prostrate mon- 
 arch of the Calaveras grove, in the circus ring where 
 master and clown pelt each other with fossilized jests of 
 the Silurian age, and there would be scant room for the 
 calico horses to canter round the trunk without tramp- 
 ling the toes of the spectators, or grazing the flesh- 
 colored legs of the centaurs of the circus. Think of 
 taking a horseback ride of five rods into the hollow of a 
 tree, with head erect as becomes the knight cap-a-pie who 
 enters the redwood hall of a single timber. A cave is 
 burned out of one of the Maraposa family, and seven of 
 our party rode into it. 
 
 Fires and fools have wrought sad havoc with these 
 sinless towers of Babel that have kept on growing through 
 the centuries straight toward heaven, and no confusion 
 of tongues to stop the business, but they are now the 
 wards of the Government. A boy and now and then a 
 man would naturally suppose that the tree that can 
 hold its fruit three hundred and fifty feet in the air 
 should hold up something worth while, say the size of a 
 bee-hive or, at least, of Cotton Mather's hat, but the cone 
 of the sequoia is not much larger than the egg of a 
 talented pullet, and among the smallest of the conifers. 
 AVriters have printed their groundless fears that these
 
 208- BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 royal dukes of the wilderness will become extinct, but 
 the earth around them is alive with baby sequoias from 
 a few inches in diameter to six feet. Only give them a 
 few centuries and protect them from rogues and ruin, 
 and the tourists of the year of our Lord 2500, who visit 
 the western slope of the Sierras by aerial ship and elec- 
 tric car, will wonder at the vigorous giants, young at a 
 thousand years old, that lift their green coronals in the 
 thin air, and will talk viva voce across the continent to 
 the friends they left a day or two ago. 
 
 "What shadows we are!" But think how the dusky 
 double of a tree four hundred feet high will single you 
 out, while the sun goes down, as if the index finger of 
 purple darkness were pointing the route of the Eastward- 
 coming Night, that shall blot you out like a misspelled 
 word from a day-book. It grows along the landscape. 
 The earth has lost the sun, but there upon the redwood's 
 crown shines a crimson flame. It is the bedroom candle 
 just lighted by the drowsy day. 
 
 A man whose ax used to tick like a lively clock in 
 " the sounding woods of Maine " asks " how much cord- 
 wood will one of the big fellows make?" The answer, 
 if snugly piled along the roadside would extend twenty- 
 eight hundred feet, and if twenty-five cords a winter of 
 such fuel will keep his kitchen chimney roaring with 
 satisfaction, one tree would last him sixteen years. 
 
 One after another the wonder-stories of childhood 
 prove true. Lemuel Gulliver's talent for vegetable lying 
 in his most Brobdingnagian mood would not have added 
 more than two hundred feet to the tallest sequoia, which 
 is a very short range for anybody with a gift for draw- 
 ing the long bow.
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 209 
 
 A FOREST RIDE. 
 
 "Who's going in to-day?" That is what I heard the 
 next morning after we had slept off the giants. The 
 question was answered in a minute, for Mott, a skilled 
 driver, whirled up to the front of Washburne's hotel, and 
 we were off. California stages are prompt to the minute. 
 They run on schedule time. That "going in" recalls 
 the old army life at the Front. The blue-coats were 
 always talking of " going in," when they waded knee- 
 deep into the thick of the battle. We were nearing the 
 Valley. 
 
 Another day of forest magnificence. You can form 
 little idea of the stateliness of these woods. Golden 
 mosses drape and spangle the dead trees with the color 
 of Ophir. For miles, arcades of columns two hundred 
 feet high, dressed in rainbows, aflame with scarlet, afire 
 with crimson, aglow with gold, running up, and up, a 
 thought's flight without a limb. Should an artist paint 
 them as they are, you would doubt your own eyes or 
 discredit the painter. They were the wild woods in a 
 Roman carnival. With the grandeur of the trees, the 
 colored mosses, and the painted creepers, it was a picture 
 all brilliance, as if the columns of a thousand Greek tem- 
 ples, decorated with garlands, had fallen into lines in a 
 great procession, and were ready to march. Not a brown 
 shaft in sight. It was a sort of revelry of the spectrum. 
 The bark of many of the trees resembles tortoise-shell. 
 It suggests the empty skins of the huge Brazilian ser- 
 pents you saw at the Centennial Exhibition. You are in 
 a gorgeous land, whither you have sailed without going 
 to sea. You long for a glimpse of an American flag to 
 assure you you are yet at home, and you find it. On 
 9*
 
 210 BETWKKN mi: <;ATES. 
 
 the peak of a little cur of a barn though what there 
 could ever be to put in a barn but pine conr< H mys- 
 tery is a handkerchief of a flag that has about flut- 
 tered itself to pieces; but there are a star and a stripe 
 left, and you are comforted. 
 
 FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE YO SEMITE. 
 At three o'clock, afternoon, we had climbed almost to 
 Inspiration Point without knowing it, whence the Valley 
 of the Yo Semite appears to you there is no other 
 word; "breaks," and "bursts," are terms of feeble vio- 
 lence to express the truth. If day broke in a noisy way; 
 if these pines around us grew with sound of hammers, 
 the grandeur would be gone. We have just seen an am- 
 phitheatre ten thousand times as large as Vespasian's at 
 Rome ; have looked across the blue spaces at the semi- 
 circular ranges of rocky seats, curve above curve, sweep 
 beyond sweep, and fancied the pines that fronted them 
 were senators risen to their feet as the Imperator entered 
 the Coliseum. But there was no hint that we were near- 
 ing the brink of the valley of the granite gods. The 
 precipices that took our breath away had disappeared. 
 The great chasms of empty azure that we had looked off 
 upon till we felt almost lost in an ethereal ocean, were 
 closed behind us by merciful walls and curtains of dense 
 green. We had blundered up into the garret dormitory 
 where the mountains were lying down all around us in 
 " the sixth hour sleep." The stage crept over a recum- 
 bent shoulder without waking the owner, rolled out upon 
 the point where the drowsing giant would have worn an 
 epaulette had he been in uniform, moved a few steps 
 farther, came to a halt, and there, lighted by the after-
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 211 
 
 noon sun behind us, speechless, near, far, nothing doubt- 
 ful, nothing dim, the Yo Semite awaited us without warn- 
 ing, met us without coming. 
 
 Spectral white in the glancing of the sun, the first 
 thought was that the granite ledges of all the mountains 
 had come to resurrection, and were standing pale and 
 dumb before the Lord. We had emerged in an instant 
 from a world of life, motion and warm, rich color into 
 the presence of a bloodless world, a mighty place of graves 
 and monuments where no mortal ever died. It looked a 
 little as I used to fancy those Arctic wonders looked to 
 Dr. Kane, glaciers, icy peaks and turrets, turned imper- 
 ishable in the golden touch of a Tropic sun. For the 
 first few instants I saw nothing in detail. I had been 
 making ready for it for weeks; not reading such dull 
 descriptions as my own; not reading anything; only 
 fancying, dreaming, wondering, and here it took me by 
 surprise at last! It seemed a glimpse into another and 
 an inaccessible kingdom. I am ashamed to say for one 
 moment I was disappointed, for another afraid, in an- 
 other astounded. I had nothing to say, nobody had any- 
 thing to say, but a linnet that never minded it at all. 
 The driver began to introduce the congregation to us by 
 name. I thought at first he was about to present us to 
 the congregation and I got out of his reach. It was 
 much as if, when the three angels made a call at Abram's 
 tent on the plains of Mamre, the Patriarch had whipped 
 out a two-foot rule and measured and written down the 
 length of their wings. 
 
 Almost four thousand feet below us was the Valley 
 with its green meadows, its rich foliage, and its river 
 Merced. We looked down upon the road we must go,
 
 212 l'.KT\VEEN THE GATES. 
 
 looped backward and forward upon the side of the wall, 
 track under track, like the bow-knots of flourishes boys 
 used to cut under their names, when writing-masters 
 nibbed their pens and boys ran out their tongues. We 
 looked two miles across the air and saw the sculptured 
 fortresses no man had made; saw a great heraldic shield, 
 bare of inscription, a thousand feet from the ground. 
 Upon that shield the coat-of-arms of the United States 
 should be emblazoned. It would be the grandest escutch- 
 eon on earth. We saw traced upon the wall beneath it 
 a chalk line that went to and fro, as if, bewildered and 
 dizzy it did not know where to go. That chalk line is a 
 wagon road out of the Valley. If anybody had told you 
 it was an illiterate giant's first attempt at writing coarse 
 hand it would have seemed more probable. Looking down 
 the chasm behind you, the river is foaming on toward the 
 base of a mountain, to escape from the vale of enchant- 
 ment, till it roars its way into a yawn of a mouth that 
 seems no larger than the entrance to a wolf's den, but 
 which, if you ever escape from this region, you will find 
 is a broad caflon. 
 
 I noted all these minor things with a strange irrele- 
 vancy. It was an instinctive resistance to being wrenched 
 from the every-day world of seeming trifles to which I 
 belong, for I assure you, when the Valley is finally reached, 
 all such things as trifles will vanish away. And while I 
 was doing these nothings, Yo Semite was standing before 
 me and waiting. 
 
 I turned to it again, and began to see the towers, 
 the domes, the spires, the battlements, the arches and the 
 white clouds of solid granite, surging up into the air and 
 come to everlasting anchor till "the mountains shall be
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 213 
 
 moved." The horizon had been cleft and taken down to 
 make room for this capital of the wilderness, and for the 
 first time in my life I saw a walled way out of the azure 
 circle that had always ringed me in. 
 
 Just then, the coach we were to meet came creeping 
 like an eight-footed insect up the mountain. It cut a 
 poorer figure than the fly that traveled along the curve 
 of the Ephesian dome. The party leaped out with laugh 
 and chatter, and a girl of eighteen ran to this vantage 
 ground of glory, took an instant look and said her 
 hands unclasped, not an eye fine, frenzied or revolving, 
 it was a saccharine adverb and an adjective too soft to 
 provoke an echo that she used and said, "It is sweetly 
 pretty!" and with a little cluck of satisfaction she munched 
 a sandwich. Now as between an idiot and an affected 
 actress there is much space and little choice. Perhaps, 
 after all, it was as well as anything, for I begin to mis- 
 trust I cannot make anybody see the Yo Semite who does 
 not go himself. Judge B had been here. He met his 
 friend C, who a^lfcd a description of the Valley. The 
 Judge had traveled in foreign lands, and was able to 
 compare, and so he began : " Why, my dear sir. the Yo 
 Semite is as much superior to as much superior to 
 as as much grander than well, than but what's the 
 use of trying? Let's take a drink!" But who ever was 
 warned and took heed? Not the land-lubbers that Noah 
 left ashore, not Lot's old neighbors, not the pilgrim to 
 the Yo Semite, not anybody. 
 
 " Let us down easy, George," for our old driver was 
 going back with the coach. He generally untied the 
 double-bows of the road " by the run," but he just 
 walked the horses every foot of the way, and spelled
 
 214 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 down the Z's like an urchin laboring through a hard 
 word by the help of a schoolma'am's index finger. It 
 was easy as swinging down in a basket, but it was not 
 heroic. And to think that when we got down, we were 
 yet four-fifths of a mile above the sea! 
 
 THROUGH THE VALLEY. 
 
 The ride of three miles up the Valley was restful as 
 " the beauty sleep " of forty winks that girls take after 
 the call to breakfast. The twanging nerves that were 
 keyed to "C sharp" on the heights, let down a little. 
 The Valley, seven miles long, with a varying width of 
 a half mile to a mile and a quarter, is as wild as you 
 want it. The Merced, that crystal river of Mercy, in 
 endless quarrel with rock and rubble, foaming, flashing, 
 roaring, dashing, meets you all along, in its desperate 
 haste to get out of the canon. And when you see what 
 tremendous accidents are always happening to it now 
 slipping from the verge of precipices a mile high, and 
 tumbling hundreds of fathoms sheer down, with nothing 
 to hold by, till it grows gauzy as a bridal veil and white 
 as silver, you can hardly wonder at its desperation. You 
 are a little sorry for its misfortunes, as if it were some- 
 thing human, and then a little glad it has had the prov- 
 ocation to show its torrent temper and angry beauty. 
 You drive through broad natural meadows, dotted with 
 tangles of shrubbery, feathery with ferns, and impudent 
 with wild flowers that fear nothing; amid pines that are 
 trying to grow up out of the tremendous gorge into the 
 world; beneath avenues of live-oaks, among the junipers, 
 the buckeyes and the buckthorns; here a mountain lilac, 
 a manzanita, or a nutmeg; there a cluster of silver firs
 
 ABOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 215 
 
 or mountain alders; yonder a balm of Gilead, a maple, 
 or a dogwood. Azaleas, bluebells, honeysuckles abound. 
 The woods that grow in the Yo Semite are all precious 
 woods, taking the polish and showing the clouded beau- 
 ties of the finest marbles; mountain mahogany, rosewood, 
 Indian arrow, laurel, ash. 
 
 The quaking aspen, trembling like a timid girl at 
 nothing at all, is a feminine figure in the landscape. 
 " What is that shivering tree, shaking without any wind?" 
 asked an English tourist of a raw and ignorant guide. 
 " I doant roightly know," was the reply, " but it is a 
 wobblin' asp, or somethink that away"; and " wobblin' 
 asp " became a synonym in the Valley for forty-fathom 
 stupidity. 
 
 You hasten on ; towers, spires, battlements, castles, 
 dizzy walls, sculptures at either hand; you hear the winds 
 intoning in the choral galleries a mile above your head; 
 you hear the crash of waters as of cataracts in the sky; 
 you trample upon broad shadows that have fallen thou- 
 sands of feet down, like the cast-off garments of descend- 
 ing Night. The three great geological theories of this 
 cleft's formation that the bottom fell out and let things 
 down; that earthquake tongs and volcanic fires melted 
 the crags and rent them asunder; that the softer and 
 more edible parts of rock and mountain were eaten out 
 by rains, and frosts, and rivers, leaving the stupendous 
 bones bleaching through the centuries you would not 
 toss coppers for the choice of them. All you know is 
 that you are in a tremendous rock-jawed yawn of the 
 globe, and the most you hope is, that it will keep on 
 yawning till you are safely out of its mouth. Jonah was 
 never one of your great exemplars. You pass two or
 
 Jit; 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 three inns and modest dwellings, and are set down at 
 Barnard's capital Yo Semite Falls Hotel, where you find 
 a Highland welcome and a bounteous table. Nothing in 
 the whole animal kingdom is recognized here but the 
 tourist. Wells & Fargo have an express-office for him, 
 and a post-office for him, and educated lightning strikes 
 him in all languages. There are collectors of ferns and 
 
 flowers, cutters of canes 
 and workers in woods, 
 dealers in tit-bits of fern- 
 prints, foot-prints, stone 
 fish, trilobites, stalactites, 
 and bonne-couches of ta- 
 rantula nests; there are 
 guides with spurs like 
 game-cocks, scrambling 
 mountain horses, Mexi- 
 can saddles, and wooden 
 baskets of stirrups: there 
 are straggling Indians 
 with tangled manes over 
 their eyes, and strings of 
 speckled trout in their 
 hands; there is the ubi- 
 quitous, aggressive photographer, who is always ambush- 
 ing his head and taking sight with his Cyclopean eye at 
 every visible thing that will wait to be looked at. Some- 
 times I wonder if we really want him; if he is not a 
 multiplier of illusions, a sort of traveling agent for the 
 diffusion of delusive knowledge. I am sure he is, when 
 I compare his Yo Semite with the Lord's. Few photo- 
 graphed landscapes ever convey a new idea. They only
 
 BOUND FOK THE YO SEMITE. 217 
 
 recall an old one. One of these artists has set his sky- 
 light kennel in front of the Yo Semite Fall, and blazons 
 in big letters: "Photographs taken with the Yo Semite 
 in the background ! " 
 
 Think of the impudence of the thing! Offering to 
 throw in twenty-six hundred feet of cataract; pairing off 
 your little dot of a face and figure with a half mile of 
 tumbling glory, and selling cascade and tourist for eight 
 dollars a dozen. The "eternal fitness of things" is a lit- 
 tle out of plumb. 
 
 The first thing I did was a sentimental improbability. 
 I ran down the balcony stairs to congratulate the poor 
 River of Mercy on having a few rods of rest. There it 
 was, lurking behind the hotel, as smooth as a looking- 
 glass, and a fleet of ten ducks afloat upon it, ten above 
 and ten below, and not so much as a duckling's breast 
 shattered by wind or water. Listening a minute, I heard 
 it in full quarrel a mile below. Persecuted, perplexed, 
 pugnacious Mercy. No tourist forgets the admirably 
 appointed Cosmopolitan Baths, owned by a gentleman with 
 the singular name of John Smith John Smith sundered 
 by a C. Here is 
 
 THE GRAND REGISTER. 
 
 It is a ponderous book, containing several solid feet 
 of paper, bound in morocco, mounted with rich plates of 
 silver worth eight hundred dollars, and is a big lift. The 
 pages are apportioned to every State, and almost every 
 country but Patagonia. That book furnishes reading so 
 ridiculous as to be ludicrous " infinite platitude," rhymes 
 thick as sleigh-bells in New England winters, flashes of 
 wit, and whole nights of stupidity. 
 10
 
 218 BETWKKN Till: (i ATI's. 
 
 The disposition to patronize the Yo Semite is remark- 
 able, as is also the fact that almost every l><>ily arrived 
 by the first stage. One tourist with the dental name of 
 Toothaker, and one with the rascally name of Turpin, 
 figure on the same page. The latter writes: "Seen the 
 Bridal Veil. Slept next to the man that snores." Here 
 a tourist declares: "The miteist work of man is dwarfed," 
 unconscious that he is comparing a lively cheese and 
 mountain magnificence. 
 
 A writer " made futile efforts to reach the Valley 
 October 12, '75, but in vain." Does the man mean to 
 say that he failed? One mercifully says: "Words fail 
 me"; and a lady declares, sorrowfully: "Can't express my 
 language." 
 
 " You need not go round the world. When you have 
 seen Glacier Point and Cloud's Rest, go home and rest 
 yourself." 1 A poor Tray confesses: "Came with three 
 Western legislators never stole anything will never 
 be guilty of the same indiscretion again." A sensible 
 man remarks-: " I leave my hard but modest name, A 
 Flint." An impressible young woman is " blissfully hap- 
 py." Another leaves a certificate: "Not disappointed!" 
 " Top-side below," ejaculates an angular man from Maine. 
 
 Massachusetts is very reticent pages of names, and 
 not a word of comment, only this: "Plymouth Rock to 
 the Rocks of the Yo Semite, which in their grandeur 
 illustrate the sublime events and principles of which it 
 is itself a symbol, greeting ! " An equestrian who had 
 been making a hammer of himself asserts: "God made 
 the mountains, but man made the saddles." Connecticut 
 " did not find it more than his imagination had pictured 
 it." New Hampshire leaves a neat sentiment: "The 
 Granite State to El Capitan sends greeting!"
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 219 
 
 Here is verse Tis-sa-ack is the South Dome: 
 
 " Tis-sa-ack's caught the homed moon, 
 
 And holds it pendent in the air, 
 Where calm its silver shallop rests, 
 
 By airy sailors anchored there. 
 Time travels gray-brow'd o'er each height, 
 
 And holds his scroll against the sun, 
 And says, ' come view my heaven- born might, 
 
 And what my air-edged chisel's done.' " 
 
 Little Rhody shouts "Hail Colombia!" Here is some- 
 thing in Russian, here a scrawl in short-hand, there a 
 capacious Missourian "took it all in!" Ohio's imagina- 
 tion goes by water: "Cannot realize the grandeur of the 
 falls, the water being low." Put in an overshot wheel. 
 A prodigal son of adjectives cries: "Grand, beautiful, 
 picturesque ! " fairly offset by an eloquent fellow who 
 says: "Dumb as an oyster." " Superbe, Yo Semite !" and 
 France salutes. " Hoofed it to the Valley," is an old 
 soldier's memorandum. Who wouldn't be glad that Liv- 
 erpool is "much pleased so far!" How encouraging to 
 Nature to hold out and pass muster! Some tourist 
 weaves in everybody's pronunciation of Yo Semite: 
 
 "At half-past five o'clock at night, 
 Our party reached the Yo Sewz'fe, 
 Glad ere the evening lamps were lit, 
 To see the Valley Yo Semite. 
 Who that has seen it can condemn it, 
 The wondrous beauty of Yo Semite? 
 This verse I dedicate to thee. 
 Oh, world-renowned Yo Sem-i-te.' " 
 
 A Baltimore girl effusively exclaims: "Let me em- 
 brace thee, beautiful Valley. A kiss to thee ! " " Take 
 off your shoes," quotes another, " for the ground whereon 
 you stand is holy ground." Can there be much doubt 
 that the Mississippian who left the record, "Let us go 
 and see the monkey," is himself the missing link? A
 
 220 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 lovely maiden testifies: "My eyes devour the crags!" and 
 a young man makes love to the Bridal Veil Fall. Fancy 
 him courting a young woman nine hundred feet high, 
 with hair all the colors of the rainbow. 
 
 The names upon these broad pages represent the world. 
 Here are lords, barons, viscounts, counts, members of 
 parliament, one solitary duke, a sprig of princes, great 
 generals, world-famed savans, statesmen, Lady Franklin, 
 Mrs. Partington, and nobodies. Australia is here with the 
 verdict, " America is the dertiest country in the world." 
 We regret that he put an i out with his adjective. If 
 he will only write it again and put out the other, he 
 will be as discerning a tourist as ever. Peru, Japan, 
 Egypt, New South Wales, are all represented. Ceylon, 
 of the spicy breezes, writes, " Beautifle." New Zealand 
 declares it mathematically: "Switzerland minus its moun- 
 tains." Pennsylvania gives a good-natured Low Dutch 
 groan: "Weak and wounded, sick and sore" then down 
 he comes with his avoirdupois "weight 260 pounds." 
 Then comes a record: "This invalid lady was packed in 
 a chair twenty-seven miles, on the backs of four China- 
 men " the best proof in all the book of an earnest love 
 of Nature. And so they run. " This day Freddie Strong, 
 six years old, rode thirty-eight miles on horseback." Give 
 the little mountaineer a record. 
 
 There is no sin in " a little nonsense now and then," 
 but the Sinbads the sailors, who come hither under pre- 
 tense of seeing the strength of the hills, and bring a sor- 
 did " old man of the sea," pick-a-pack, with his legs tied 
 in a bow-knot under their chins for a cravat, and make 
 business directories of the big book, and placard the ma- 
 jestic rocks with cries of "Cream yeast!" "Sewing ma-
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 221 
 
 chines!" "Farm wagons! " and "Liver pills!" commit an 
 outrage demanding indignant protest. It is the money- 
 changers in the Temple over again, and nobody to cast 
 
 them out. 
 
 EL CAPITAN. 
 
 The most impressive granite wonder in the Valley is 
 the great rock El Capitan, gray in the shadow and white 
 in the sun. Standing out, a vast cube with a half mile 
 front, a half mile side, three-fifths of a mile high, and 
 seventy-three hundred feet above the sea, it is almost the 
 crowning triumph of solid geometry. Thirty " Palace 
 Hotels," seven stories each, piled one above another, 
 would just reach the hanging eaves of El Capitan; two 
 hundred and ten granite stories by lawful count. Well 
 did the Indians christen him Tu-toch-ah-nu-lah Great 
 Chief of the Valley. He fronts you when you catch your 
 first glimpse from Inspiration Point. Had there been any 
 fourteenth-story windows, you would have looked squarely 
 into them. When you reach the Valley he towers above 
 you on the left. He grows grander and more solemn 
 every step of the way. When you stand beneath him he 
 blocks out the world. When you near the base he roofs 
 out the sky; for though the wall seems to stand upright, 
 the eaves project one hundred and three feet, a granite 
 hood five hundred feet thick, but in the vastness you 
 never see it. Get as far from him as you can, he never 
 diminishes. He follows you as you go. He is the over- 
 whelming presence of the place. A record in the Grand 
 Register runs thus: "A lady fellow-traveler, struck by 
 the constant appearance of El Capitan in the Valley, 
 suggested that it recalls the Rabbinical legend, ' The Rock 
 that followed them was Christ.' '
 
 2'22 HKT\VEEN THE GATES. 
 
 You never tire of seeing eastern sunshine move down 
 the front, like a smile on a human face. You never tire 
 of seeing the great shadows roll out across the broad 
 meadows as the sun descends, and rise, like the tide in 
 Fundy's Bay, till the Valley is half filled with night, and 
 the tips of the tall trees are dipped like pens in ink. 
 You never weary of watching the light from a moon you 
 cannot see, as it silvers the cornices and brightens the 
 dusky front, as if wizards were painting their way down 
 without stage or scaffold. A dark spot starts out in the 
 light. It turns into a great cedar. Pines that stand 
 about the base resemble shrubs along a garden wall. 
 They are two hundred feet high. A few men have crept 
 out to the eaves of El Capitan, looked over, and crept 
 back again. Little white clouds sail silently toward the 
 lofty eaves and are gone, as to a dove-cote in a garret. 
 And yet an earthquake in 1872 rocked him like a cradle, 
 and the clocks in the Valley all stopped, as though when 
 El Capitan was moved, then " time should be no longer." 
 
 THE BRIDAL VEIL. 
 
 The Bridal Veil Fall the Indian Poliono, or Spirit 
 of the Evil Wind has been talked at and raved about 
 till it is famous as Niagara. A clergyman has been 
 known to take it home with him, and carry it around 
 to weddings and funerals, and preach it for a bissextile 
 year. As you enter the Valley, you see upon the right 
 almost a thousand feet of unbent rainbow, thirteen yards 
 wide, hanging over the edge of a precipice. In midsum- 
 mer, when there is less need of a token, the broad scarf 
 of the spectrum is narrowed to ribbons bright enough 
 for a queen of May. It curves out over the cliff and
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 223 
 
 plunges down to the tumbled boulders below, and shat- 
 ters to spray* that blossoms into rainbows, arching the 
 gloom, a bouquet of flowers for the Spirit of the 
 mountain. 
 
 Now the cataract begins to swing majestically to and 
 fro, like a gridiron pendulum, and the tick of a moun- 
 tain clock would not surprise you. And now it is twisted 
 into colored bell-cords and finished out with downy tas- 
 sels, as if somebody were making ready to ring the chimes 
 of Heaven. Then the fingers of the wind weave it into 
 a gossamer veil of thirty-nine hundred square yards, that 
 falls with fairy grace over the face of the mountain and 
 down to its feet, and the Wedding March is the music 
 for the moment. Then the veil is swept aside, and lifted, 
 and flung up around the brow of the cliff, in the folds of 
 a white turban, touched up with tints of color like the 
 head-dress of some qxieen of the Orient. Nothing more 
 delicate than this veil ever came from the looms of India, 
 and where you stand it is silent as a picture; no more 
 crash than there is to the broidered lace that flows down 
 a woman's arms and falls upon her wrists. It looks 
 aerial enough to be rolled up to the verge of the precipice, 
 and then drift away like a commodore's broad pennant 
 swept from the mast-head in a gale. It is a tributary of 
 the Merced River in disguise. 
 
 And yet, while you gaze upon this glorified Spirit of 
 all cataracts, somebody beside you will be pretty sure to 
 break the spell by saying, " But you ought to see it in 
 May, when there was more water, or in June, when there 
 will be less," or some more blessed time which never 
 happens to be now. Such people should be apprenticed 
 for life as gate-tenders to the flume of a grist-mill, where
 
 _-l nrnvEEN THE GATES. 
 
 they can let. the water on at will. " From pestilence. 
 famine and Madame Malapropos, good Loi-d deliver us!" 
 
 MIRROR LAKE. 
 
 The professional tourist is a vagrant animal. You 
 know him at sight. He has elbows, and they are never 
 trussed. A place wide enough to- let them through will 
 let him through. He dresses to please himself, and never 
 mistakes your eyes for a looking-glass. You see him in 
 a tweed coat, always too short or too long, pantaloons 
 that fit like a couple of extinguishers, gray gaiters splay- 
 ing out into roomy shoes that would track in the snow 
 like the grizzliest of plantigrades, and crowned with a 
 disreputable hat with a green brim that appears to have 
 been blasted before it could get ripe. The small worry 
 of his life is not that he may be cheated, but that any- 
 body should think it possible. He will forgive the theft 
 but not the thought. His outside is his rough side. Get 
 at him and he is kind-hearted, rich in strong sense and 
 pleasant information. He bestrides a pony with his long 
 legs, and the little beast has as many feet as a house-fly 
 in a minute. He cuts a club of a cane as if he were 
 going to have a bout with Hercules, and .stalks away up 
 the mountain. He is never more at home than when he 
 is abroad. 
 
 The sunrise pilgrimage to Mirror Lake, three miles 
 up the Valley from the hotel, is one of the most delight- 
 ful. The lake is a sheet of water with an area of six or 
 eight acres in midsummer, and waveless in the morning 
 as a silver floor. Insignificant of itself, it betrayed the 
 professional tourist into a premature spasm of contempt, 
 and he exclaimed, his head running on Lakes Geneva and
 
 BOtnSTD FOR THE YO SEMITE. 225 
 
 Tahoe, " Why it's nothing but a blarsted poodle after 
 all!" "But it reflects the mountains," interposed some- 
 body, and the tourist snuffed him out with, ''''Any poodle 
 can cast a shadow." 
 
 Big or little, Mirror Lake is the toilet-glass of Maj- 
 esty. Had there been such a piece of furniture in Pal- 
 estine, Satan could have saved his mountain climb, for 
 he would have showed the Savior the glory of the world, 
 if not its kingdoms, reflected in this breathless trinket of 
 water. At the left and three miles distant, Mt. Watkins 
 lifts eight thousand feet above the sea who is Mr. 
 Watkins? and yonder is South Dome, a half loaf of 
 solid rock, ten thousand feet above salt water, cut on the 
 severed side to a precipice that swoons away almost a 
 dizzy mile. In front, and six miles away, like snowy cu- 
 muli at anchor, tower the granite glories of Cloud's Rest, 
 a mile and a quarter above the Valley and two above the 
 sea. 
 
 The rising sun shows a flag upon the summit of 
 Cloud's Rest. It is answered from the South Dome. 
 There is gold on the Cathedral Spires. There is crimson 
 on Glacier Point. There is fire on El Capitan. Did you 
 ever see a cataract of morning light? Look along that 
 castellated ridge. See the sort of rayed and smoky glory 
 rolling like a rapid river over the brink; it is the spray 
 of morning playing on the granite. 
 
 Now gaze down into Mirror Lake, and you shall be- 
 hold the mountain heights draw near each other; the 
 lofty crowns and far-off peaks incline their stately heads 
 together to whisper "morning!" round the land. The 
 curve of the great dome like the fragment of an azi- 
 muth, the outline of crag and cliff, the trees that cling
 
 226 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 like sailors in tli<> shrouds, the changing lights, the shoot- 
 ing, shortening, shifting shadows, all doubled in the water 
 at your feet. 
 
 Looking at the gigantic group in the little mirror, 
 you begin to gain a new idea of the magnitude of 
 mountains and the size of yourself. Here are giants 
 that, ranged around in a twelve-mile sweep, could all look 
 into the same well together, like Jacob and Rachel at old 
 Haran. 
 
 As we were watching the dissolving views we should 
 never see again, a Cassius of a fellow with an African 
 antecedent appeared with a battered bugle, rheumatic as 
 to its keys, patched with pewter and asthmatic beyond 
 relief. It might have been blown by The Cid's bugler in 
 the eleventh century to scare the Moors away, and look 
 not a century older. Cassius wanted to play for fifty 
 cents, and the echoes. To have the crags open mouth 
 upon us in harmony with that instrument of torture was 
 not, to be thought of. So one of the party lifted up his 
 head and called cnck-o-o! and every rocky face and alcove 
 and wooded wall gave back the word treble, alto, tenor, 
 bass, and when we thought they were all done, a faint 
 voice from a far ledge faltered "cuckoo." 
 
 For a lumbering old mountain weighing two or three 
 hundred million tons, and whose shoulder an able-bodied 
 star could not get high enough to look over without a 
 two hours' climb from the level of the sea, to stand there 
 and say "cuckoo" after you was absurd to a degree. It 
 was paltry business to bandy a word about that names 
 a bird too mean to hatch its own chickens, and so Boa- 
 nerges was desired to shout "Liberty!" and the rousing 
 trisyllable came bounding back from the responsive con-
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 227 
 
 gregation. A crag called " Lib," a wall put in the " er," 
 and somebody in a turret shouted "fe/" and then far and 
 near, high and low, the syllables came straggling along, 
 the articulation growing fainter and slower, and " the 
 daughter of voice "- was silent. 
 
 And then a breath from down the valley struck the 
 water, and the Dome was wrinkled and the Cap of Lib- 
 erty was ruffled like a French night-cap. Cloud's Rest 
 trembled out of sight, and the pageant was ended. 
 
 UP A TRAIL. 
 
 On horseback or on foot, there never was anything in 
 a champagne bottle so exhilarating as climbing a mountain 
 trail. I tried to read these trails inscribed like the mys- 
 terious writing on Belshazzar's palace walls, for a day or 
 two. I watched an apparently perpendicular rock a thou- 
 sand feet in the air, and saw a chalk line. All at once 
 from a fringe of trees mid-air there emerged three horse- 
 men single file, and toed it, and crept like flies along the 
 mountain side where there seemed no foothold for a 
 chamois. Then with one accord they rode straight out 
 to the angle of the precipice, as if they had concluded to 
 make a cataract of themselves, and a Tarpeian rock of it. 
 Then one of them climbed to the left, and two of them 
 scrambled to the right. They had parted company. Tn 
 ten minutes they reunited and were headed the same 
 way and upward still. And so they kept meeting and 
 parting, meeting and parting; the thousand feet was fif- 
 teen hundred, the fifteen hundred two thousand, and then 
 they went into a hole and I never saw them come out; 
 but after a couple of hours, upon a pinnacle were three 
 rats that were horses, and three glove fingers that were
 
 228 HKTWEKN THE OATKS. 
 
 men. They had been traveling on two sides of a ladder 
 of flat Z's, and had slowly spelled themselves to the sum- 
 mit. 
 
 The next morning, a four-in-hand took us two miles 
 up the Valley, through scenery that, with tree and vine, 
 rock and river, tangle and shadow, was wild as the most 
 exacting Dryad or Naiad could wish, to the horse-trail, 
 a crooked, dusty trough, strown with stones, streaked 
 with the stroke of horse-shoes striking fire, ribbed with 
 gnarled roots, jostled by rocks, bordered by precipices that 
 tumble down into holes through the world, set up end- 
 wise, tilted edgewise, and wide as a stair carpet. We 
 reached Register Rock, with a shadow in a weary land, 
 like its Old Testament twin. It is about the size of a 
 Pennsylvania Dutchman's barn, and scrawled over with 
 " cream yeast " atrocities, and mammon and harlequin 
 possess it. It tells us that a flock of seventy-three 
 Bloomers alighted here in one day; that Bierstadt and 
 Moran halted for a mountain drink; that "Bob of Chili," 
 " the noblest Roman of them all," has been here. 
 
 From this rock the horse-trail climbs to the right 
 for Nevada Fall, and a fine-hand affair, a foot-trail, 
 trends up to the left for Vernal Fall. We take the lat- 
 ter, a crazy screw of a track, where the thread turns 
 both ways in three minutes; a wall of earth and rock on 
 one side, a gulf on the other, where the persecuted and 
 mystified Merced is roaring and raving from its last 
 tumble, the unhappiest, jolliest, liveliest river in the 
 geography. You put your feet side by side at first, and 
 then Indian file, as boys walk a crack; doubling head- 
 lands, climbing jagged stairs, crossing unrailed balconies. 
 It is nervous enough. The hungry Merced is tearing
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 229 
 
 down the gulf at your left. The boulders lift their 
 brown sea-lion heads flecked with foam. You wish your 
 right ear weighed four pounds, for a balance on the safe 
 side. You are not sure but it does and 
 the other ear also for as you turned in 
 upon the trail, a placarded tree exclaimed: 
 If the Athenians really voted that asses should be horses, it 
 was never carried. You grasp the laurel's shining leaves 
 as you climb, and they reward you with the refreshing 
 fragrance of bay-rum. You pass round an angle, and 
 Vernal Fall, three hundred and fifty feet high, is tum- 
 bling out of the air. It is no more vernal than a Lap- 
 land January is 110 in the shade. It is a cascade of 
 crystals. The rocks are spattered with the broken crock- 
 ery of the spectrum. 
 
 Water Falls do not talk alike. They roar, growl, 
 crash, grind, rush. The voice of the Vernal is grum, 
 like a mill, one minute, and then rough, like the grate 
 of coach wheels in the gravel, the next; but the Nevada 
 Fall slides with a smooth, soft, lulling sound, and a 
 faint tone like the moan of a bell that has just done 
 ringing. You creep over a lean shoulder, and two flights 
 of stairs, straight as Jacob's ladder, confront you. At 
 the first glance you think you would about as soon climb 
 by the curve of a notched rainbow. In some places the 
 path has an outer edge bare as the hem of a handker- 
 chief. In others, a fringe of grass two or three inches 
 high borders the trail, and how that mere nap of vege- 
 tation helps you keep your balance is truly wonderful, 
 when there is no more protection in it than there would 
 be in a railing of spider's web, but you walk with a 
 braver, surer step.
 
 230 HKTWKKN T1IK HATES. 
 
 Fern Grotto, at the foot of the stairs, is a dilapidated 
 hood of rork, apparently just ready to tumble upon any 
 forty or fifty heads that may get into it. Every maiden- 
 hair fern within reach had been plucked or wrenched 
 away by the roots, and some, on the rocky shelves out of 
 harm's way, had evidently been stoned as boys stone a 
 ti-fcd squirrel. Climbing the stairs, you land upon a broad, 
 smooth rock floor, with a stone balustrade built by giants, 
 whence you watch at your leisure the first silent, polished 
 plunge of the curving and jeweled water over the verge. 
 Then we go down the stairs, back over the hair-line, 
 which is an 'air-line on the brink side, to Register Rock, 
 where we take to the elbowed arms of the horse trail, 
 and tack and tug slowly up the mountain. Every other 
 arm, we are in the full glare of sunshine. Every other 
 arm, we are in the shade. The valley falls away as we 
 rise. The mountains settle down like motherly hens and 
 brood the little hills. The horizon ripples away and takes 
 in more and more of the world. The trails double above 
 each other like hanging balconies. 
 
 Just now a ringing mountain cry comes from below. 
 It is answered or echoed far over our heads. Queerly 
 enough, the highland shout is an inarticulate 
 cuck-oo, a variation of the Swiss yodel. Here Fi 
 is the score of the musical cry: 
 
 These signal and warning cries are not only pleasant 
 everywhere, but necessary upon the narrow trails, and 
 prevent many an accident and awkward meeting. In 
 twenty minutes the owner of the voice followed the 
 shout. He was a mounted guide with two ladies and a 
 bit of a girl whose horse he led with a lariat. The 
 horses went with their noses down as if following the
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 231 
 
 trail by scent, carried their tails like Bo-peep's sheep 
 and scrambled, sure-footed as goats, up the steeps. The 
 ladies were picturesque in sea-side hats, two stirrups 
 apiece and a foot in each of them. Some of the best 
 trails had the cows for engineers. Few suspect what 
 ambitious heights the lumbering mothers of the herd can 
 reach for a tuft of grass. 
 
 Four miles on the crooked hypothenuse of a triangle 
 brought us out at last upon a sun-bombarded, scraggy 
 plateau, and in front of us, as if a rock in the sky had 
 been smitten like the one in the Wilderness, the Nevada 
 Fall poured its snowy waters. Softly sliding in silken 
 scallops, some fast, some slow, waters over waters, silk 
 over satin, and only four steps in a seven-hundred-feet 
 stone stairway, it gracefully descended with a rustle of 
 white garments, to the paved street that led down to 
 Vernal Fall and the valley and the canon and the sea. 
 
 Towering two thousand feet above the head of the 
 grand staircase, like a sentinel four thousand feet high, 
 stands, rigid, soldierly, erect, The Cap of Liberty. Shaggy 
 Bearskin Point is in sight, which Miss Anna Dickinson, 
 with a slight godmother experience of baptismal fonts, 
 strove to rechristen Crinoline Point. A sightly place to 
 hang a petticoat! 
 
 There has been some atrocious naming of the moun- 
 tains. Neither poet nor soldier has so much as a peak to 
 himself, but a photographer is his Eminence by virtue of 
 a crag, and there is a whole mountain by the name of 
 Gabb! Think of filling Fame's sounding trumpet with a 
 sonorous gabble! Coming up the Valley from the Bridal 
 Veil, you see at the left three grotesque crags, four thou- 
 sand feet high, that turn their heads as you near them
 
 232 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 and change their shapes as you leave them. Some fra- 
 ternally-inclined soul named them the Three Brothers 
 why not the three blind mice? when the Indians h;i<l 
 recognized and christened them as well as Adain could 
 have done it, Pom-pom-pasus, the mountains playing leap- 
 frog, and there, to be sure, they sit, the granite batra- 
 chians, each behind the other, their arms on their thighs, 
 their chuckle heads lifted, and forever making ready to 
 jump. 
 
 We shambled and heeled it, and sometimes tnanibus 
 pedibusque, down the trail into the Valley, where saddle- 
 horses overtook us, a stage met us and friends greeted 
 us. We had enjoyed a climb, a hold-back, a saddle, and 
 a stage ride, fourteen miles, all told; had been in sight 
 of the raftered garret of North America; had seen hori- 
 zons, now crushed like a broken hoop, and now built 
 far out, broad, round and perfect. a vast amphitheater 
 peopled with a senate of mountains. It was a white day. 
 It is so set down in the calendar. 
 
 YO SEMITE FALL AND SUN TIME. 
 In midsummer the Yo Semite is less a fall than a fall- 
 away, and there is no more tumult about it than there 
 is in the drooping grace of a weeping willow. A streak 
 of water and a broad, dark line on the face of the rock, 
 a sort of dull lithographic map, show the route of the 
 cataract. It is a perpendicular half mile from the brink 
 of the fall to the base, and there are times when the 
 tumbling thunders of the melting snows from the Gothic- 
 towers beyond, plunge through the cleft with a head- 
 long leap of fifteen hundred feet, strike a granite stair, 
 and then, girdled and hooded with foam and fury, des-
 
 BOUND FOR THE YQ SEMITE. 233 
 
 perately slip and slide four hundred more, and then make 
 a clean and final leap of more than forty rods down to 
 the Valley, a total twenty-six hundred feet of cataract 
 It is a drove of up-country rain storms and snows, herded 
 by the shepherds of the Sierras, and driven " down a steep 
 place into the" valley. 
 
 There are times when the ice and snow are piled at 
 its base to a height of four hundred feet, as if Yo Sem- 
 ite had pocketed a young Arctic ; but it is sure to slip 
 through its fingers in June. The wettest thing I saw 
 was a small white cloud, as diy as Jason's golden fleece, 
 that came to the cleft, took a look, and disappeared. 
 
 A dweller in the Valley can see the sun rise several 
 times in the same morning, and not travel more than a 
 mile to witness it. There seems to be a granite con- 
 spiracy to prevent his rising at all, and he acts as if he 
 were assaulting point after point for a weak spot. Over 
 this peak, beyond that cliff, above -yonder crag, along 
 that wall, he shows fight; but he scales them all at last, 
 and bombards the canon with his golden batteries. Eight, 
 nine, ten, eleven he is an accommodating sun, and the 
 laziest man in the world is glad to see him before night. 
 I stood near an old cabin where he does not rise in 
 December until half-past one, and sets at half-past three. 
 An old-time preacher's election sermon would pack such 
 a day eVen-full of doctrine, and leave not a minute for 
 dinner or doxology. The man was no dormouse; two 
 hours' day were not enough; he moved a mile and got 
 eight. It is the sort of sun that would have delighted 
 the soul of Gentle Elia. " You come very late in the 
 morning, Mr. Lamb," said the chief of the India House 
 10*
 
 _:'. I 1:1 T\\ i:i:\ TIM: <;.\T,ES. 
 
 to the immortal clerk. " Yes," was the poet's reply, 
 "but then I go home very early in the afternoon!" 
 
 There never was a grander place to put up chronom- 
 eters, from the great cathedral clock to the mantel-shelf 
 afl'air that ticks like a harvest-fly. There are not ten 
 minutes of sunshine that it does not touch some salient 
 point, or a shadow extend a finger and lay it on a spire, 
 a tower, or a mountain fir, that, once noted, is always 
 remembered. The face of the rocks could be mentally 
 covered with clock dials that would tell the hour as 
 perfectly as the giant of Strasburg. Once set these time- 
 pieces for the season, and you may leave your watch 
 under your pillow. 
 
 While we were in the Valley, the Evening Star had 
 a habit of passing a rugged embrasure on the summit of 
 Sentinel Rock, three thousand feet up, and it was better 
 than one of Shakspeare's plays to watch it. First it 
 passed into a castle cell, behind the wall. Then you 
 knew it was coming, for you saw a small dawn growing 
 on the sill of the battle-window. Last, it glided into 
 sight, clear and strong, passed straight across the field of 
 view, and was lost in the donjon. 
 
 The moonlight sometimes reveals more than broad 
 noon. Thus you may be watching a mountain wall all 
 day that has seemed a smooth and finished face of ma- 
 sonwork; but when the moon swings farther round, 
 shadows from some undetected high-relief of rock start 
 out and run five hundred feet along the mountain: or 
 what has always looked a whisker of a bush projects 
 the double of a great tree upon the wall. There is a 
 hand-shaped crag on Yo Semite Point, rudely resembling 
 the four fingers and palm in a gray mitten, and the
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 235 
 
 thumb is kindly furnished by a scrubby pine, that seems 
 to spring from the side of the hand, and you estimate 
 the height of the tree at sixteen feet, when it is two 
 hundred by actual measurement, and one hundred and 
 ten feet from its base to the cold and uncharitable hand, 
 and yet not the slightest dislocation is apparent. These 
 unaccustomed heights work surgical miracles. 
 
 In low and level regions, a man is accurately located 
 if you give his latitude and longitude; but among the 
 mountains a third factor is necessary his altitude how 
 far East or West, North or South, how far Up. In Chi- 
 cago, not a man in ten thousand thinks about his geog- 
 raphy above the sea level; but in the high lands you 
 pick up a hotel card, as at Denver, and read, " altitude, 
 6,000 feet." There are other evidences of altitude where 
 the stage routes are strown with broken bottles of all 
 colors and nations, from the stocky porter to the slender- 
 necked champagne. They exemplify a certain kind of 
 high civilization. 
 
 Did you ever see a cast of Oberlin's head, that sugar- 
 loaf of a head, full of sweet thoughts as a bee-hive is of 
 honey? That is about the shape of the South Dome. Its 
 organ of veneration is tremendous; there are six or eight 
 acres of it, six thousand feet high, and solid rock through 
 and through. It is a small petrifaction of the overarch- 
 ing sky. Agassiz would have delighted, in some fanciful 
 mood, to construct it. He would have set this skull upon 
 shoulders a mile and a half broad, and built up a human 
 figure six miles high to carry it. Three kinds of pines 
 and a few scattered grasses grow upon the reverential 
 Arabia Petrea. It was only toward the close of the 
 year '75 that a Montrose Scotchman, George S. Anderson,
 
 - !('. BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 (limbed off with the honor of being the first man to set 
 foot upon the summit. He drove iron pins into the 
 drilled rock, extended nearly a thousand feet of rope, and 
 h;ind over hand pulled himself up, and then backed in- 
 gloriously down. It is a kind of rope ferry to the skies. 
 While we were in the Valley, a ewe and her lamb unac- 
 countably reached the high pasture. Had it been in 
 South America, we should have said the condors gave 
 them a lift with a view to future mutton. How to get 
 the ambitious lanifers down was a problem. 
 
 BREAKING UP CAMP. 
 
 The sojourn in the Valley was made instructive and 
 delightful by Mr. J. M. Hutchings, whose name is indis- 
 solubly linked with the history of the Yo Semite, and 
 who has done more than all other men, and done it bet- 
 ter, to acquaint the world with its wonders. A gentle- 
 man of culture, he is an enthusiastic lover of the region 
 wherein he has passed so many years. Tall, spare, made 
 of whip-cord and grit, he is a revised and improved edi- 
 tion of Cooper's Leather Stocking. His gray hair does 
 not suggest age, but like a horse iron-gray, means endur- 
 ance. Tent life, mountain trails, adventure and shaggy 
 canons have charms for him that make the wilderness a 
 perpetual delight. He was about breaking up camp to 
 lead a party a three weeks' mountaineering, and we went 
 over to the ground to see the flitting. 
 
 His camp was pitched beside a beautiful stream near 
 the foot of the Yo Semite, a grassy place with luxuriant 
 shade. 
 
 The party was composed of ladies, old and young, two 
 or three strong men, a photographic artist, and some
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 237 
 
 bright, smart bits of boys and girls. They had just had 
 breakfast, and were busy as bees. The scene was pictur- 
 esque. A dozen horses were standing about, "all saddled 
 and bridled and ready to ride"; the tents were coming 
 down by the run, and rolling up as handily as you would 
 shut an umbrella; a lady of sixty-five, and who, by the 
 way, went up that sky-ferry on the Dome much as if she 
 had skipped to the mast-head on shipboard, was packing 
 pans and plates; girls were baling blankets, slinging tin 
 cups to the saddles, and petting or plaguing the horses. 
 
 The pack animals, whereof the mule Molly was chief, 
 were taking on a deck-load of cargo. She made a saw- 
 buck of her legs when the men began to tighten the 
 long cords over the load on one side and the other with 
 a foot braced against her for -a strong pull. Trunks, 
 boxes, bedding, a whole kitchen of culinary ware, were 
 balanced in the great panniers, till the cargo was as big 
 as herself. Sometimes she wearied of being a saw-buck, 
 and took to rearing up behind and before at about the 
 same instant, which rendered things uneasy and made 
 lively times for the stevedores of the queer craft. Mr. 
 Hutchings was the ruling spirit, tightening a girth, giv- 
 ing a snugger reef to a tent, condemning things they 
 could do without, showing it was more of a science to 
 know what you do not want than what you do. At 
 length the camp was clear, the brands of the fire were 
 stamped out, the last pack animal was a little elephant or 
 a big camel, and the order to mount peopled the saddles 
 as if it had been done by a bugle. Florence Hutchings, 
 and her brother whose short legs were projected to lar- 
 board and starboard from the saddle they were about 
 long enough to bestride the back of a jack-knife and
 
 288 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 made an inverted capital T of him thus, 1, led off the 
 cavalcade. Let us give the girl, for her own and her 
 father's sake, some graceful mountain height, and let it 
 be called Mt. Florence. 
 
 The party then deployed in a circle around the car- 
 riage that brought their guests, and sang "Vive L'Com- 
 jHinit''" till the birds listened, the health of everybody was 
 drank in water "qualified" like a Justice of the Peace, 
 and one after another they filed away, the little elephants 
 and dromedaries giving an oriental look to the caravan, 
 and as they streamed out through the meadow toward 
 the bridge over the Merced they struck up, with one 
 accord, "Where now are the Hebrew children?" And 
 where are they? That night upon the mountain height, 
 five miles as the crow flies, and ten miles as the trail 
 went, we saw through the wind-swayed cedars their camp 
 blaze, like a fire-fly's intermittent light. But the bright- 
 eyed girls, the gentle women and the stalwart men, we 
 saw no more. Mr. Hutchings and a San Francisco girl 
 kept us company for awhile, halted with us at a mineral 
 spring, where we took a parting stirrup-cup of something 
 in ate, ite and et, the Yo Semite Leather Stocking told 
 sparkling and pathetic stories, one after another, taking 
 off the curse of sentimentalism, every now and then, with, 
 
 "And they all flapped their wings, 
 Singing Filly McGree McGraw," 
 
 and then, putting foot in the stirrup, away went the 
 genial mountaineer and the merry maiden at a hand 
 gallop, through the trees and up the trail and round a 
 curve and out of sight. Good fortune and good night 
 to the gypsies of the Yo Semite! And then we made 
 our way out of the marvelous Valley, and our last look
 
 BOUND FOR THE YO SEMITE. 
 
 239 
 
 was at El Capitan, and as we rode over the ridges and 
 climbed the crags, the August sun blazing with all its 
 fires, we turned and saw the sheen of the snows, drift 
 above drift, like the clouds of Magellan, everlastingly 
 there, and then, with benisons on the Valley and regret 
 for the friends and the glories we were leaving, we set 
 pur faces toward the Western sea and the Bay of San 
 Francisco, and that new Athens of the Occident.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO has lions, and now and then a whale. 
 For several days the street cars had been carrying 
 "a banner with the strange device" "To THE WHALE," 
 and we entered one of those crowded cars bound to 
 ride until somebody said " whale." But everybody said 
 " whale,, and persevered in it to such a degree 'that we 
 asked the driver the car was one of those Insurance- 
 Company self-paying institutions to say "whale" him- 
 self just once when the time came. He did, and we 
 bundled out of the car and followed the crowd. And 
 there he was, the h'n-back, seventy-six feet long and 
 moored to the dock like a dismasted ship of the line. 
 We never got much idea of the monster from the pic- 
 tures we used to have. They represented a big, bulging 
 rubber overshoe, in the days when they called them 
 " gums," with a weeping willow turned to water grow- 
 ing out of the toe. 
 
 But here was the genuine sea-side tenement of the 
 Prophet Jonah, with its arched door and seventeen-feet 
 posts, but not a place for a bell-pull or a door-plate, the 
 only evidence of high life being fixtures for a fountain 
 in the front yard. But its blowing days were past. Roses 
 blow, and so do whales. Being a whale of seventy-six, 
 he was a Revolutionary aquatic, for he lay upon his back 
 
 340
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS. 241 
 
 and looked like the ribbed bottom of an awkward boat 
 painted one coat of dirty white. He was moored stem 
 and stern and slowly surged with the sea. 
 
 The crowd were as much of a wonder as the whale. 
 "Where's his flippers?" said one; "his fins?" another; 
 "his teeth?" a third; "Oh, hasn't he any ears?" whined 
 a little lubber; "Did he really swallow Jonah, ma?" 
 asked a good little Sunday-school girl; and so it went. 
 Some women were looking for a mouth full of corset 
 frames, but there being a doubt to which end the head 
 belonged, they never found " those skeletons of the closet." 
 An old whaler stubbing about estimated him at sixty bar- 
 rels. And this was the sort of beast for which all tar- 
 paulined Nantucket went round the Horn and widowed 
 the women; the mountain of blubber that could thresh a 
 boat like grain with one end and drown the crew with 
 the other; the floating oil-well for the light of other 
 days. 
 
 Polonius would not have said, "it is backed like a 
 whale," for there was no ocular proof it ever had a back; 
 but he could have declared, "it hath an ancient and fish- 
 like smell," for it suggested a whiff of the smoky lamp 
 of japanned tin that stood on the stand with a snuff-box 
 and the family bible. A herd of whales going to " school " 
 in mid-ocean, with the plumes of water waving and the 
 great flukes lashing the sea into foam, must be a grand 
 sight, but this ill-shapen wreck of oleaginous examination 
 was not a success. Let us give it a bad name and be 
 gone: the great northern rorqual of the genus Balcenop- 
 tera, class of mammals, think of its having calves! of 
 the family of cetacea and the tribe of mutilates, and that 
 is what it is, and badly mutilated too! The fishermen 
 11
 
 iM'J BETWEEN '\\\\: tiATES. 
 
 caught the whale, the whale caught us, and we caught 
 the first car for home. Moral: "If you want to see a 
 whale, ship before the mast for a three years' voyage. 
 
 SEALS. 
 
 A seal-skin sacque with a snug woman inside and a 
 snug winter outside, is as pretty a sight as a snow-bird 
 in its season. But a seal in its own jacket would not 
 catch " the apple of discord " in the competition for beauty 
 with anything you ever saw pulled out of the sea. It is 
 an exaggerated garden slug, weighing from one hundred 
 pounds to four thousand, dog-headed, ox-eyed, whiskers 
 Spanish and sparse, a benign countenance and a pair of 
 nippers. Seal Rocks, six miles from San Francisco and a 
 few hundred feet from the headland, are three huge 
 cairns with a Druidical look, piled up in the sea, the 
 blarney-stones of San Francisco and the paradise of seals. 
 They are the wards of the State, protected by law, and 
 the piscatorial triumphs of the Coast. 
 
 You ride through Golden Gate Park, one of the most 
 beautiful drives in the world, with its winding sweeps 
 of magnificent distances, bowl up to the Cliff House and 
 make for the balcony. Before you, blue and scintillant 
 as frosty steel, is the Pacific, flaunting its white fringes 
 and flounces along the shore at your feet, and dying 
 away into the sky afar off. As the great waves come slid- 
 ing up the slopes of gray sand and fling themselves down 
 upon the land with thunder in the rustle of their gar- 
 ments, you think what a royal fool Canute was. Some 
 flies with filmy wings are creeping along the curve of 
 the horizon. They seem to move as the grass grows. 
 They are ships from South America, from Oregon, from
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS. 243 
 
 round the Horn. Some tobacco smokes are rolling up 
 in the distance. They are ocean-going steamers from 
 Honolulu and Cathay. Some fragments of white love- 
 notes are nickering in the air. They are sea-birds. 
 
 Before you rises the acropolis of seals. There are 
 other inhabitants of the rocky fastnesses, but you do not 
 notice them at first. There the seals are, some of them 
 coming up sleek and dark out of the sea; some lying 
 about with lifted heads, quarreling, gossiping, playing 
 with their young; some working their way up the crags 
 like so many portly men tied up in tawny bags from 
 head to heel. You are half sorry for their helpless- 
 ness at first, but when you see them climbing where 
 you could not scramble for your life, your sympathy is 
 lost in admiration. Their voices are a hoarse confusion 
 of the bark of puppies, the creak of dry cart-wheels, the 
 clatter of guinea-hens. You vainly try to translate the 
 jargon into English. It rises above the roar of the sea 
 and drives against the wind. These seals have a peren- 
 nial cold and live an everlasting Friday, for their food 
 is fish. They do their own angling, and twelve thousand 
 pounds is no extravagant estimate for the monthly rations 
 of the whole community. The fishing fleets would be 
 delighted to work up the last skin of them all into caps. 
 Pish, likewise eggs: for you begin to see the birds dot- 
 ting the rocks, sitting in drowsy rows, rising in freckled 
 clouds, settling down to the sea like big snow-flakes in 
 the dusk. There are gulls, pelicans, sea-parrots, sea- 
 pigeons, guillemots; some swift, some slow, and all lazy. 
 They lay their eggs heedlessly about among the rocks, 
 and the seals help themselves. The eggs are clouded and 
 colored marbles, pretty enough to pave the king's court-
 
 J44 
 
 i;i:i \\ I:I:N- THE GATES. 
 
 vanl, and no two alike. They are nourishing inside and 
 neat outside. Fish and <-^s! What intellectual folk the 
 seals should be, with nothing but edible phosphorus on 
 the bill of fare! 
 
 The Seal Rocks are a sort of domestic Juan Fernan- 
 dez, but nothing could be wilder. To see Crusoe's Capri- 
 cornus come round a corner would not surprise you. The 
 clamor of the waves, the crying of the disconsolate winds, 
 the screaming of the birds, the strident talk of the seals, 
 give you the cast-away feeling of a shipwrecked mariner. 
 
 With any other surroundings such a Babel would be 
 hideous, but delicate ladies sit by the hour and listen as 
 to bassos with subterranean voices and larks of prima- 
 donnas. California is proud of its seals and its seal. The 
 Legislature tossed out a thousand-dollar bag of gold for 
 the design, like the rich uncle in the play, when they 
 could have bought a live bear and hired a live miner 
 for half the money, while the bath-tub exclamation of 
 Archimedes, "'Eureka!'" is everybody's, and Minerva the 
 Romans had done with long ago. But it is wonderfully 
 appropriate and peculiarly Californian. Contrast with
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS. 245 
 
 this exultant device the arms of Washington Territory, 
 with its cheerful young woman, her hand uplifted, an 
 anchor at her feet, a cabin and a capitol in the distance, 
 the rising sun opening a fan of glory over the picture, 
 and the modest, hopeful word, borrowed not from classic 
 Greek but savage Indian, "Al-ki!" by and by. 
 
 THE GOLDEN GATE. 
 
 It was a memorable day when we visited the Cliff 
 and The Golden Gate. The Lord made it that morning 
 and pronounced it good. Even the bare sand dunes are 
 beautiful with the pictured waves and ripples of watered 
 silk. Two mountain ranges, the nearer, russet, the far- 
 ther, blue, are in sight, and Diablo lifts his three thou- 
 sand feet of smoky grandeur. And looking upon the 
 purple hills and the blue and golden lights upon the 
 water, we thought that if ever a spot could dispute with 
 Athens her ancient title, it is San Francisco. Oh, " City 
 of the Violet Crown," all hail! 
 
 Flocks of all river and ocean craft are coming and 
 going. Here, a great steamer ploughs squarely out, leav- 
 ing a highway of wake and a line of drifted foam each 
 side of the road. There, a fellow with one white wing 
 lifted and body a-tilt, is skimming obliquely across the 
 Bay. 
 
 Yonder, a little African of a tug with his nose out 
 of water and his great fleece of black wool bigger than 
 his body, has a leviathan by the halter, and is leading 
 him up to the wharf. Now, a surly man-of-war comes 
 in view, or a Chinese water-bug of a craft puts out its 
 long antennae this way .and that, feeling for something, 
 or a ship with her top-hamper piled in volumes white
 
 JU> BETWEEN THK (JATKS. 
 
 and high, as if she had taken on a cargo of summer 
 clouds for a dry market; or a srli<imirr sits motionless on 
 the water asleep in its bare bones, or a long lean boat darts 
 about like a midge, with oars as slender in the distance 
 as a fine-tooth comb. San Francisco Bay is a grand 
 parlor with a crystal flooring of six or seven hundred 
 square miles. The Bay is divided somewhat as General 
 Lee of the Revolution partitioned off his one room into 
 several apartments, with a piece of chalk and a garden 
 line, into San Pablo and Suisun. And this grand recep- 
 tion chamber has furniture. There are Alcatras and 
 Angel Islands, and Black Point, all parlor organs with 
 iron batteries of pipes for pedal bass, that can pitch a 
 tune and a shot at the same instant. San Francisco was 
 ambitious to be an island itself, but the best it could do 
 was to become a peninsula thirty miles long with the 
 city upon its northeastern end, like a big word on the 
 tip of a tongue. 
 
 And the parlor opens out upon the Pacific. Its front 
 door is The Golden Gate. In fact, it is a hall five miles 
 long and one and a half miles broad. Its gate-posts are 
 Fort Point and Lime Point, a mile apart, and not the 
 least like the pillars of Hercules, and a greater than 
 Samson lifted the Gate from its hinges and flung it into 
 the sea. It is the strait of Chrysopola?, and the name was 
 prophetic, for early in 1848, before the discovery of gold, 
 Fremont, the Pathfinder, because of the fertile shores to 
 which it led, christened it The Golden Gate. At the 
 South portal is a lock. It is Fort Point, a grim struct- 
 ure with eight-feet walls of brick and stone, mounting 
 one hundred and twenty-three guns, and the Fortress 
 Monroe of the farthest West. A solitary sergeant opened
 
 WHALES, LIONS AND WAR DOGS. 247 
 
 a ponderous little door in a ponderous big door, and let 
 us in. We passed through the hollow arched ways; went 
 up and down the rusty iron stairs; crossed the echoing 
 courts; paused in the cave-like alcoves where the cannon 
 dwell, and slowly paced the iron arc of death upon the 
 floor whereon the great guns swing round when they 
 look out at the windows for the canvas-winged enemy, 
 and speak to him in crashes of thunder; stood by the 
 furnace where they cook cannon balls, and deliver the 
 glowing planets " all hot," like the cross-buns of the Lon- 
 don cries, on board the hostile ships; patted the black- 
 mouthed monsters that forever watch the cobwebbed win- 
 dows, waiting for something to say, and talking in mono- 
 syllables when they talk at all; listened at the locked- 
 up dungeon of thunder and lightning; sat upon a twelve- 
 feet Spanish gun, adorned with the Castilian arms, and 
 dated 1673. that spoke Spanish, perhaps, where Toledo 
 blades are born, and came to this wilderness a century 
 ago. Very silent, very solemn, is the place. 
 
 And then we saw how the guns from fort, island and 
 point could send their iron shuttles to and fro across the 
 hall, and string great ships, like beads, upon their fiery 
 warp and woof. And then we went out and saw the 
 fog-bell, shaped like an iron lupin or a Puritan's hat, 
 hanging with its dead weight run down, voiceless, by the 
 wall. Think of a hat weighing two tons! And then, 
 climbing the craggy hills above, we saw great kennels, 
 and big dogs of war crouched in the sand, and their 
 noses smutted with " villainous saltpetre," all pointed 
 toward the Pacific. 
 
 And then we thought what a weary while ago it was, 
 three hundred and one years, since Sir Francis Drake, with
 
 248 liKTWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 a ruff round his neck, lace in his sleeves, and a silk doub- 
 let, discovered the bay of St. Francis,, and in the n;unc 
 of the Virgin Queen who was no duck named the land 
 New Albion, and set a plate upon " a faire great poste, 
 wherein was engraven her Majesty's name and yeere." 
 
 And then we took a long look at the battered door- 
 posts of rock and mountain, and the dim ocean beyond, 
 and saw a ship weighing and balancing in the offing, a 
 wing spread here and a wing spread there, and curtsy- 
 ing through the Gate into the blue parlor of the Bay. 
 And then we thought how the gray mists swept down, 
 sometimes, upon crag and water, and blotted and brooded 
 them all out. And then we turned away and passed 
 Lone Mountain, the everlasting camping ground of dead 
 Californians, and struck into the clattering streets of the 
 living, and the music of a band swayed to and fro, and 
 near and far, and loud and low, in the wind, and we 
 met fellows invested principally in vests, with their feet 
 apart, like an inverted Y, A, and the ribbons twisted 
 like yarn, getting out of the roan and the bay all there 
 was in them, and shouting: "Hi!" as the spokes grew 
 dense in the dizzy wheels. And then we saw a placarded 
 window that might have said, "Coffin plates purchased," 
 when it did say, " Wedding presents bought or exchanged " ; 
 and at a street corner, " A. Goldmann " declares himself 
 "Mender of Broken Articles," a piece of information that 
 many a verdict of " twelve good and lawful men " has ap- 
 plied to tattered affections and fractured hearts, making 
 them toughest and strongest at the spot that was weakest. 
 
 And then the sea breeze bore down upon us in a 
 shower of sand like a troop of Bedouins, and the sky was 
 Coventry-blue, and the day by the sea was ended.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 
 
 E valleys radiating from the Bay are among the 
 ~*~ chief glories of the State: those spacious halls of 
 beauty and abundance, San Joaquin, Sacramento, Napa, 
 Santa Clara, forever opening into chambers along the 
 way, and meaning bread for the Continent, flowers for 
 its festivals, fruit for its tables, and the climates of all 
 hospitable lands. 
 
 The Central and Southern Pacific Railroads took us 
 over nearly five hundred miles to Los Angeles, the capital 
 of Semi-tropical California. To build the thoroughfare 
 through an appalling desert and over a rude and rugged 
 rabble of disorderly mountains was a bold project, but it 
 proved a triumph. The equipments are " express and 
 admirable," the officers courteoiis. No more delightful 
 winter trip than this can be found without inventing 
 a geography. Leaving the Bay, the train runs through 
 miles of perpetual gardens. Think of one horizon full of 
 currants, another red with plums and cherries; a level 
 world set with vegetables like a sunflower disc with 
 seeds. 
 
 You set forth from San Francisco yesterday afternoon. 
 At this morning's dawn you have left three hundred 
 miles behind, and are up betimes to see the glories and 
 difficulties of sunrise. It is August, and you look out
 
 -!">'> BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 upon great, tawny plains dotted and tied down with tufts 
 of sagr-gnrii grass, as were your grandmother's com- 
 forters with yarn. Those slate-colored thunder-clouds at 
 your right are mountains. They look as smooth as a 
 new monument. There are more mountains ahead in 
 the way of the train, but it makes for them as if there 
 was nobody there. You are in the region where the 
 Sierras and the Coast Range meet. It is the trysting- 
 place for grandeur. 
 
 A DIFFICULT SUNRISE. 
 
 The day is yet in the gray. A flock of magpies have 
 been racing with the train for ten minutes. They just 
 showed what they could do and switched off. You see a 
 Chinaman asleep in the open air on a flamingo-legged 
 bedstead. He has achieved a second story without going 
 upstairs. The arrangement suggests creeping things with 
 shorter legs but more of them. 
 
 The shadows of the mountains begin to show along 
 the plain. There is something beyond. As the light 
 grows, the heights retreat before the coming train. They 
 had drawn near in the dark to keep each other company, 
 but courage returns with the dawn. The light strikes 
 through a cleft between two lines of mountains, fires 
 over your head, takes the landscape behind you at long 
 range, while you are yet jarring on in the shadow.- It 
 is the phenomenon of clouds in a clear sky. The peaks 
 in the West respond. They are covered with pinks in 
 full blossom. It is as if Yesterday were pursuing you 
 and To-day were heading you off. At last, the unrisen 
 sun begins to define the edges of the mountains. He 
 ravels them out into fringes of trees, and sharpens the
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 251 
 
 rocks into angles. You think he is about to rise here, 
 and then a cliff crimsons somewhere else, and you are 
 sure he will appear yonder. The sky is steadily growing 
 golden red, like the ripening fruit of the Hesperian or- 
 chards. The sun seems to be looking for a low place to 
 rise in, and trying one notch after another in the jagged 
 horizon. You see his upper edge an instant, and then he 
 sinks back as you near him. The train swings round a 
 curve and finds the canon where he must have halted 
 for breakfast. An hour more and it is sunrise all 
 abroad. The mountains' night-clothes that strewed the 
 ground are rolled up and put away. The king of day 
 has come to his own again. 
 
 THE TEHACHAPI LOVE-KNOT. 
 
 Te//ac/mpi! is not a sneeze, but the name of a mob 
 of mountain peaks and crags that disputed the right of 
 way with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The heights 
 were impracticable, the rocks were immovable, and so the 
 train climbed as high as it could, and crept into a bur- 
 row like a fox. It was an eyelet-hole drilled through 
 and through, and so the train came out on the mount- 
 ain's other side, found a shelf and climbed again, entered 
 a second tunnel, a third, a fourth, swinging round and 
 up and over and through. It is a tremendous screw cut 
 out of mountains just to let that train run up the thread. 
 80 we go, skirting one peak, running to earth in an- 
 other, whipping through seventeen tunnels, taking seven- 
 teen stitches in the ragged selvedge, in the distance of 
 ten miles, the engine and the train in two burrows at 
 once. Now we look down upon four tracks we have 
 come, and now we look up upon three tracks we are
 
 _'". ' KKTWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 going, that are forever crossing themselves like a con- 
 fused witness. 
 
 The little roasted village of Caliente lies in the valley 
 four thousand feet below us, and we have been circling 
 iibove that cigar-box of a town like a hawk over a barn- 
 yard. We bid it a final farewell as often as a star actor 
 takes leave of the public, and round we swing again, and 
 there is bewitching Caliente! It is a single mile distant, 
 but we have gyrated six miles to make it. One curve of 
 three-fourths of a mile lifts us seventy-eight feet above our 
 own heads. We seem to be constantly meeting ourselves, 
 pursuing ourselves, contradicting ourselves. The summit 
 of Tehachapi is five-sixths of a mile above the sea, and 
 the train climbs one hundred and sixteen feet to the mile 
 for twenty-five miles. The engine does some tough tug- 
 ging hereabouts, but then, going one way it runs forty- 
 seven miles without pulling a pound. All it wants is a 
 snaffle-bit and a hold-back. It boxes the compass in sixty 
 minutes. 
 
 - You have seen a cat feeling her cautious way through 
 the currant bushes with her whiskers? If they touch, 
 she tries another opening; if they clear, she disappears 
 in the greenery; for she knows she carries the measure 
 of her fur clothes at the corners of her mouth. This 
 train, prowling and feeling its way among the crags of 
 the knobbed world, has a cat-like way of its own. High- 
 land and lowland, that engine is a wonderful civilizer, 
 and there are only two hundred thousand of her on the 
 globe, but they represent the physical force of a hundred 
 millions of men, and a spanking team of twelve millions 
 of horses. The double-stranded thread on which these 
 heights are strung, called the Loop, is three thousand
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 
 
 253 
 
 seven hundred and ninety-five feet long, a great double 
 bow-knot of steel. 
 
 The tunnels are about as thick as woodchuck holes 
 in a New York pasture, and looking back upon the 
 craggy mouth of one you have just threaded, you wonder 
 how the cat made it without bending her whiskers and 
 rasping her sides. There- is some beauty about these bur- 
 rows if you watch for it. Standing upon the rear plat- 
 form as the train enters the great tunnel of San Fer- 
 nando, a mile and seventeen hundred feet long, you see 
 
 first a round frame with the picture of a rock and a tree 
 in it. It is a rare medallion. It grows finer and finer, 
 but clear as an artist's proof all the while, and then it 
 changes into a great harvest moon in the horizon, and 
 the umber-colored smoke tints it down to lunar light. 
 Then as the train descends the grade of seventy feet in 
 the tunnel, that moon begins to rise, and lessen as it 
 climbs. The clouds sweep over its face, but leave no 
 stain. That moon-rise in the mountain heart, with its 
 undrilled welkin of solid rock, is a magical and beautiful 
 illusion. You watch it with anxious eagerness as you are
 
 -J.M IU:T\VI:I:N THK HATES. 
 
 borne away into the rumbling Erebus of the sunless hall. 
 At last it is only a star of the fourth magnitude, a spark 
 of light, then gone. Meanwhile the system of compensa- 
 tions sets another planet waxing at the other end of the 
 tunnel; and so there are a pair of moons doing escort 
 duty for every passing train. 
 
 You have noticed a hen before now, standing on one 
 foot in a drizzly, lazy day, and you saw a sort of filmy 
 curtain draw slowly over an eye about as intelligent as 
 a glass bead, while the outside blind was wide open. Go- 
 ing through tunnel No. 5 of the Loop, I saw that pul- 
 let's eye magnified and glorified, and that same curtain 
 but made of yellow smoke this time drawn slowly 
 over the unspeculative optic in the absurdest way, while 
 the great rocky eyelid remained lifted under the shaggy 
 brow. There is something unaccountably ridiculous about 
 both of them. 
 
 THE MOJAVE DESERT. 
 
 It is at mid-day, under a sky cloudless as the shield of 
 Achilles, that we strike into the great desert of Mojave. 
 I fancied I crossed a desert on the Overland Train, but 
 it was a blunder. It was nothing but a batch of Satanic 
 dough. But here are the cruel, glittering plains, flinty 
 to the feet, fiery to the eye, " and not a drop to drink," 
 thousands of square miles of desolation. No ruins here 
 but the wrecks and ruins of all the Christian seasons of 
 the year, shut out from the blessed promises of seed-time 
 and harvest, and sending back fierce answer to the noon. 
 It is the crumbling skeleton of Nature, hopeless of burial 
 and bleaching in the sun. 
 
 I cannot realize this transit of the desert in a palace-
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 255 
 
 car, this turning a howling Tadrnor into a luxury. It 
 robs the route of all daring and adventure. I ana sorry 
 I cannot be as sorry as I was, for Mungo Park and 
 Bruce, and the rest, who, foot-sore and camel-back, wan- 
 dered hungry and athirst in the trackless sands. I can 
 believe all they tell me of starvation and death; of trains 
 bewildered and lost; of the lakes of delusion with which 
 the mirage beguiled them miles from their way, only to 
 sink down in the arid waste disconsolate; of the dumb 
 despair that lashed to desperate deeds. Only a few days 
 before, a Colonel of the Army had told me of leading his 
 command of infantry through this Desert, and eighteen 
 days on the way; of the steel blade that could lie upon 
 the ground the night out without a tarnish; of the wagons 
 that tumbled to pieces without wearing out. 
 
 Away at the left, a sweep of two hundred miles, it is 
 lost in the distance, and far to the front it touches the 
 mountains. Tufts of raspy grass rigid as knitting-needles 
 are sparsely sprinkled about among leprous patches of 
 white earth. Everything that grows here is covered with 
 thorns, or spikes, or stings, and seems making a stub- 
 born fight for its life. What they want to live at all 
 for nobody knows. 
 
 A VEGETABLE ACROBAT. 
 
 But the Yucca is the triumph of the Desert, and 
 there are thousands of it. Fancy trees from twelve to 
 twenty feet high, growing in the most fantastic shapes, 
 and covered with deep-green bottle-brushes of foliage, 
 never fading, but bristling all ways in the most irritable 
 manner; their gnarled figures, dark as the black cypress, 
 showing in mournful relief against the ghastly plains
 
 256 BETWEEN THE GATKS. 
 
 and the brazen skies, and you have the Yucca. It looks 
 as if it might be an exaggerated cousin of the cactus 
 family. The trunks' of the chicken Yuccas are covered 
 with coarse plumage, a little like the covering of a pine- 
 apple, down to the ground, like so many Bantams feath- 
 ered along the legs. 
 
 Nothing more grotesque in the vegetable world can 
 be conceived: the limbs growing out jnst as it happens, 
 from the trunk and from each other, sometimes live ball- 
 clubs with the big ends farthest from the tree, and some- 
 times oven-brooms for the wind to swing, if there were 
 any more swing to them than there is to the tines of a 
 pitch-fork in a breeze. Now you see a tree that oddly 
 suggests one of the useless and ornamental waiters that 
 infest hotels with their whisk brooms and open palms, 
 but sprouted out all over with arms and legs, and the 
 tip of every finger and toe finished off with a green 
 brush. But the most resemble acrobats. Here a family 
 of limbs make a slender-bodied, long-legged fellow with 
 his lean arms resting on a branch beneath him, and just 
 ready to leap over the top of the tree, which he never 
 does. If we were not quite sure the Lord made the 
 Yucca to fight and frolic in the Desert, we should lay 
 its manufacture to a Chinaman. It has a grotesque- 
 ness quite " celestial " but not heavenly. Who knows 
 but these trees are transmigrated champion equestians of 
 the ring, and Mojave a sort of circus-riders' paradise? 
 You have little idea how those Yucca fellows beguile the 
 way, and I can hardly help thinking of them now as 
 some tribe of East Indian jugglers turned vegetables. 
 
 The Yucca has its uses, the trees are being swiftly 
 slain, and a short time will see the plains utterly de-
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 257 
 
 nuded. Who would suspect that closely folded in those 
 eccentric trunks were reams of bank-note paper? And 
 yet I have before me a piece of the fibrous wood and a 
 sheet of the firm, smooth fabric they wove of it. 
 
 THE MIRAGE. 
 
 We had been hoping for the phantasm of the mirage, 
 and we were not disappointed. Some one cried " mire- 
 idge!" and some one corrected, "ml-rSzh!'" and there 
 indeed it was, a beautiful lake of blue water at the left 
 of the train and five miles away. We must surely run 
 along the edge of its white beach. We must rest our 
 eyes with a near look of the rank sedge, but we never 
 did. The splendid waters rippled in the wind and re- 
 freshed the fancy, but as we approached they vanished, 
 and the thirsty plain lay parched and rigid where the 
 waves had glittered and glassed in the sun! We had 
 seen one charming picture of aerial geography, one shore 
 that never meandered, one lake that never was named, 
 one world that was never mapped. And to think of the 
 hundreds of travelers with blackened lips that had sought 
 these seas of delusion, and died with dry eyes before they 
 reached them! 
 
 The train halted at a Station, desolate as a light- 
 house and as guiltless of door-yard as a gibbet, and a 
 dilapidated stage, a sort of tattered tent on wheels, was 
 waiting there for a victim. It looked just fit to connect 
 with Charon's ferry and carry second-class passengers and 
 dead-heads. One man with a pair of saddle-bags climbed 
 into it, and we wondered if he meant to cross the river 
 Styx after he left the coach. A little while after, we saw 
 an eight-mule team, the wagon under bare hoops, like a 
 11*
 
 J.".^ HFr\VF.i:\ THE GATI'.s. 
 
 woman's dismantled skirt, creeping along in the distance 
 like a procession of rats. Whether the canvas was burned 
 off or blown off no one could tell. Somebody said they 
 were going to a mining camp in the mountains, and 
 they are quite welcome to everything they can get. One 
 man said: "Things look barren as Sarah," meaning the 
 African Sahara of the blundering old geographies. An- 
 other man said: "That's so! Barren as Sarah before she 
 was ninety years old!" The other man had been made 
 mad by the desolation, and a Yucca beside the track 
 held up two hands full of brushes in deprecation and dis- 
 tress. 
 
 A field at the right of the train, white as a cambric 
 handkerchief, sent everybody to the ice-pitcher with thirst. 
 It was a lake of salt. A drier piece of waterscape can- 
 not be found between Cancer and Capricorn. The salt 
 was piled upon the shores of what was no sea, like the 
 snow-forts of the Yankee boys in New England winters, 
 and two wagons were there taking on a load of chloride 
 of sodium. Sodom would have been at home in it, and 
 Gomorrah also. 
 
 This traversing a desert reclining upon a sofa, with 
 your lazy feet on an ottoman, defrauds a man out of 
 the luxury of remembered deprivation and danger. We 
 should have enjoyed its memory more had there been 
 anything struggled through and escaped. Set a fellow 
 on foot behind a mule bankrupt of thistles and with 
 ears wilted down with the drouth; let the fellow's hair 
 turn the color of corn-silk in the sun, and the canteen 
 at his side tinkle loudly with emptiness, and he tighten 
 his belt another hole to gird up his leanness let him 
 come to some blessed edge of the green world at last,
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 259 
 
 with a soul in his body and yet to be saved, and his 
 recollections are worth keeping and telling. 
 
 We are nearing the mountain range of San Fernando. 
 The entrance of the tunnel yawns for us with hospitable 
 darkness. We enter it without misgiving. The disas- 
 tered night is welcome. The avant-courier of a moon 
 rises before us at the distant end of the tunnel. It 
 broadens from sickle to crescent, from crescent to full. 
 We pass out of eclipse into what Richelieu always de- 
 clared there is "another and a better world." 
 
 THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 
 
 Entering the tunnel was a sort of dying out of the 
 waste places, and emerging on the other side was a 
 little like being born into an emerald world. We hardly 
 knew how much we missed the green fields, the clear 
 waters and the human homes, till we saw them again. 
 Could the moon be towed alongside the earth and the 
 twain connected by an unlighted hall a mile and a third 
 long, through which a lunatic could come toll-free in 
 ten minutes, the contrast could hardly be finer. And 
 yet to see the valley and plains of Los Angeles in mid- 
 summer sometimes throws dust in the eyes of enthusi- 
 asm. Tree and shrub, except where transfigured with 
 the witchery of water, are powdery as a miller's coat, 
 and the dry fields and highways are thickly and waste- 
 fully strewed with Graham flour that rises without yeast. 
 Palm leaves are as gray as an elephant's ears, and por- 
 tions of the landscape have a disused air, as if beauty 
 was about going out of business and moving away, 
 while the heat dances a hot-footed hornpipe upon the top 
 of your hat, and gives you the feeling that somebody
 
 260 BETWEEN THE OATES. 
 
 has slyly slipped an athletic and attractive mustard- 
 plaster between your shoulder-blades. 
 
 I can almost see the fur of indignation rise as some 
 Angelian reads this paragraph, but then we reached the 
 city of " Our Lady " at high noon of an August day, 
 when everything is in curl-papers like a woman's hair 
 before breakfast, and it was an hour too early for the 
 salted breeze to begin to blow from the sea, and the 
 grim maps of the benighted regions of the heathen to 
 be washed from our heated faces, and the cool tinkling 
 of the fountain in the " Pico House " court to be heard, 
 where tropic vines we had never seen were climbing 
 easily and noiselessly about in cool jackets of green. 
 
 Then there is ground for suspicion that the warm 
 welcome we received from Mr. JOHN OSBORNE, of the 
 Overland Transfer Company, and Colonel SAMUEL C. HOUGH, 
 of the " Pico House," to both of whom we are indebted 
 for attentions, as unwearied as they were grateful, may 
 have given the thermometers an additional lift and made 
 us a few degrees warmer than if they had turned the 
 cold shoulder. In an action for slander, let the jury 
 bring me in: "Not guilty, and so say we all!" 
 
 Whoever asks where Los Angeles is, to him I shall 
 say: across a desert without wearying, beyond a moun- 
 tain without climbing; where heights stand away from 
 it, where ocean winds breathe upon it, where the gold- 
 mounted lime-hedges border it; where the flowers catch 
 fire with beauty; among the orange groves; beside the 
 olive trees; where the pomegranates wear calyx crowns; 
 where the figs of Smyrna are turning; where the ba- 
 nanas of Honolulu are blossoming; where the chestnuts 
 of Italy are dropping; where Sicilian lemons are ripen-
 
 A TRIP TO THE TEOPIC. 261 
 
 ing; where the almond trees are shining; through that 
 Alameda of walnuts and apricots; through this avenue of 
 willows and poplars; in vineyards six Sabbath-days' jour- 
 neys across them; in the midst of a garden of thirty-six 
 square miles there is Los ANGELES. 
 
 The city is the product of one era of barbarism, two 
 or three kinds of civilizations, and an interregnum, 
 and is about as old as Washington's body-servant when 
 he died the last time, for it is in its ninety-seventh year. 
 You meet native Californians, wide-hatted Mexicans, now 
 and then a Spaniard of the old blue stock, a sprinkle of 
 Indians and the trousered man in his shirt and cue. You 
 see the old broad-brimmed, thick-walled adobes that be- 
 tray the early day. You hear somebody swearing Span- 
 ish, grumbling German, vociferating Italian, parleying in 
 French, rattling China and talking English. 
 
 You read Spanish, French, German and English news- 
 papers, all printed in Los Angeles. It is many-tongued 
 as a Mediterranean sea-port, and hospitable as a grandee. 
 
 Yesterday and to-day are strangely blended. You 
 stroll among thousands of vines that are ninety years 
 old and yet in full bearing. You pass a garden just 
 redeemed from the dust and ashes of the wilderness. 
 You pluck an orange from a tree that was venerable 
 when Charles the Fourth was king of Spain, and you 
 meet a man who has sat down to wait six years for his 
 first fruit. A drive through the old quarter of the city 
 takes you to the heart of Mexico, with the low-eaved 
 fronts, the windows sunk like niches in the walls, the 
 Italic-faced old porticoes, the lazy dogs dozing about in 
 the sun. In ten minutes you are whirled between 
 two long lines of new-made Edens whence Eve was never
 
 -.'"J BETWEEN THE G.VTKS. 
 
 drivi-n; such wealth of color, swch clouds of fragrance, 
 such luxuriance of vegetation, and nothing nearer like 
 the " waving sword at the Eastward " of the first home- 
 stead than the slashed sabre-like leaves of the banana 
 that holds up its rich, strange, liver-colored blossoms as 
 if it were proud of them. 
 
 The Pueblo of the Queen of the Angels was founded 
 by the proclamation of Governor Felipe De Nieve, almost 
 a century ago, and was the Mexican capital of Alta Cal- 
 ifornia. You are startled the first morning by a battle 
 of cracked bells, as if ringing from the necks of a gal- 
 loping and demoralized herd of cattle stampeding through 
 the city streets. It is the pitiful complaint of the disabled 
 chime of green bells in the old Parish Church of Los 
 Angeles, and you stroll over to look at the ancient 
 structure. A gray-haired padre, leaning heavily upon a 
 young priest, " all shaven and shorn," comes slowly out. 
 The inscription over the portal is: "Los Fieles de esta 
 Parroquia a la Reina de Los Angeles'" The Faithful of 
 this Parish to the Queen of the Angels. The church 
 has a story and has been restored. The inscription for- 
 merly ran: "Los Pobres" the poor, instead of the faith- 
 ful, shadowing the fact that at one time it was the mite 
 of the widow and not the wealth of the hidalgo that 
 sustained the mission. 
 
 THE ORANGE GROVES. 
 
 My idea of an orange grove was of an orchard where 
 the trees laden with golden fruit sprang up from a smooth, 
 green turf "of broken emeralds," that invited you to sit 
 down on the dapple of a shadow every few minutes and 
 be happy; of trees with a tropic brightness of foliage
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 263 
 
 that would dispose me to listen to such fowls as the bul- 
 bul and sing gay little canzonets in two parts. Now an 
 apple orchard is a cheerful place; it is spangled with 
 clover; its fruit is of all colors but indigo; it has rob- 
 ins and sparrows; its sturdy arms extend over you in a 
 sort of pomonic benediction and invite you to perch in 
 the Seek-no-further or, as we called it, the signifider, 
 but what signifies? or the Pound Sweeting. 
 
 Nothing of all this belongs to an orange grove. The 
 trees are tall, straight, symmetrical, not friendly in their 
 way but a little stately, as if they should say: "Behold, 
 we are oranges!" and not much more shadow about their 
 roots than a Lombardy Poplar. There is no individual- 
 ity. Every tree resembles every other tree. The earth 
 is bare and tilled like a garden. When you feel like 
 reposing in a well-weeded onion bed you can take lodg- 
 ings in an orange grove. Driving through the splendid 
 lines of trees numbering up to the tens of thousands, 
 the whole year hung upon a single one, from the deli- 
 cate white blossom that graces the bridal veil to the 
 baby fruit, small as a walnut; to the tint of yellow 
 struggling through the green; to the untarnished gold of 
 the rounded and ripened fruit; the air, like a swinging 
 censer, heavy with fragrance, and filled with the hum of 
 bees; the lighter-leafed regiments of lemons, with their 
 bright gilt orreries of fruit; the lime hedges, dotted 
 with diamond editions of the full-grown mothers of lem- 
 onade; the cactus fences, all alive, slowly climbing over 
 themselves in diagonals of serried pin-cushions; the ba- 
 nanas bursting into barbaric luxuriance; the earth ter- 
 raced off for the water to flow in, and, this moment, 
 coursing along the checker-work of channels and shining
 
 264 HETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 in the sun; the feathery plumage of the pepper tree, 
 touched up with spangles and bugles of brilliant crimson 
 and red; the fan-palms slowly lifting and lowering their 
 great hands in perpetual salute, all these scenes, lovely 
 as anything in the vale of Cashmere, seem to rebuke 
 your dear rugged home at the Eastward of Eden, and 
 you grow grave when you meant to be gay, and are not 
 quite sure a Rhode Island Greening, and a dough-nut 
 with an orthodox twist, are not better than oranges, ba- 
 nanas and June all the year long. Here is an orangery 
 of six acres, and five hundred trees fourteen years old, 
 that filled thirty-eight hundred boxes the last season, and 
 its owner sold the crop for six thousand dollars in ad- 
 vance. A man with a counterpane of a farm and six 
 hundred orange trees can sit in the shade and draw a 
 Star-preacher's salary without passing the plate. The 
 orange is the true pomum aurantium of California, the 
 'apples of gold" of the old Scriptures. 
 
 THE VINEYARDS. 
 
 The tillage of the vine is the oldest in the world. It 
 grows in the Old Testament and the New. It is a native of 
 the Odes of Horace, and thrives in Grecian song. " Vine " 
 and " wine " have stood up to be married by rhymsters 
 ] wine, ^ wo hundred thousand times in twenty years. If to 
 one city more than another, of all cities I have seen, belongs 
 the urbs in horto of Chicago's seal, Los Angeles is the 
 place. It is not only a city in the garden, but a garden 
 in the city. The two are interwoven like the blossoming 
 warp and woof of a Wilton carpet. We visited the vine- 
 yard and wine-presses of Don Matteo Keller. It is in 
 the heart of the city, and contains one hundred and thirty-
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 265 
 
 seven acres, and has two hundred and ten varieties of 
 grapes. In the season ten thousand gallons of wine are 
 produced daily, and there were two hundred thousand 
 gallons ripening in the vaults. I looked upon "the wine 
 when it is red," when it " moveth itself aright," like pure 
 amber in the cup; when it looked like the golden haze 
 of Indian Summer. White, port, sherry, Angelica, are 
 among the wines. The semi-tropical zone of Los Angeles 
 county contaiils twenty-eight hundred square miles, of 
 which about one hundred and twenty are under cultiva- 
 tion. It is the zone of three rivers, the Los Angeles, the 
 San Gabriel, and the Santa Ana, and is guarded by two 
 mountain ranges, the San Bernardino and San Gabriel, 
 four being saints, and one full of angels. The Spanish- 
 Mexican race beat the world in verbal magnificence. They 
 will bankrupt Castile, Aragon, and the Halls of the Mon- 
 tezumas, to christen an adobe chapel, primitive as a Dutch 
 tile, with saintly names enough to man St. Peter's, at 
 Rome. Sometimes their religion is imposing, and their 
 piety an imposition. 
 
 A vineyard is a torrid region in August, with hardly 
 shadow enough to shelter a sheep. The broad leaves of the 
 vines shining in the sun are warm to look at; the great 
 purple clusters, like those the two pictured Israelites are 
 bringing home from the Promised Land swung upon a 
 pole, and the tip grapes of the pyramids touching the 
 ground, are all about you as you walk. You are in Col- 
 onel B. D. Wilson's vineyard of two hundred and fifty 
 acres, a quarter of a million vines around you, two and a 
 half million pounds of grapes slung up by the stems, and 
 two hundred and fifty thousand gallons of wine " in the 
 original package." 
 12
 
 266 in i\\ I;I:N TIII: <;ATKS. 
 
 Let us escape to a great willow. Let us strike into 
 the stately hull with its \\alls of live orange and its cor- 
 nices of leaves. You are a little afraid of scorpions, but 
 people tell you that while not much, in the way of per- 
 sonal beauty, they are not near so fatal as Daniel Boone's 
 ritlr. Looking in the Dictionary, you find it is " a pedi- 
 palpous, pulmonary arachnidan," with a pair of forceps 
 coming out of its forehead. This is certainly pretty bad. 
 but in the next sentence Webster comforts you with 
 " very seldom destructive of life." Tarantulas also. My 
 friend cracked one over " the dead line " with his whip- 
 lash just now, and the party flung its eyes about 
 regardless of expense as it strolled over a dry plain. But 
 then, to balance the books, we have Los Angeles: Cr. 
 by musquitoes, none; frost-bitten ears, none. 
 
 "A BEE RANCH." 
 
 I quote it because it is none of my verbal sins. To 
 call a place where bees are harbored and robbed, a ranch, 
 is about as bad as to name the grazing range of lowing 
 herds a cattle academy. But to quote Webster at a Cali- 
 fornian because he confounds hacienda with rancho would 
 only be to provoke him to make a Dictionary of his own; 
 so I leave him to " band " his sheep and herd his bees 
 as he pleases. If bees are either cattle, sheep or horses, 
 then there is such a thing as a bee ranch. 
 
 The sun beat, like a drummer in a spasm, upon the 
 parchment-dry earth as we rode ten miles out to a bee 
 village. It was some comfort to see the mountain, " Gray 
 Back," snowy as a bride's cake, with its undated frosting, 
 even if it was ninety miles away; and a grand orange- 
 tree avenue to a vineyard, with its deep green foliage,
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 267 
 
 suggested a sort of " Abraham's- bosom " Paradise to us 
 poor feverish children of Dives in the valley below. 
 
 Stumbling over the mountain toes, and up to the in- 
 step of the foot-hills, we entered a Bee Town. There, were 
 the white, flat-roofed cottages, hundreds of them, in reg- 
 ular streets, and the bees, Italian hybrids, with less gold 
 lace on their uniforms than our Eastern pagans of the 
 old straw hives, were coming and going. If you can 
 keep from sneezing, and are not taken with St. Vitus's 
 dance, and your horses never emulate Job's chargers, and 
 say " ha ha ! " you are as safe as if nobody in that com- 
 munity carried concealed weapons. The population of this 
 village it was never incorporated on account of the 
 taxes is not less than five millions. New York, with 
 all its dependencies, would be a mere suburb. The pro- 
 prietor is a courteous Southron, lean, and long in the 
 flank as a panther, and children as thick about him as 
 the young shoots of a cottonwood. The bee is the most 
 overworked animal in California, and is miserably im- 
 posed upon by the only creature that can match him in 
 geometry. 
 
 His working day begins at four o'clock in the morn- 
 ing and lasts fifteen hours. Often so far from home at 
 sunset that he cannot return, he puts up for the night 
 at some wayside inn, and you often see him coming 
 slowly in at sunrise with his heavy burden. In more 
 inclement climates a night out is a life out, for the bee 
 " that hesitates is lost." His usual foraging range is a 
 circle about twelve miles in diameter, and he pastures 
 upon plains and mountains that a crow of moderate 
 means would never halt at. He extracts honey from the 
 wild sage, willow, wild buckwheat, barberry, coffee bean,
 
 268 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 sumac; and the greasewood, a disagreeable plant, as open 
 to a honey suspicion as a lump of putty, affords an excel- 
 lent article. That of the orange blossom is golden and 
 oily, and good enough to follow the flower and sweeten 
 the honeymoon. " How," said I to the patroon of the town, 
 "is it that the bee derives the harmless luxury from 
 noxious weeds?" "Ah," he replied, "bees are the best 
 chemists in the world. They never err. They can get 
 , the unadulterated honey safely out and leave a strychnine 
 crystal untouched. Bees are not like folks. Did you ever 
 hear of their committing suicide?" 
 
 " Yes, we keep 'em to work. When the comb is filled 
 and capped, we just uncap it by passing a hot knife-blade 
 over it, fasten the comb in this hollow cylinder here, set 
 it going, the honey is all whirled out into a reservoir 
 below, we restore the empty cells, and the puzzled bees 
 go at it again." 
 
 A curious case of litigation just then was exciting a 
 little interest. The owner of a vineyard was the apia- 
 rist's next neighbor. Now a bee will not puncture an 
 unbroken grape, but when it is crushed the honey-maker 
 is its best customer. He drinks like a Rhinelander. 
 When the season for wine-making came, a few bees went 
 over in a friendly way, though taking their rapiers 
 along, returned to the village with a good report, and 
 the whole community never stood " on the order of their 
 going," but made for the press, drove off the workmen 
 and took possession. The air was fairly dusty with bees. 
 Where the grapes are trodden out as in Bible times, and 
 as sometimes in California, though nobody owns it, the 
 lazy, bare-foot tramp is accelerated to a quick-step out of 
 the neighborhood. Therefore the patroon was ordered to
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 269 
 
 keep his bees at home and sued for trespass. But how 
 can such unruly flocks and herds be fenced in? And so 
 the defendant rejoined that the vine-dresser could protect 
 his press with a wire gauze that would keep the busy 
 aggressors on the right side of it, which is the outside. 
 The case of Wine versus Honey is one of tlje legal 
 novelties of the farthest West. Looking down street I 
 noticed a boiling cloud of bees apparently in excited con- 
 sultation, and suggested to my friends that " to be or not 
 to be " was the question, and " wouldn't we better be 
 going?" and we got safely out of town. Each swarm 
 last year put up about one hundred and fifty pounds, that 
 brought twelve dollars. To be the owner of five hun- 
 dred hives is better than to be a member of the Cabinet. 
 
 THE MISSION OF SAN GABRIEL. 
 
 It was a splendid pilgrimage ten miles out, into the 
 valley of San Gabriel and the old Mission. To the north 
 is the Coast Range with a white proof-sheet of winter 
 pinned upon Gray Back like a vandyke, beyond us a 
 rolling plain with samples, you would say, of all sorts of 
 soil from cinder-and-ashes and gravel to dark loam, a 
 sort of jumble of the remnants of a geological ware- 
 house. But no matter about the soil. All you want is 
 a watering-pot or a waterspout, or something rather wet. 
 All fruits and flowers are spelled out with the one word 
 irrigation. On this plain, where the horses' hoofs tick like 
 nail hammers, too hard-baked for a cracker and not quite 
 hard enough for a brick, grass springs rank and strong 
 from December to June, then makes hay of itself of its 
 own accord, and lasts out the year. 
 
 We begin to see orchards, vineyards, cottages; the
 
 270 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 magnificent orange Alamedas, the walnut walks, the fig- 
 tree lanes. At last we reach the quaint old Mission vil- 
 lage where the adobe dwellings like last year's birds' 
 nests are lost and forgotten in shrubs, vines and flowers. 
 Some Indians and squaws were sauntering about. It was 
 hot as Cayenne and quiet as Sleepy Hollow. We were at 
 one of the ancient posts in the picket-lines of the Fran- 
 ciscan Fathers. We looked at the clock. It marked tlic 
 year of our Lord 1774. Here, one hundred and four 
 years ago, the Mission was established in the uttermost 
 wilderness. Not a handful of clay had been moulded for 
 any City of the Angels. We approach the gray Gothic 
 church of San Gabriel, the buttresses projecting at inter- 
 vals along walls that are five and a half feet thick, 
 whose foundations were laid before the Minute-men of 
 Concord and Lexington had rallied out. 
 
 A woman unlocked the ancient door, and bare-headed 
 and silent we entered in. Some neophyte had written, 
 " Hats off. Pray don't talk," but with the thoughtful 
 there was no need. Hollow as a cave and solemn as a 
 tomb, the floor spoke back to the footfall. We saw the 
 censers and the saints, the crosses and the crowns, the 
 tattered tapestries that came from Spain to be unrolled 
 in the desert, all faded like an old man's eyes. We 
 stood, and not irreverently, upon the worn stone dished 
 like the scale of Justice, by feet that turned long ago 
 into leaves and flowers. Here clouds of incense and ves- 
 pers rose harmonious, and the nocturn, a sweet song in 
 the night, deepened into matins in the morning. We did 
 not hear the chime of bells that came from the Span- 
 ish furnace rich with gold and silver offerings that were 
 flung into it, and are heard in every tone of the neck-
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 271 
 
 lace of melody even until this da} r . They are trinkets 
 as safe from all thieves as treasures laid up in Heaven. 
 Borne across the sea to a wilderness without a name, 
 they have rung out upon the charmed air for a hundred 
 years like three bell-birds of Brazil. But as has been 
 well said by Major BEN. C. TRUMAN, of Los Angeles, they 
 are only links in the endless chain of melody flung from 
 San Diego to the Red River of the North. 
 
 " The bells of the Roman Mission 
 
 That call from their turrets twain, 
 To the boatman on the river, 
 To the hunter on the plain." 
 
 We went through a side door into the poor, neglected 
 city of the silent. It has survived grief and friends. It 
 is too old. Gray, wooden crosses lean this way and that, 
 over graves that are nameless. Sealed tombs are crum- 
 bling. It lies there under the church wall in the glare of 
 the sun, the autograph of death and desolation scrawled 
 upon the dusty, thirsty and insatiate earth. It is conse- 
 crated ground, but dishonored by neglect. What would 
 we have? Is there more than one man that can weep at 
 the grave of Adam? Does anybody set pansies on the 
 grave of his mother-in-law's mother-in-law? 
 
 THE GARDEN. 
 
 The Mission Garden is not as old as the Garden of 
 Eden, but it was a cultivated spot, for all that, when 
 there was not a State between Pennsylvania and the 
 Pacific ocean but the state of Nature, and when saddles, 
 bateaux, dug-outs and moccasins were the only means of 
 conveyance. We came to a high wall and a low adobe, 
 and halted in the shade of a great palm seventy feet 
 high planted by a Franciscan two generations ago. It
 
 272 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 was my first acquaintance with the tree where it seemed 
 to be at home. Its trunk was curiously fluted, and it 
 spread its great palms as if it felt and enjoyed the sun- 
 shine. Our knocks at the gate brought the reply of a 
 couple of dogs, and if I can judge of the canine gamut, 
 I should say those dogs were hungry, and barked in the 
 key of C sharp. They leaped, and looked through the 
 cracks of the wall, and snuffed like a camel that smells 
 water, barking their way up and down those cracks as a 
 boy runs his mouth along the holes of a harmonica and 
 blows. It was a good thing for them that the wall was 
 too high for me to get at them, and I said, my voice 
 trembling with compassion, "Let us not worry those 
 poor" I was just about to say "dumb brutes" when 
 one of them put his mouth to a crevice not more than 
 a foot from my ear and barked me six feet from the 
 fence at one jump so I said, "poor brutes any more. 
 Let us go away. The merciful man is merciful to the 
 beast." 
 
 My humane counsel- prevailed, and we all went to the 
 low door of the adobe. A battered old hatchet tethered 
 by a string hung from the door-post for a knocker, and 
 some one lifted it and smote the heavy gray portal, and 
 a Spanish woman opened it and admitted us with a smile. 
 She was eighty, and no dentist's window ever showed so 
 handsome a set of teeth, even, white, none gone, and hers 
 by birthright; and her hair, just silvered to the tint of 
 beauty, was as rich and heavy as the mane of Bucephalus. 
 We saw the fire-place wide and deep as a cave and the 
 quaint smoky furniture, and went out into the garden. 
 
 Here we were, where the Franciscan Fathers had 
 paced, and veiled sisters flitted in the morning twilight
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 273 
 
 of the present century; in the early afternoon of the last. 
 Here was the garden of olives. We stood under fig-trees 
 hung with money-purses filled with seeds, that paid their 
 way with just such coin when the janitrix of fourscore 
 was a baby in arms. Here were orange-trees that were 
 bearing in 1800, and sweet lemons and sweet limes from 
 Barcelona. The scabbards of Toledo blades have clanked 
 along these rambling alleys, and boots of Cordovan leather 
 printed off the dust. Here was a Mission grape vine 
 with a gnarled trunk like a great tree, and mother of 
 the vines of the valley, that came over from Spain in a 
 three-storied castle of a galleon in 1798, and beat grandly 
 up the bay to the embarcadero of the Mission of San 
 Gabriel. But it is not worth while to waste any senti- 
 ment upon the place, for, truth to tell, it is not a bit 
 more like Irving's Alhambra than a Scotch kale patch is 
 like the Queen's gardens at Kew. 
 
 There is no implement on the premises less than a 
 half century old. The walks are dusty, the borders are 
 ragged, the trees have grown wanton and willful. Every- 
 thing is a hundred years old but the madre and the 
 dogs. Those dogs! Come to see them, one weighs less 
 than eight pounds, and his bark is bigger than his body. 
 But the earth has not forgotten its cunning, nor the sun 
 been shorn 'of his glory. There is no hurry here in any- 
 thing but growing. Kill the dogs, and Sterne's starling 
 would never have sung here to get out, and Cowper's hare 
 would have slept undisturbed in her form. The old glo- 
 ries of the Mission have departed. As we filed out of the 
 door some one said a friendly word to the woman. I can 
 see her pleasant mouth as, with a smile flickering across 
 her white teeth, as if some one passed by with a light,
 
 271 B ET\V E E N T I IK ( ! A T KS. 
 
 and a hand pushing back her silver hair, she said "Gra- 
 cias, tl Dios!" and so we went out from the old garden 
 <>n an errand. 
 
 Went out to see a girl! And her name, it is Ulailie 
 Perez Geuillen. Her father was a soldier in Lower Cali- 
 fornia, her mother followed the regiment, and she was 
 born in the Presidio Loretta. But the girl had gone 
 visiting, and she has figured in a lawsuit. She had some 
 friends who wanted to take her to the Centennial Expo- 
 sition, and others who resisted. So, one party stole her, 
 and the other replevied her. When the Mission church 
 was built and the Mission garden was planted, Ulailie 
 was old enough to catch a bee in a hollyhock, to tell her 
 beads and say her paternoster. She is seven years older 
 than the United States of America, for she was born in 
 1769. She retains her faculties, for though she has not 
 danced a fandango or beat the castanets in eighty or nine- 
 ty years, she knows a tarantula from a tortilla with the 
 naked eye. She can read as readily without spectacles 
 as she did at eighteen. The fact, however, is not so 
 noteworthy as it would be had Ulailie ever learned to 
 read at all. 
 
 The return to Los Angeles was in the burden and 
 heat of the day, and the " Pico House" was grateful as 
 the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Thinking 
 over the facts, I must express the conviction that no 
 place between the oceans and North of the Gulf of Mex- 
 ico offers so delightful a refuge from the inclemency of 
 hyperborean winters as Los Angeles, and I trust it will 
 prove in the future as it has been in the past, the city 
 of good angels to thousands of fugitives from the " tem- 
 pestuous wind called Euroclydon."
 
 A TRIP TO THE TROPIC. 275 
 
 Returning from San Gabriel to the city a-flying, we 
 sat in the pleasant court of the "Pico House" with 
 pleasant friends, and heard the story of a running vine 
 that is yet hurrying about, looking for Longfellow's im- 
 mortal Latin comparative. The runner, on a growing night, 
 mounted a ladder of pencil-marks on the frame, at the 
 rate of an inch an hour, and several truthful gentlemen 
 watched it go up, and not one of them could have over- 
 taken that vine in all night if he had been compelled 
 to climb the same ladder! 
 
 Our brief visit was ended, and bidding good-by to the 
 friends we* had found, we betook ourselves to the moun- 
 tains and the desert and the valleys, and with bright 
 memories of the old Franciscan paradise, we became San 
 Franciscans ourselves.
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 
 
 IN old California the Agamemnons, the kings of men, 
 were the cattle-kings. They were the leaders of soci- 
 ety. Their daughters were the belles of balls by virtue 
 of the herds their fathers owned. The crack of the herd- 
 er's whip was music. Over tens of thousands of acres, 
 tens of thousands of cattle ranged at will. The ranches 
 were principalities and duchies. In Europe their masters 
 would have been dukes and princes. The blue blood of 
 California was the blood of a bullock. Below them in 
 the social scale were the owners of swine, but bristles 
 had no entrance into the bellowing realm where tossing 
 horns were the cornucopias. Bitter were the envyings of 
 the daughters of the household of pork, and many a 
 swineherd has yielded to their importunities and turned 
 bacon into beef. And why is not beef as good a basis 
 for position as bullion? "Answer me that and unyoke!" 
 Then came the mining monarchs and the mighty shep- 
 herds, and the grain potentates, and the railroad mag- 
 nates. Fortunes of silver and gold in a week; broad har- 
 vests controlled by the scratch of one man's awkward 
 pen. A railroad must traverse the broad State, or it is 
 a bagatelle. In all this there is no such thing as a safe 
 mediocrity. Think of a country where it is possible to 
 say, as of Colonel W. W. Hollister, of Santa Barbara: " He 
 used to be in the sheep business, but is now nearly out of 
 
 276
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 277 
 
 it, having only fifty thousand left, a remnant of his won- 
 derful bands," and this because he must look after his 
 almond orchard of fifty-four thousand trees. What is a 
 ranchman of tvfro hundred pitiful acres, that are just 
 standing room for his feet to save his being crowded out 
 of social existence? The four B's of California are bread, 
 beef, bacon and bullion. 
 
 Visit Dr. Glenn's " little* farm well tilled," lying on 
 the west bank of the Sacramento, with a river front of 
 thirty miles, with its twenty-three .thousand acres under 
 cultivation, fifteen thousand of wheat and six hundred 
 of barley, its fifteen hundred horses and mules, and its 
 hundreds of men. Think of forty-nine gang- plows going 
 at once; harvest machinery driven by three engines; har- 
 rows enough to demand the muscle and patience of two 
 hundred mules. Think of a harvest time kindly distrib- 
 uted through the year, from the fifteenth of May to the 
 first of October, making all these things possible. See 
 that field of alfalfa. It yielded two tons an acre in 
 March, and was cut six times during the season. 
 
 What would Joel Barlow, poet-laureate of maize, have 
 said to such a grouping of the seasons in one landscape 
 and day, as this: Corn in the blade, corn in the tassel, 
 corn in the silk, corn in the milk, corn in the gold, corn 
 in the heap? And the first shall overtake the second, and 
 the second the third a sort of Grecian torch race along 
 the line of almost perennial harvests. Make us up a bou- 
 quet of May, June, July, and September, and tie them with 
 a ribbon of Longfellow's verse to grace this story: 
 
 "And the maize-fleld grew and ripened, 
 Till it stood in all the splendor 
 Of its garments green and yellow, 
 Of its tassels and its plumage.''
 
 -is BETWEEN THE OATKS. 
 
 Tli ink of a single vine in Yuba County bearing twen- 
 ty-six hundred pounds of genuine squash in a year, equal 
 to the manufacture of two thousand Thanksgiving pies; 
 of a eucalyptus four feet in diameter and sixty feet high, 
 that was in the seed six years ago; of a tomato plant 
 laden with love-apples the fourth year of its bearing; of 
 onions twenty-two inches about, that old Connecticut 
 Wethersfield would have wept over with exceeding joy; 
 of a sixteen-pounder of a potato; of cabbages weighing 
 fifty pounds a head, that in Wolfert Webber's time would 
 have made him a burgerme'ester of New Amsterdam 
 and these cabbage plants, if not watched, will turn into 
 perennials, attaining the height of six feet, and yet grow- 
 ing; of a rose in the public-school grounds at Hay ward's, 
 blooming in February and March, a hundred feet in cir- 
 cumference; of building a cottage in it thirty feet square 
 and fourteen feet high, and nobody needing to know it 
 is there, with the thousands of flowers looming up like 
 a fragrant pink cloud on every side. 
 
 If Nature lengthens the harvest time to suit the con- 
 venience of the grain kings of California, yet nowhere 
 in the world has a plate of light white biscuits been 
 brought a minute nearer to the standing grain rustling 
 with ripeness. One five o'clock in the morning of a sum- 
 mer day in 1877, on the Rancho Chico, the first header 
 wagon brought a load of wheat to the machine to be 
 threshed; two sacks were thrown into a wagon, whirled 
 away two miles to mill, turned into flour, and a house- 
 wife's clean knuckles were kneading it and moulding it 
 at half-past six, and at seven the biscuits were heaped 
 upon a plate ready for butter and appetite. 
 
 Nowhere else in America but in San Francisco can
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 279 
 
 you see mansions of regal splendor costing from $200,000 
 to $800,000 each, with kittens of dwellings almost under 
 the shadow of their walls that would attract no atten- 
 tion in a country village. A rusty old calash-topped car- 
 ryall, painted last in the days of the Argonauts, gives 
 only half the way to the carriage glossy as a cricket, a 
 mirror on wheels without, a boudoir within, gold-mounted 
 horses, and servants sewed to 'big buttons. The occupant 
 commands neither attention nor respect. The faded wom- 
 an who walks apologetically along the sidewalk was once 
 a peeress of the realm in which my lady of the carriage 
 reigns to-day. The world goes up and the world goes 
 down, and nowhere with more startling rapidity than in 
 California. It is a rocket under saddle. There is no 
 abject worship of wealth. It is never accepted as legal 
 tender for brains or culture. Of the older residents, 
 nearly every one has had plenty of money. He knows 
 just what it brought him and cost him and lost him. 
 
 Enormous wealth suddenly acquired, wealth that dis- 
 tances the fables of the Orient, exists on " the Coast," and 
 enormous wealth is one of the most barbarous and cruel 
 things on earth. It does not spare its possessors. It is 
 relentless. It chills them with anxiety and chains them 
 with cares. They fill their own horizons, and there is 
 nothing visible beyond. It is a monarch reigning over 
 itself. It is selfishness crowned king. Such wealth seldom 
 does a generous thing, and seldom thinks a wise one. 
 We .wonder why, but in its place we should find it as 
 natural as breathing. Nobody is so liberal as he that 
 has little to give, and nobody so grasping as he who holds 
 the world in his hand. In the unstable footing of these 
 behemoths of Plutus is the universal salvation of society.
 
 J.xn 
 
 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 One after another, sooner or later, they must come 
 down, and their loss will make a gainer of the world. 
 Then for the first time they will forgive people for being 
 poor, and listen for somebody to say to them, "Go and 
 sin no more." When Croesus gives munificently he gives 
 for Croesus' sake. His name must christen the charity, 
 be graven upon the tablet. It is his right. It is the 
 luxury that his princely coffers 
 can procure him, and who shall 
 pass sumptuary laws to restrain 
 him? The genuine Californian is 
 proud of his golden lions, but he 
 does not bend the knee to them. 
 Some time or another he has 
 been a lion himself, and famili- 
 arity is not the mother of rever- 
 ence. To modify the proverb, 
 when a man is his own valet 
 he never takes off his hat to 
 himself. 
 
 There is nothing here if it is not tremendous. It is 
 a sort of feudal system revived upon the Pacific Coast. 
 And here comes in the question of cheap labor. Here 
 the temptation to fill the land with heathendom; to 
 make labor degrading because the business of serfs and 
 coolies, and to banish the white toiler from California. 
 There is a sentimental view of the situation, made up of 
 references to all sorts of Fathers, Pilgrim, Revolutionary 
 and Declaration, that denounces any prohibition of Chi- 
 nese immigration, and spreads an eagle over it, and makes 
 America the welcome home of everything from a grass- 
 hopper to a coolie, and fashions a capital piece of dema-
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 281 
 
 gogic eloquence out of the whole thing. It is simply a 
 question of Christendom versus Heathendom. It may be 
 deferred, but sooner or later it must be squarely met. 
 
 LATITUDES. 
 
 I can hardly repress a smile when I think of the up- 
 lifted hands of horror with which the dear old fathers of 
 the Eastern churches would have regarded things here 
 that hardly excite a comment. They would have looked 
 for Noah or a life-preserver or an asbestos clothing-store, 
 or some other defense against fire and water. They could 
 not have understood what a difference it makes with a 
 man whether his pulses beat with blood or quicksilver. 
 But those who sail over the old parallels of latitude by- 
 and-large believe in fair play. In no State of the Union 
 is a camp-meeting or a religious assembly more exempt 
 from interference than in California. Convene it in a 
 canon adjoining a mining-camp, or in some suburban re- 
 sort, and it is safe from all harm. "Give every man a 
 chance" is incorporated in the proverbial philosophy of 
 the land. The man who has just tipped a tumbler of 
 what he calls in his random recklessness, " The coal- 
 burner's ecstasy" or "The sheep-herder's delight," or 
 taken a chew of the lovely narcotic called " The Terrible 
 Temptation," will tighten his belt another hole at the 
 first symptom of anybody's disturbing a religious meet- 
 ing, and sail in with " Give the parson a chance," or 
 " the devil his due," or whatever expression he is most 
 familiar with, to express his advocacy of fair play. It is 
 a rough sense of honor with the bark on. 
 
 Nearly everything will grow in California but rever- 
 ence. It seldom gets knee-high. And yet nothing is 
 12*
 
 -S'J i:i T \VKKN Til i: i- \ ll>. 
 
 ea-ier tlian to do this people wrong. A sterling old man 
 from some Eastern rural district came not long ago to 
 see tin- land of gold. He had one of those simple, trans- 
 parent natures, and loved his fellow-men. A California!! 
 rendered him several little services in San Francisco, for 
 which he was very grateful, and at parting he took the 
 friendly stranger by the hand, and with a doubting man- 
 ner said: 
 
 " There is something I want to say to you, if I can do 
 it without giving offense." 
 
 "What is it?" asked his companion; "I am sure it 
 cannot be anything unpleasant." He still hesitated, but 
 finally brought it out thus: "If you wouldn't mind it 
 I should like to say God bless you!" 
 
 " Why, of course," replied the amused recipient of the 
 beatitude; " why shouldn't I like it? What idea can you 
 have of us out here?" 
 
 "Ah, but," replied the old man, " I said it to a per- 
 son up in the country, and he flew into a passion and 
 swore frightfully, and I was afraid I had done him more 
 harm than good." 
 
 No city in America is governed more easily and with 
 less show of authority than San Francisco. It seems to 
 govern itself. With elements enough to make a second 
 Babel more confused than the first, it is comparatively 
 quiet and well ordered. Policemen are seldom seen. The 
 mayor appears to be a sort of ornamental figure-head. 
 The aldermen are nowhere. The city moves peacefully 
 on. Theft is rare; bold robbery a thing almost unknown. 
 Every day you see slender boys darting about the city 
 shouldering canvas bags; old men laboring under canvas 
 bags that seem heavy enough to have a package of con-
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 283 
 
 centrated attraction of gravitation in them; everywhere 
 canvas bags. Those little grists are money-purses con- 
 taining gold and silver coin. Scores of thousands of 
 dollars are flirted about the city every day. There goes 
 an old expressman with twenty thousand in gold lying 
 exposed in his rickety old vehicle. He is going across 
 the city with it. Everybody sees, nobody minds. You 
 can set a bag down on a sidewalk or in an office, and 
 chat with a friend. It may contain thousands, and it will 
 be waiting for you when you are done talking. Try this 
 whisking about of bags of money in Eastern cities, and 
 see what will come of it! You seek the reason of this 
 security, and you find it in three things: the rough sense 
 of honor inherited from the old days ; the fact that almost 
 every long resident has had the handling and ownership 
 of just such bags himself; the salutary traditions, neither 
 dim nor distant, of that tremendous institution, the Vigi- 
 lance Committee, which punished the beginning of offenses 
 with the ending of the law, which is the rope's-end. 
 That institution was the spirit of the law made swift to 
 execute. Its treatment was heroic, but it has been a 
 blessing to The Coast. Its ghost yet walks abroad, and as 
 Spiritualists say, it could be " materialized " any day of the 
 seven, and wo to the culprit upon whom it lays its hand. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 The spirit of California has been grossly caricatured. 
 It is not a land of profanity and slang. The Dutch Flat 
 and Mining Camp literature that has been dished up in 
 equal parts of bad grammar, shrewdness and blasphemy, 
 and called touches of nature; the villains that have been 
 rhetorically made up, girdled with zodiacs of knives and
 
 284 BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 revolvers, tobacco, bad speeches and whisky, each worse 
 than the other, in their mouths, and then tricked out 
 with some school - girlish posy of tender sentiment for 
 something or somebody, to make the injudicious think 
 that the best way to brighten a little virtue is to pin it 
 upon the dirty blouse of a vulgar renegade whom noth- 
 ing saves from a prison but the lack of one these absurd- 
 ities have tinged and tainted many a man's thought of the 
 country, until when he comes to see it he cannot recog- 
 nize it as the original of his grotesque ideal, wherein 
 revolting oaths have been seasoned to the taste with adroit 
 dashes of angelic nature, and murders condoned for the 
 tears of sympathy the rascals shed for the widows of their 
 victims. 
 
 That the old stock was rough, venturous, dreamy and 
 visionary, the fact that they dared savage nature and more 
 savage savages to get here is ample proof; that the traces 
 of the free consciences that slipped their bridles and ran 
 wild in the new land yet remain, nobody can deny. Peo- 
 ple sow their wild oats here earlier and later, and har- 
 vest them oftener than elsewhere. But is it to be wondered 
 at, when Nature herself has not done sowing her own? 
 You can see them by hundreds of acres among the moun- 
 tains. They are beef and mutton in disguise. Let us 
 hope something quite as good for the wild oats of human- 
 ity. The world they left has gone on without them. They 
 have developed a new and peculiar civilization, whose 
 points of contact with the old are very few and very 
 slight indeed. It is easy to be respectable in California, 
 but it is the most difficult thing to be famous. A twenty- 
 thousand ox-team power will draw you to the pinnacle. 
 Get into the one dish of the scales and put a million in
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 285 
 
 the other, and you will kick the beam as quick as a man 
 can cock a revolver. But people here look all ways at 
 once. There is no agreed pride in anything but Califor- 
 nia. They resent criticism. No Bantam cock of the walk 
 ever ruffled quicker than they at invidious comparisons, 
 and yet they are the only beings I ever saw who will 
 never swallow eulogy with their eyes shut. They want 
 to see if you believe it; if you say it as if you couldn't 
 help it; and if they think you do, they just score one for 
 California, and commiserate you that you have not been 
 there long enough to be a fraction of the State, and so 
 the recipient of your own praise of yourself. 
 
 The unadulterated Californian is hopelessly himself, 
 and by this I mean that there is nobody like him East 
 of the Rocky Mountains. He is imaginative, prospective. 
 What he left behind him he brought with him. What 
 he brought with him he has forgotten. He left his 
 youth there years ago, but he has renewed it here. He 
 brought certain staid old notions of life and labor upon 
 a plan; of giving six days to work and the seventh to 
 the Lord; of having a family board and children ranged 
 around it like pansies in a garden boi'der, when you 
 might as well set the table or a flock of quails and ring 
 the bell for dinner. All these things he lost out of his 
 knapsack on the plains. In such a country Christians 
 need more lead in their shoes or more grace in their 
 hearts. To be steadfast when everything has tripped the 
 anchor, and the very seasons have free range of the 
 whole year, is a difficult achievement. 
 
 Out of the elements of character sketched in these 
 pages, the reader will rightly infer that the genuine 
 Californian is a lover of poetry. He prefers it to prose;
 
 m-.Tu i:i:\ mi: I.ATKS. 
 
 sips it with the soup, and munches it with the filberts. 
 It is ver.M- u!> <>ro H&JIH' ml nuiht. He calls for it on 
 public occasions; his daughters write it, also his wife, 
 likewise his hired man, otherwise, -himself. I have seen 
 two dogs that could sing, but they never learned to 
 write. His papers are filled with poems. Many columns 
 look as if the language had turned bellman and fallen to 
 ringing chimes. 
 
 There are more writers of verse in San Francisco and 
 its suburbs than in the whole State of New York. They 
 have poems at picnics and clam -bakes. Farther East, 
 poetry on a public occasion is generally regarded like 
 an extra length of tail to a cat of no special util- 
 ity, for it does not help her to catch mice and people 
 speak of a poem much as a lion would sniff at a pink 
 when he is waiting for a beef -steak. California is the 
 rhymster's paradise. 
 
 A Black Sea of ink floods acres of paper in San 
 Francisco. Of dailies, weeklies and monthlies there are 
 ninety, and it takes eight languages to go round En- 
 glish, German, Scandinavian, French, Italian, Spanish, 
 Chinese, and a touch of Hebrew. The newspapers, as a 
 race, are bright, sharp, aggressive, Californian. You miss 
 the old familiar names of Tribune, Herald, Times, Stin^, 
 World, appended to quoted articles, and you wonder at 
 it till you think how old an Eastern paper gets to be 
 before it reaches California. Two days more would give 
 sight to a puppy, and ripen bean - porridge to the fine 
 perfection of " nine days old." The news of the world 
 reaches California, not by steam, but by lightning. The 
 flash tears out its spirit and flies away with it, and the 
 remains come slowly and reverently after by railroad.
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 287 
 
 THE MEN AND WOMEN. 
 
 In any Eastern sense there is no rural life in Cali- 
 fornia, and the thing called rustic simplicity is unknown. 
 To be sure, you can fino 1 a miner coiled in a hole in the- 
 hill like a woodchuck at home. You can find places 
 where it is always border land and camp-life. You can 
 share somebody's shake-down with your feet to the tire, 
 walled in with mud like a barn swallow. But the instant 
 you rise to the dignity of a home, with women and com- 
 forts in it, fig-leaves disappear and Eve's flounces grow 
 artistic. You meet farmers on California street, which is 
 the Wall street of San Francisco, and you cannot distin- 
 guish them from the habitues of the place. There is no 
 rustic cast to their coats, no hay in their hair, nor is it 
 gnawed square across with' the family shears. The lan- 
 guage of the city is the vernacular of the country. Pro- 
 vincialisms are as rare as gold eagles in contribution 
 boxes. Rural simplicity, which means living and doing 
 like their grandmothers, does not exist. They have done 
 with their grandmothers. Find a place that seems as 
 isolated as a mid-ocean island, with neither lightning nor 
 steam, and the dwellers are not prisoners. There is not 
 a slip of a girl in the house but can mount a horse, as 
 vicious at both ends as an Irishman's shillelah and chron- 
 ically .wound up for a twelve hours' gallop, and ride to 
 Vanity Fair without minding it. People that are born 
 on horseback, in countries where there is any place to 
 i-ide to, can never be very primitive. And so it is that 
 bits of city life and talk and notions can be found any- 
 where in the State, and the tint of green that Webster's 
 milkmaid meant to have is worn by nobody. I have not
 
 JSS BETWEEN THE GATES. 
 
 seen one in the State whom the color became, unless he 
 \\.t- somebody fresh from the East. 
 
 California is wonderful in wonders. There is every- 
 thing in gold but the "golden .mean." Her trees keep 
 on growing like Babel's tower, and as if the law had for- 
 gotten them. The Eastern dots of flowers are discs. They 
 \\;ix like crescent moons. Her springs expand to sum- 
 mers, and her summers are all the year. Her face is 
 eloquent with the charm of valleys, the sweep of plains 
 and the might of mountains. It is a sweet, strong face, 
 full of character and never to be forgotten, where desert 
 and wilderness, beauty and grandeur, age and youth, for- 
 ever struggle for the mastery and never triumph. As 
 Talleyrand said of Spain, California " is a country in which 
 two and two make five." 
 
 But men and women are the most wonderful product 
 of California, and the problem of the continent. If not 
 actually born there, she adopts them in five years into 
 full brother and sisterhood. 
 
 If ever anywhere men needed one " pull-back " and 
 women two, it is in California. In a hundred years, 
 unless men of brains in the right region take the helm, 
 the Coast will be a land whose luxurious wickedness will 
 be equaled only by its energy, its liberality and its cour- 
 age. It will have great poets and painters. It will have 
 yrand sculptors and musicians. They must come, for the 
 climate craves them, but the poets will sing of love like 
 Anacreon, and Cleopatra will sit oftener than Ruth for 
 her picture, and poor Dorcas not at all, and the "Peep- 
 ing Toms " of Coventry will go unrebuked. The sculptors 
 will lend to lip and limb a semi-tropical languor that is 
 not weakness, and the musicians will score new measures,
 
 KINGS OF SOCIETY. 289 
 
 but not a Dead March in Saul. There is no such field 
 under the sun wherein to lay the foundations of a Pan- 
 theon for the Christian arts and the Christian muses as 
 California, and I believe the master builders are there 
 who have the inspiration of unquestioned power to exact 
 respect and to command success. 
 
 The children that are springing into maturity with- 
 out permission, and without waiting for time, are electric 
 with vitality. You think, sometimes, that a dozen of 
 them would make a battery strong enough to send a tele- 
 gram around the world. And they will be heard for 
 right or wrong, for good or ill. If you ever go among 
 the redwoods, where the columns stand in close order, 
 dense as corn, and you fear they must pump the earth 
 into hopeless poverty, you will see the ruins of trees that 
 have been felled. Around them, hurrying up from the 
 ground, nimble as squirrels, are the shoots and slips of 
 young redwoods. They dart out from the base, with a 
 crook here and a crook there, to get up to the light. 
 They are so bright and saucy, they look at you so impu- 
 dently, as if they had eyes that never winked, that it 
 requires little fancy to think them vigorous young ani- 
 mals instead of living riding-whips that can get another 
 mile an hour out of your lagging horse. The young 
 pioneers are the young redwoods of mankind. They need 
 a law to grow by to be straight and grand. They are 
 sure to lash another mile an hour out of the horse "Cal- 
 ifornia," no matter what the pace she was going when 
 they took the saddle. Let us hope that so gracious an 
 air, so responsive an -earth, where the new Jacob gets 
 Esau's birthright and the pottage besides, may develop 
 them into a statelier manhood. 
 13
 
 290 KETWEKN THE GATES. 
 
 When the mines shall be impoverished and the men 
 who worked thorn pass into tradition, the State will not 
 be bankrupt, for the seasons will turn miners, and silver 
 and gold will grow from the ground over countless acres 
 now lazily sleeping in the sun. The wild and misty 
 imaginings of the adventurer will vanish before the 
 broader, steadier light of a better day, when men will 
 toil under an enduring promise that summer and winter, 
 seed-time and harvest, shall not fail. The training of 
 the mountains in chemistry and hydraulics will set foun- 
 tains playing and grasses growing where waters never 
 fell nor herbage sprung. What ought not the world to 
 demand of a land where music, poetry, painting and 
 architecture can flourish in the open air; where the stars 
 march in splendor and review before the eyes of Science 
 for half the year, through cloudless skies; where man has 
 nothing to fight but indolence and himself? 
 
 If the ten talents are shaken from the napkin, and 
 California is true to her opportunity, the world will 
 wonder at the new civilization, and the evening sun, as 
 he puts to sea, with his royal standard dipping and its 
 glory trailing along the threshold of the Golden Gate, 
 will bid good night to no truer Promised Land in the 
 round world. The words of Bishop Berkeley will be 
 born again in all the beauty of a fresh inspiration, and 
 inscribed to this Ultima Thule of the new geography 
 according to man: 
 
 "Westward the Star of Empire takes Its way: 
 
 The first four acts already past, 
 The fifth shall close the drama of the day, 
 The noblest and the last!"
 
 HOME AGAIN. 291 
 
 HOME AGAIN. 
 
 It is a bright winter morning; the snow is clean and 
 crisp under foot as a new bank-note; the smokes from the 
 kitchen fires go straight up and kindle and are glorified 
 in the sun; a cloud of snow-birds has rained merrily 
 down and dotted a drift; I am writing the closing para- 
 graphs of this rambling book. 
 
 The broad days of sunshine rise in the West full upon 
 my thought; the stately trees, the royal mountains, the 
 revel of the flowers, the tonic of the air, the breezes of 
 the sea, the loveliness of the valleys, the welcome of the 
 friends. And yet the charm of a beech-and-maple fire, 
 with the andirons leg-deep in the fallen rubies, and the 
 robin-mouthed tea-kettle on the crane, and a brick in the 
 jamb dished out by the tongs, the faithful old pair! that, 
 leaning so long in one place, have grown magnetic in both 
 legs, fits my fancy better than a marble mantel set on 
 fire with flowers that are never quenched; and the cleft 
 logs in a glow, which were shafts aforetime with sugar 
 running down within and squirrels running up without, 
 warm my hands and my heart as well. 
 
 One of the most suggestive objects in California is not 
 Shasta, but the granite rock in the Yo Semite that some 
 day gave a lunge into the air and never came down. 
 And because almost every pilgrim yawl of cloud idling 
 about in the valley's oifing is pretty sure to touch at 
 that granite landing in the sky, it is called Cloud's Rest. 
 I myself have seen a small white craft, the only one in 
 sight, make the aerial wharf and wait until the freshen- 
 ing wind drifted the waif away. I named it Abde-el, 
 which is the Cloud of God.
 
 J'.fJ 
 
 MKTWKKN THE OATKS. 
 
 It is pleasant to go sailing on the sea. It is delight- 
 ful to go gypsying on the land, but there comes a time 
 when we crave an anchorage, some blessed Salem or 
 Manoah, some place of rest. I was sorry for the little 
 Abde-el that it could not tarry at the landing in the blue, 
 and so, whatever it be, a bank of violets or a drift of 
 snow, I join the world in the restful song of 
 
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