you may want to camp out, and
you may not always find any but the public towel at the inn where you dine
or sleep. Traveling in spring, summer, or fall, you need no umbrella or
other protection against rain, and may confidently reckon on uninterrupted
fine weather.

The coast is always cool. The interior valleys are warm, and during the
summer quite hot, and yet the dry heat does not exhaust or distress one,
and cool nights refresh you. In the valleys and on much-traveled roads
there is a good deal of dust, but it is, as they say, "clean dirt," and
there is water enough in the country to wash it off. You need not ride on
horseback unless you penetrate into Humboldt County, which has as yet
but few miles of wagon-road. In Mendocino, Lake, and Marin, the roads
are excellent, and either a public stage, or, what is pleasanter and but
little dearer, a private team, with a driver familiar with the country,
is always obtainable. In such a journey one element of pleasure is its
somewhat hap-hazard nature. You do not travel over beaten ground, and on
routes laid out for you; you do not know beforehand what you are to see,
nor even how you are to see it; you may sleep in a house to-day, in the
woods to-morrow, and in a sail-boat the day after; you dine one day in
a logging camp, and another in a farm-house. With the barometer at "set
fair," and in a country where every body is civil and obliging, and where
all you see is novel to an Eastern person, the sense of adventure adds a
keen zest to a journey which is in itself not only amusing and healthful,
but instructive.

[Illustration: WOOD-CHOPPER AT WORK.]

Marin County, which lies across the bay from San Francisco, and of which
the pretty village of San Rafael is the county town, contains the most
productive dairy-farms in the State. When one has long read of California
as a dry State, he wonders to find that it produces butter at all; and
still more to discover that the dairy business is extensive and profitable
enough--with butter at thirty-five cents a pound at the dairy--to warrant
the employment of several millions of capital, and to enable the dairy-men
to send their product to New York and Boston for sale.

For the coast journey the best route, because it shows you much fine
scenery on your way, is by way of Soucelito, which is reached by a ferry
from San Francisco. From Soucelito either a stage or a private conveyance
carries you to Olema, whence you should visit Point