riding hard and
relentlessly, like all Californians.

He sped onward, through the long hot day, leaving the hills for the
marshes and a long stretch of ugly country, traversing the beautiful San
Antonio Valley in the night, reaching the Mission of San Miguel at dawn,
resting there for a few hours. That night he slept at a hospitable
ranch-house in the park-like valley of Paso des Robles, a grim silent
figure amongst gay-hearted people who delighted to welcome him. The
early morning found him among the chrome hills; and at the Mission of
San Luis Obispo the good padres gave him breakfast. The little valley,
round as a well, its bare hills red and brown, gray and pink, violet and
black, from fire, sloping steeply from a dizzy height, impressed him
with a sense of being prisoned in an enchanted vale where no message of
the outer world could come, and he hastened on his way.

Absorbed as he was, he felt the beauty he fled past. A line of golden
hills lay against sharp blue peaks. A towering mass of gray rocks had
been cut and lashed by wind and water, earthquake and fire, into the
semblance of a massive castle, still warlike in its ruin. He slept for a
few hours that night in the Mission of Santa Ynes, and was high in the
Santa Barbara Mountains at the next noon. For brief whiles he forgot
his journey's purpose as his horse climbed slowly up the steep trails,
knocking the loose stones down a thousand feet and more upon a roof of
tree-tops which looked like stunted brush. Those gigantic masses of
immense stones, each wearing a semblance to the face of man or beast;
those awful chasms and stupendous heights, densely wooded, bare, and
many-hued, rising above, beyond, peak upon peak, cutting through the
visible atmosphere--was there no end? He turned in his saddle and looked
over low peaks and canons, rivers and abysms, black peaks smiting the
fiery blue, far, far, to the dim azure mountains on the horizon.

"Mother of God!" he thought. "No wonder California still shakes! I would
I could have stood upon a star and beheld the awful throes of this
country's birth." And then his horse reared between the sharp spurs and
galloped on.

He avoided the Mission of Santa Barbara, resting at a rancho outside
the town. In the morning, supplied as usual with a fresh horse, he fled
onward, with the ocean at his right, its splendid roar in his ears. The
cliffs towered high above him; he saw no man's face for hours together;
but his though