s of travelers believe that the only
safe and interesting way to return is the way they go--namely, by his
route. They who take his counsel miss some of the grandest scenery on the
continent. Any stage driver who by his misrepresentations would shut a
tourist out of the entrancing beauties of the "Russian Valley" ought to be
thrashed with his own raw-hide. We heard Foss bamboozling a group of
travelers with the idea that on the other route the roads were dangerous,
the horses poor, the accommodations wretched and the scenery worthless. We
came up in time to combat the statement with our own happy experiences of
the Russian Valley, and to save his passengers from the oft-repeated
imposition.

And thus I have suggested the chief annoyance of California travel. The
rivalries of travel are so great that it is almost impossible to get
accurate information. The stage drivers, guides and hotel proprietors, for
the most part, are financially interested in different routes. Going to
Yosemite Valley by the "Calaveras route," from the office in San Francisco
where you buy your ticket to the end of your journey, everybody assures you
that J.M. Hutchings, one of the hotel keepers of Yosemite, is a scholar, a
poet, a gentleman and a Christian, and that to him all the world is
indebted for the opening of the valley. But if you go in by the "Mariposa
route," then from the office where you get your ticket, along by all the
way stations and through the mountain passes, you are assured that Mr.
Liedig, the hotel keeper of Yosemite, is the poet and Christian, and that
J.M. Hutchings aforesaid is a nobody, a blower, a dead beat, the chief
impediment to the interests of Yosemite--or, to use a generic term, a
scalawag.

The fact is that no one can afford in California to take the same route
twice, for each one has a glory of its own. If a traveler have but one day
for the Louvre Gallery, he cannot afford to spend it all in one corridor;
and as California is one great picture gallery, filled with the
masterpieces of Him who paints with sunshine and dew and fire, and
sculptures with chisel of hurricane and thunderbolt, we cannot afford to
pass more than once before any canvas or marble.

But whatever route you choose for the "Hot Springs," and whatever pack of
stage driver yarns you accept, know this--that in all this matchless
California, with climate of perpetual summer, the sky cloudless and the
wind blowing six months from the genial west