rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with
joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming
river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'

'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It
was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly
deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'

By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a
city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day
the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The
day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:

'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything
was waiting breathless for the sun.

'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened
downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye

'The tall hills Titan discovered,'

'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.'

In _The Old Pacific Capital_ he writes delightfully of San Francisco and
the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around
Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is
interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco,
modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of
a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its
refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas
of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not
consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing
it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take
care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee
sharpness and smartness.

He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires.
On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he
applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to
see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in
the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the
tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his
own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the
indignation of the men who were