e casual tourist has no real reason for fear,
however scared he may become.

Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way called the Cold
Spring Trail. We used to enjoy taking visitors up it, mainly because
you come on the top suddenly, without warning. Then we collected
remarks. Everybody, even the most stolid, said something.

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy and gradually
ascending creek-bed of a canon, a half hour of laboring steepness in
the overarching mountain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great
rock gateway which seemed the top of the world. At the gateway was a
Bad Place where the ponies planted warily their little hoofs, and the
visitor played "eyes front," and besought that his mount should not
stumble.

Beyond the gateway a lush level canon into which you plunged as into a
bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue
California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral
into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine
angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you
found always other summits yet to be climbed. And all at once, like
thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked over the top.

Then came the remarks. Some swore softly; some uttered appreciative
ejaculation; some shouted aloud; some gasped; one man uttered three
times the word "Oh,"--once breathlessly, Oh! once in awakening
appreciation, OH! once in wild enthusiasm, OH! Then invariably they
fell silent and looked.

For the ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual coquetry of
foot-hills, broad low ranges, cross-systems, canons, little flats, and
gentle ravines, inland dropped off almost sheer to the river below.
And from under your very feet rose, range after range, tier after tier,
rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of wonderful tinted mountains
to the main crest of the Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the
mightiness of California's western systems. The eye followed them up
and up, and farther and farther, with the accumulating emotion of a
wild rush on a toboggan. There came a point where the fact grew to be
almost too big for the appreciation, just as beyond a certain point
speed seems to become unbearable. It left you breathless,
wonder-stricken, awed. You could do nothing but look, and look, and
look again, tongue-tied by the impossibility of doing justice to what
you felt. And in the far dista