e you will soon look younger--and even more
triumphant than when you came."

"I have never felt so triumphant as on this morning, dear senorita. I
had not hoped to give you so much pleasure."

Her cheeks were as pink as her reboso, her great black eyes were
dancing. Her hands strained at the railing. "I shall see La
Bellissima! La Bellissima!" she cried.

They rounded the low broken point of the island, sailed through the
racing currents between the lower end of La Bellissima and "Our Lady of
the Angels," more slowly past what looked to be a perpendicular forest.
From water to crest the gulches and converging spurs of this hillside
in the sea were a dense mass of oaks, bays, underbrush; here and there
a tall slender tree with a bark like red kid and a flirting polished
leaf, at which Concha clapped her hands as at sight of an old friend
and called "El Madrono." It was a primeval bit of nature, but sweet
and silent and peaceful; there was no suggestion either of gloom or of
discourteous beast.

"We shall have our dinner here, Excellency. There on that little beach;
and afterward we shall climb to the top. See, there are trails! The
Indians have been here."

They stood out through the straits between Point Tiburon and the Isle
of the Angels, where the tide ran fast. Then, for the first time, was
Rezanov able to form a definite idea of the size and shape of this
great natural harbor. To the south it extended beyond the peninsula in
an unbroken sheet for some forty English miles. Ten miles to the north
there was a gateway between the lower hills which Luis had alluded to
as leading into the bay of Saint Pablo, another large body of
tidewater, but inferior in depth and beauty to the Bay of San Francisco.

The mist had dissolved. The greens were vivid where the sun shone on
island and hill. The woods of Bellissima, the groves of Point
Sausalito, the forests in the northern canyons, deepened to purple like
that of the great bare sweep of Tamalpais. Only the farther peaks
remained a pale misty blue, and were of an indescribable floating
delicacy.

Concha pointed to the eastern double cone. "That is Monte del Diablo.
Once they say it spouted fire, but that was long ago, and all our
volcanoes are dead. But perhaps not so long ago. The Indians tell the
strange story that their grandfathers remembered when this bay was a
valley covered with oak trees, and the rivers of the north flowed
through and emptied i