airer light.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed, not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a
great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before,
safe in a nook of inland mountains and had awakened in a bay upon the
coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had
risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight
for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit
aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven,
and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely
different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like
little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices
and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of
that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among
the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on
the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what
surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in
a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the
extreme south, a little hill of fog arose ag