housand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old,
so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me
still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the watershed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man.
But still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet
water it was and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain
of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a
gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second
to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past
the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in
the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About
eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and
I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was
the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began
to blow squally from the mountain summit and by half-past one all that
world of sea fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the
south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green
country far below us, and t