nd lay its attractive hand
on my beloved. The fog has been dear to me ever since. I have often
grumbled at it when I was in it or under it, but when I have seen it
from above, that first thrill of wonder and delight has come back to me
--always. Whether on the Berkeley hills I see its irresistible columns
moving through the Golden Gate across the bay to take possession of
the land, or whether I stand on the height of Tamalpais and look at the
white, tangled flood below,--

"My heart leaps up when I behold."

It remains to me--

"A vision, a delight and a desire."

When the beauty of the fog first got hold of me, I wondered whether any
one had given literary expression to its supreme charm. I searched the
works of some of the better-known California poets, not quite without
result. I was familiar with what seem to me the best of the serious
verses of Bret Harte, the lines on San Francisco,--wherein the city is
pictured as a penitent Magdalen, cowled in the grey of the Franciscans,
--the soft pale grey of the sea fog. The literary value of the figure
is hardly injured by the cold fog that the penitence of this particular
Magdalen has never been of an enduring quality. It is to be noted that
what Harte speaks of is not the beauty of the fog, but its sobriety and
dignity.

Sill, with his susceptibility to the infinite variety of nature and with
the spark of the divine fire which burned in him, refers often to some
of the effects of the fog, such as the wonderful sunset colors on the
Berkeley hills in summer. But I find only one direct allusion to the
beauty of the fog itself:--

(1)"There lies a little city in the hills;
White are its roofs, dim is each dwelling's door,
And peace with perfect rest its bosom fills.

"There the pure mist, the pity of the sea,
Comes as a white, soft hand, and reaches o'er
And touches its still face most tenderly."

In 1887 I had not read "The Silverado Squatters." Part of it had been
published in Scribner's Magazine. It was only in the following year that
I got hold of the book and found an almost adequate expression of my own
feeling about the sea fogs. Stevenson did not know all their beauty,
for he was not here long enough, but he could tell what he saw. In other
words, he had a gift which is denied to most of us.

Silverado is now a quite impossible place for squatting. When I first
tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak an