d rattlesnakes
that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know
at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that
the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal
as John Muir has since assured us that he is. The last time that
I passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid of a gang of
wood-choppers.

Curiously, the last great fog effect that I have seen was almost the
same which Stevenson has described. Last summer we had been staying for
a month with our friends who have a summer home about three miles
beyond Stevenson's "toll-house." It is, I believe, the most beautiful
country-seat on this round earth, and its free and gentle hospitality
cannot be surpassed. We left this delightful place of sojourning between
three and four o'clock in the morning to catch the early train from
Calistoga. Our steep climb up to the toll-house was under the broad
smile of the moon, which gradually gave way to the brilliant dawn.
When we passed the toll-house, the whole Napa Valley should have been
revealed to us, but it was not. The fog had surged through it and had
hidden it. What we saw was better than the beautiful Napa Valley. I
should like to tell what we saw, but I cannot,--"For what can the man do
who cometh after the king?"

(1) This exquisite little poem is unaccountably omitted from the
Household (and presumably complete) Edition of Sill's poems issued
by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906. It is found in the little volume,
"Poems," by Edward Rowland Sill, published by the same firm at an
earlier date. Mountain View Cemetery is no longer a "little city."

THE SEA FOGS

A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning.
By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where
the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as
stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to
marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the
heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of
the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in
a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would
kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of
our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that
earlier and f