nd there
along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their
translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing
and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of
these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.
The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in
the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a
lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,
spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy,
live oaks flourish singly or in thickets--the kind of wood for murderers
to crawl among--and here and there the skirts of the forest extend
downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of
pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint desert the
railway cars drew near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas
City--though that and so many other things are now for ever altered--and
it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying
in the sands, its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual
wind, and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from
the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the
ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the
inland canyons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of
Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have
but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out
of the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine woods.
Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks
that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But
the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind
among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at
length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened
vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for
now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer
only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa