not been built above a year or two, and perhaps had been
deserted overnight. Indeed it was not so much like a deserted town as
like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards.
The barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still occupied,
where a Scots pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty
theatre. The place was "The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside
Resort." Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a life of
teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think
blameless and agreeable. The neighbourhood at least is well selected.
The Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse
in a wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in
amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits and
interests to surprise his brave old-country rivals. To the east, and
still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a hamlet, a haven
among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are
very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of
all; to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats
that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you
walk into the hamlet you will behold costumes and faces, and hear a
tongue, that are unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the
opium-pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured
paper--prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their
destination--and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left
across the sheet writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial
Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard
region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not smell salt
from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of
the other. For days together, a hot, dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. The
cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is
blowing from the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of
California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the
distance. A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be
favourable, they gallop over mile