y worth the travelling to."

But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and
adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr.
Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old
age.

III

NAPA WINE

I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all
wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
school-fellow kept secreted in his playbox up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines that once shone upon the board of Caesar.

Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the
age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France,
and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petraea. Chateau
Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage--a hermitage indeed
from all life's sorrows--lies expiring by the river. And in the place of
these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued,
flower-scented, dream-compellers:--behold upon the quays at Cette the
chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in
obsecration, attesting god Lyaeus, and the vats staved in, and the
dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent,
hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences--for a
bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect--if
wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have
compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon
dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the
while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.
And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to
where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green
with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning
of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious
metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land a