are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a
stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in
that old flask behind the fagots.

A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has
features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or
Rhone, of the low _cote d'or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of
Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them,
Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing the same glen.

Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a
little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the
rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides, a
bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still
flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the
part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their
twisted horns of blossom; through all this, we struggled toughly
upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and
continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The
last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a
matter of some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there
prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called poison oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by
the most impervious.

The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its
own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near,
there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head
must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been
cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran
the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun
and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.

Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden
house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines
planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently begun;
his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
look of a man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his
fat