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 fairer light.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barracks, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody
foot-hills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below
me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the
night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a
bay upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at
Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and
sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of grey sea-vapour, like a cloudy
sky--a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the
invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the
unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the
valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far
away were hillt