gures in a dream.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed
the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have
been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing
helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
was also part in play.

As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor'land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old,
so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me,
still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hill-tops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But
still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And
yet water it was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only
somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain
of fog was several hundred feet hi