p under the open sky, we
set out to cover the three or four miles to Sutter's Fort.

This was my first sight of the California country landscape, and I saw
it at the most beautiful time of year. The low-rolling hills were bright
green, against which blended the darker green of the parklike oaks. Over
the slopes were washes of colour where the wild flowers grew, like
bright scarves laid out in the sun. They were of deep orange, or an
equally deep blue, or, perhaps, of mingled white and purple. Each
variety, and there were many of them, seemed to grow by itself so that
the colours were massed. Johnny muttered something about "the trailing
glory--banners of the hills"; but whether that was a quotation or just
Johnny I do not know.

The air was very warm and grateful, and the sky extraordinarily blue.
Broad-pinioned birds wheeled slowly, very high; and all about us, on the
tips of swaying bushes and in the tops of trees, thousands of golden
larks were singing. They were in appearance like our meadow-larks back
east, but their note was quite different; more joyous and lilting, but
with the same liquid quality. We flushed many sparrows of different
sorts; and we saw the plumed quail, the gallant, trim, little,
well-groomed gentlemen, running rapidly ahead of us. And over it all
showered the clear warmth of the sun, like some subtle golden ether that
dissolved and disengaged from the sleeping hills multitudinous hummings
of insects, songs of birds, odours of earth, perfumes of flowers.

In spite of ourselves our spirits rose. We forgot our anxious figurings
on ways and means, our too concentrated hopes of success, our feverish,
intent, single-minded desire for gold. Three abreast we marched forward
through the waving, shimmering wild oats, humming once more the strains
of the silly little song to which the gold seekers had elected to
stride:

"I soon shall be in mining camps,
And then I'll look around,
And when I see the gold-dust there,
I'll pick it off the ground.

"I'll scrape the mountains clean, old girl,
I'll drain the rivers dry;
I'm off for California.
Susannah, don't you cry!"

Even old Yank joined in the chorus, and he had about as much voice as a
rusty windmill, and about the same idea of tune as a hog has of war.

"Oh, Susannah! don't you cry for me!
I'm off to California with my washbowl on my knee!"

We topped a rise and advanced on Sutter's Fort as though we in