A La California. Albert S. Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ for hours, days, months, or years, it comes never a rod nearer to him. As it meets the hot air ascending from the dry valleys, it is dissipated at a certain point and disappears. You behold a mighty avalanche, white and solid in appearance as Alpine snows, ever advancing to overwhelm you, but never reaching you. Two great eagles with snow-white heads circled around cañon and around over the dark canon below us, in which they had their nest. There was not a sound save that of our own voices to break the stillness of the evening, and, save what I have described, not a sign of life to mar the solitude of the scene. The high, rugged mountains of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, robed in deep-green chemisal and crowned with feathery redwoods, bounded the view on the south, and made a fitting frame for the glorious picture before us. What wonder that we gazed noon the enchanting scene, fairly reveling in the feast of beauty and sublimity nature had spread before us with such a lavish hand, until the gathering shadows of night admonished us that it was time to remount our impatient steeds and descend once more to the valley!

      The full, round moon was in the heavens, throwing her mellow light o'er all that fairy landscape, as we descended from the mountain height, and in fancy we were once more wandering in the mountains of ​Sonora, or in the savage deserts of Arizona, masters only of the good steeds beneath us, and trusting only to the mercy of God and the good weapons in our hands and at our saddle-bows for the safety of our lives.

      After supper we sat beneath the trees around the hospitable casa of our friend, and rehearsed the adventures and scenes of old times with a relish the stranger to wild frontier life can never know. Harry Linden is my senior by some years, and in the ordinary course of nature and civilized life should have lost his early penchant for Robinson Crusoe-like adventure; but such is the fascination of border life that I believe that at this very hour he would exchange all the comforts of the most elegant home in San Francisco or New York, and the best spring mattress ever made, for a seat by the camp-fire in Apache land, and a blanket and the warm sand of the desert for a bed,—and I am just boy enough to do the same at a moment's notice, did opportunity offer and duty permit. Sitting here under the trees in the valley of San Andreas, surrounded by appreciative friends and the enjoyments of refined society, he tells us of a long-planned expedition to the least known of the island groups of the Pacific, how one of these days he means to have his vessel rigged, manned, and provisioned for the trip; and laugh as we may at the idea of his going on such a voyage at his age, nothing will shake his earnestness in the project, or make him admit for an instant a doubt of his ultimately carrying it out successfully. This charm of danger needlessly ​incurred, toil self-imposed, and reckless adventure in unknown lands, once felt, becomes a part of one's very being, and never fully loses its influence while life remains.

      Next day my fair friend showed me where to fish for the largest trout, helped me with her own white hands to prepare the tackle, and took part with us in the sport. A few more hours of swinging in the hammock, the last cigarrito was smoked, the last story told, and reluctantly I bade my kind friends of the valley of San Andreas good-by, beneath the laurel-and the buckeye-trees, and, mounting old Don Benito, galloped away toward the Golden City.

      We are always happier for having been happy once; and I have lived longer, and I hope better, and enjoyed life more, for the recollection of that first paseár to the valley of San Andreas. And here, as we meet again to-night, the pleasant memory comes back to us and we talk it over once again with keenest satisfaction. In taking leave of our fair young friend I tell her that I start for Mexico in a few days for a long paseár under tropic skies; and, as we ride away in the gloaming of the evening, she bows gravely, and, in the soft Castilian tongue, as is the custom of the people in Spanish lands, bids me "Adios, Amigo!" adding, with a trace of something more than mere conventional politeness in her voice, "And the peace of God be with you!"

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      CHAPTER II.

      IN THE MISTS OF THE PACIFIC.

      The Crystal Springs.—The Music of the Night.—The California Night-Singer and the Legend of the Easter Eggs.—The Cañada del Reymundo.—Over the Sierra Morena.—Down the Coast.—Pescadero and its Surroundings.—Pigeon Point and the Wrecks.—A shipwrecked Ghost.—The Coast Whalers and their Superstitions.—An Embarcadero on the San Mateo Coast.—Ride to Point Anño Nuevo.

      Riding on southward down the valley of San Andreas in the cool, quiet evening, we came to the Crystal Springs, one of the most beautiful of the summer resorts in the vicinity of San Francisco. There is a fine, large hotel, with a broad piazza all around it, just the place to sit and smoke a good cigar, have a quiet talk with your friends, and admire the beauty of the surrounding scenery, brought out in all its loveliness by the full autumn moon which was pouring down its full flood of mellow light upon the scene. The San Mateo Creek runs through a wild, tangled thicket in front of the house; parterres of flowers of every hue, in full bloom, fill the intervening grounds; and on the west the steep mountain sweeps around in a grand curve, forming a magnificent amphitheatre beside which the Coliseum is but the toy playhouse of a child. Away back in ​the air, cutting sharply against the horizon, stand great pines, from whose broad-spreading branches float long steamers of green-gray moss, giving an air of great are and venerableness to the forest. Densely wooded are all the intervening hill-sides with the fragrant laurel, tea-oak and many flowering shrubs interwoven with the glorious madroño, whose crown of bright-green leaves contrasts so pleasingly with its bark of brilliant scarlet—the madroño ought to be the favorite tree with the Fenian Brotherhood, who are so fond of seeing the green above the red. Sitting on the broad piazza, in the cool evening, we hear the whistle of the locomotive at San Mateo, only four miles away over the hills to the eastward. As the last faint echoes die away in the cañons, a coyote wolf, which has been prowling stealthily in the vicinity of the hotel, sets up a sharp, shrill yell in answer. Other wolves, far and near—there may be half a dozen of them, but it seems as if there were a thousand—take up the cry, and in an instant the woods and the night are filled with music, not exactly such as Longfellow sines of, but which for want of better will serve to induce "the cares which infest the day" to "fold their tents like the Arab, and as silently steal away."

      Half a dozen huge Newfoundland dogs, good-natured, lazy fellows enough at the best, but anxious to convince the generous public that they are of some importance in the world, and make a show of earning their bread and butter now that their master is at home, roused from their slumbers by the ​howling of the coyote, with loud yells dash off into the woods, as if determined to exterminate the whole vile race right there and then, taking good care, however, to yelp their very loudest at every jump, that the gentlemen in gray may have abundant notice of their coming, and get out of the way in time to avoid unpleasant results to either party. I have known valiant duelists start out from San Francisco to shed each other's blood, but manage to produce much the same result by simply making so much noise as to attract the attention of the police, and insure the arrest of one or both parties before reaching the field of honor. Instinct and reason are much the same in their practical workings after all.

      When the wolves have decamped, and the dogs, with the air of conquering heroes, have returned from the bloodless campaign, and turned in for the night, the cigars are smoked out and the stories told, our company breaks up, and we retire for the night. Through the open window comes at intervals a sweeter music than that to which we have just been listening: the low, sweet song of a little bird of the finch species, which is found, though not in great abundance, in all the coast range country of California. This little night-singer stays concealed in the thickets all day, uttering no note to give notice of his whereabouts; but when the cool shadows of the evening fall it comes forth into the gardens, and through all the long hours of the otherwise silent night, pours out its sweet and plaintive song as if in mourning for the loved and lost. In ​size and form it is not unlike the common wild California canary, to which it is doubtless allied; but, curiously enough for a night-singer, its plumage is far more brilliant and beautiful,—green, orange, and blue, with a narrow bar of red on the wings. I have never been able to see it save in captivity, but many a night have I lain awake in my home on Russian Hill, in СКАЧАТЬ