Yet on the Sunday—our final day at the bungalow—you would have thought that the gods had assembled together to hold sweet converse; and, when we lounged in the shadow of the invisible Ida, never looked the earth more fair to us. The whole land was in blossom from the summit to the sea; the gardeners, as they walked among their vines, prated of Sicily and sang songs of their Sun-land. There was no chapel at hand, and no mass for the repose of souls that had been sorely troubled; but the charm of those young women—they were salving our wounds as women know how to do—and the voluptuous feast that was laid for us, when we emptied the fatal larder; the music, and the thousand arts employed to restore beauty and order out of the last night's chaos, made us better than new men, and it taught us a lesson we never shall forget—though from that hour to this, neither one nor the other of us, in any way, shape, or fashion whatever, has referred in the remotest degree to that eventful night in a Californian bungalow.
PRIMEVAL CALIFORNIA
RIMEVAL California" was inscribed on the knapsack of the Artist, on the portmanteau of Foster, the Artist's chum, and on the fly-leaf of the note-book of the Scribe. The luggage of the boisterous trio was checked through to the heart of the Red Woods, where a vacation camp was pitched. The expected "last man" leaped the chasm that was rapidly widening between the city front of San Francisco and the steamer bound for San Rafael, and approached us—the trio above referred to—with a slip of paper in his hand. It was not a subpoena; it was not a dun; it was a round-robin of farewells from a select circle of admirers, wishing us joy, Godspeed, success in art and literature, and a safe return at last.
The wind blew fair; we were at liberty for an indefinite period. In forty minutes we struck another shore and another clime. San Francisco is original in its affectation of ugliness—it narrowly escaped being a beautiful city—and its humble acceptation of a climate which is as invigorating as it is unscrupulous, having a peculiar charm which is seldom discovered until one is beyond its spell. Sailing into the adjacent summer,—summer is intermittent in the green city of the West,—we passed into the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, the great landmark of the coast. The admirable outline of the mountain, however, was partially obscured by the fog, already massing along its slopes.
The narrow-gauge of the N.P.C.R.R. crawls like a snake from the ferry on the bay to the roundhouse over and beyond the hills, but seven miles from the sea-mouth of the Russian River. It turns very sharp corners, and turns them every few minutes; it doubles in its own trail, runs over fragile trestle-work, darts into holes and re-appears on the other side of the mountains, roars through strips of redwoods like a rushing wind, skirts the shore of bleak Tomales Bay, cuts across the potato district and strikes the redwoods again, away up among the saw-mills at the logging-camps, where it ends abruptly on a flat under a hill. And what a flat it is!—enlivened with a first-class hotel, some questionable hostelries, a country store, a post-office and livery-stable, and a great mill buzzing in an artificial desert of worn brown sawdust.
Here, after a five hours' ride, we alighted at Duncan's Mills, hard by the river, and with a girdle of hills all about us—high, round hills, as yellow as brass when they are not drenched with fog. In the twilight we watched the fog roll in, trailing its lace-like skirts among the highland forests. How still the river was! Not a ripple disturbed it; there was no perceptible current, for after the winter floods subside, the sea throws up a wall of sand that chokes the stream, and the waters slowly gather until there is volume enough to clear it. Then come the rains and the floods, in which rafts of drift-wood and even great logs are carried twenty feet up the shore, and permanently lodged in inextricable confusion.
I remember the day when we had made a pilgrimage to the coast, when from the rocky jaws of the river we looked up the still waters, and saw them slowly gathering strength and volume. The sea was breaking upon the bar without; Indian canoes swung on the tideless stream, filled with industrious occupants taking the fish that await their first plunge into salt water. Every morning we bathed in the unpolluted waters of the river. How fresh and sweet they are—the filtered moisture of the hills, mingled with the distillations from cedar-boughs drenched with fogs and dew!