We blow the desert dust amain,
We see the orange groves below,
We rest beneath the oaks, and we
Have cleft a continent in twain.'
After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'
'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'
By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:
'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything was waiting breathless for the sun.
'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye