Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the
conversation to an end; and he returned to his night's grog

at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high
street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are

accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I
should have used the telephone for the first time in my

civilized career. So it goes in these young countries;
telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and

advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the
grizzly bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs
Hotel, with its attendantcottages. The floor of the valley

is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here
and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the

barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one
of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel - is or was; for since

I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has
risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and

the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little
five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm

before the door. Some of the cottages are let to residents,
and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied by

ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this
is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,

without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of

sulphur and of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they
were the great health resort of the Indians before the coming

of the whites. Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs
and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on

the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At

one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it
takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I

was there. At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a
well, and there also the water came up boiling. It keeps

this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when

a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and
dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been

up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and
in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move

about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on

both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in;
beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in

the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty
summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now

from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very
quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the

cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in
the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the

north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or

whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp
growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that
enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west,

and from Yolo on the east - rough as they were in outline,
dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and

nodding pine trees - wore dwarfed into satellites by the bulk
and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by

two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the
boldness of her profile. Her great bald summit, clear of

trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected
kinship with the dark and shaggywilderness of lesser hill-

tops.
CHAPTER II - THE PETRIFIED FOREST

WE drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the
afternoon. The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool

wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with
perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of

mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating
warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and

exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a
finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the

roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a

dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain

road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another,
green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and

again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly
distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we

splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left,
there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I

think we passed but one ranchero's house in the whole
distance, and that was closed and smokeless. But we had the

society of these bright streams - dazzlingly clear, as is
their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and

striking a livelycoolness through the sunshine. And what
with the innumerablevariety of greens, the masses of foliage

tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents
into seemingly impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging

of the road which made haste to plunge again into the covert,
we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open

air.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees

- a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters
who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name

of nothing in English. He taught me the madrona, the
manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the crested

mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were
already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in

this district all had already perished: redwoods and
redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things, alike

condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate

with a sign upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest.
Proprietor: C. Evans," ran the legend. Within, on a knoll

of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and another
smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where photographs

and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little isle
of touristry among these solitary hills.

The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had
wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres -

I forget how many years ago - all alone, bent double with
sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket and an axe upon his

shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring had thus
discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt

he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from
that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the

life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these adventures,
here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat

to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.
And the very sight of his ranche had done him good. It was

"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains." "Isn't it
handsome, now?" he said. Every penny he makes goes into that