worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for
the deprivation.

The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy,
Mrs. Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the

others, and she had more of the small change of sense. It
was she who faced Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she

had been alone, Kelmar would have had no rule within her
doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air

attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration -
perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked,

along with the others, that commercialidealism which puts so
high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of

convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life
plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were

in any way less important than, for instance, mending his
waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him

mainly as a sort of play; even that he would have neglected,
had it not appealed to his imagination. His hunting-suit,

for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks - the currency in which he paid his way: it was all

befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his
heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was never

forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once

warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing
perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he

should appear, "with the horns of some real big bucks, and
dogs, and a camp on a crick" (creek, stream).

There was no trace in Irvine of this woodlandpoetry. He did
not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had

never observed scenery. The world, as it appeared to him,
was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in

the foreground: Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me as if,
in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides

of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living
really in nature; the clodhopper living merely out of

society: the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity
in one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and

thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it;
the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint

dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of
life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It

is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and
the back of man's beyond, that a creature endowed with five

senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass and
earthy vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is

roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns
no more, he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had

come scatheless through life, conscious only of himself, of
his great strength and intelligence; and in the silence of

the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.

THE SEA FOGS
A CHANGE in the colour of the light usually called me in the

morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated,

flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at
once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the

qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens
in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder

of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with
sunlight in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green;

and this too would kindle, although more mildly and with
rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If I were

sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake;
if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier

and fairier fight.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called

me. I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but
for air. The night had been very still. The little private

gale that blew every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes
or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself

out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had shaken
the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less

fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached
the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met my

eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the
crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops,
though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head,

on our own mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near
features, was entirely changed. Napa valley was gone; gone

were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range;
and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a

great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the
night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had

awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen these
inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone

abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky - a

dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the
invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and

under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the
submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even

delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little
islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of

precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to

be forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just
about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea

itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there,
what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless,

crystal stillness over all. Even in its gentlest moods the
salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the

sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor
did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that
this sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to

be. Away in the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose
against the sky above the general surface, and as it had

already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon like the
topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves,

stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and
yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving

after all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was
yet doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles

away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single
instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a

little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and only
to be swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me

looking nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the line
of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as

though by some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace
its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then

disappearing after another; although sometimes there was none
of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean

gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It
was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the

seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains. And now,
behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen

altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought
was of welcome.