Valley, skirting
San Pablo Bay, and up the lovely Napa Valley. From Napa were side
excursions through Pope and Berryessa Valleys, on to AEtna Springs, and
still on, into Lake County, crossing the famous Langtry Ranch.

Continuing up the Napa Valley, walled on either hand by great rock
palisades and redwood forests and carpeted with endless vineyards, and
crossing the many stone bridges for which the County is noted and which
are a joy to the beauty-loving eyes as well as to the four-horse tyro
driver, past Calistoga with its old mud-baths and chicken-soup springs,
with St. Helena and its giant saddle ever towering before us, we climbed
the mountains on a good grade and dropped down past the quicksilver mines
to the canyon of the Geysers. After a stop over night and an exploration
of the miniature-grand volcanic scene, we pulled on across the canyon and
took the grade where the cicadas simmered audibly in the noon sunshine
among the hillside manzanitas. Then, higher, came the big cattle-dotted
upland pastures, and the rocky summit. And here on the summit, abruptly,
we caught a vision, or what seemed a mirage. The ocean we had left long
days before, yet far down and away shimmered a blue sea, framed on the
farther shore by rugged mountains, on the near shore by fat and rolling
farm lands. Clear Lake was before us, and like proper sailors we
returned to our sea, going for a sail, a fish, and a swim ere the day was
done and turning into tired Lakeport blankets in the early evening. Well
has Lake County been called the Walled-in County. But the railroad is
coming. They say the approach we made to Clear Lake is similar to the
approach to Lake Lucerne. Be that as it may, the scenery, with its
distant snow-capped peaks, can well be called Alpine.

And what can be more exquisite than the drive out from Clear Lake to
Ukiah by way of the Blue Lakes chain!--every turn bringing into view a
picture of breathless beauty; every glance backward revealing some
perfect composition in line and colour, the intense blue of the water
margined with splendid oaks, green fields, and swaths of orange poppies.
But those side glances and backward glances were provocative of trouble.
Charmian and I disagreed as to which way the connecting stream of water
ran. We still disagree, for at the hotel, where we submitted the affair
to arbitration, the hotel manager and the clerk likewise disagreed. I
assume, now, that we never will know which w