iver to its head of navigation. This arrangement
was a great economy of time. The country bordering the Upper Sacramento
for two hundred miles from the Californian capital is level and
comparatively tame, so that no artistic advantage would have resulted
from following the bank on horseback. From the little steamer the view
became a perpetual pleasure. About twenty miles above Sacramento we
passed the mouth of Feather River, disgorging coffee-colored mud from
the innumerable gold-diggings along its course, and came into lovely
blue water, pure as the cradling snow-ridges between which it issued.
The immediate margin began to be thickly wooded with overhanging
willows, oaks, and sycamores. These were alive with birds of every
aquatic description. The shag, a large fowl of black and dingy-white
plumage, apparently belonging to the cormorant family, peopled every
dead tree with a live fruit whose weight nearly cracked its branches;
every snag projecting from the river-bed was studded with a row of the
same creatures at mathematically equal intervals, each possessing just
room enough for his favorite pastime of slowly opening his wings to the
utmost, and then shutting them again in solemn rhythm, like a pupil of
Dr. Dio Lewis's or a patient in the Swedish Movement-Cure. The quiet
embayed pools and eddies swarmed with ducks; every sunny bar or level
beach was a stalking-ground for stately cranes, both white and
sand-hill; and garrulous crows kept the air lively, in company with big
California magpies, above our heads.

The course of the river grew more and more sinuous as we ascended; it
was near the close of the dry season, and there remained none of those
cut-offs which economize distance during the prevalence of the rains.
The Upper Sacramento, especially when softened and rendered illusory by
such a full moon as it was our good-fortune to travel under, perpetually
recalls that loveliest of fairy streams, the higher St. John's, in
Florida. Nothing out of dreams is more peacefully enchanting than the
embowered stretches of clear water rippled into silver arabesque through
a long moonlight night, or the hazy vistas, impurpled by twilight, into
which one swings around the short curves of the Sacramento, amid a
silence that would be absolute but for his own motion, while beyond
either woody margin the great plains spread away untenanted, a waving
wilderness of wild grass and _tule_.

Enjoying the _far-niente_ of a life of su