ch sweet monotone all the more
because it was such a contrast to our rough riding past and future, we
spent two golden days, as many mezzotint twilights, and a pair of silver
nights upon our steamer. On the morning of the third day we reached
Tehama, a dead-and-alive little settlement, seven hours' journey by the
river-windings from Red Bluffs, the head of navigation, but only ten
miles by land. We had now got in sight of mountains; the ethereal blue
of Lassen's Buttes, rimmed with the opal of perpetual snow, bounded our
view northerly; and as every motive for taking to the saddle now
consisted with our desire for economizing time, we here began our
horseback-ride, reaching Red Bluffs several hours before the steamer.

Just out of Tehama we struck into a country whose features reminded us
of the wooded tracts between Stockton and Mariposa. After two days of
_tule_ and wild grass, Nature grew suddenly ennobled in our eyes by
thick and frequent groves of the royal California oak. There was a
feeling of luxury in the change, which none can know who have not had a
surfeit of boundless plains. We bathed our hearts and heads in shadow;
the fever of unbroken light went out of us; our very horses shared in
the relief, and gave themselves up to a sweet somnambulism with which we
had too much sympathy to break it by spurs.

Red Bluffs we found a place of more apparent stir and enterprise than
any Californian town we had seen, except San Francisco and Sacramento.
There was quite a New-England air about the main street,--so much so
that I have forgotten to call it _Plaza_, as I ought. This place is the
starting-point for all overland supplies sent between the Sacramento and
Portland. Immense wagons--shaped like the Eastern charcoal-vehicle, but
dwarfing it into insignificance by a size not much inferior to that of a
Mississippi flat-boat--are perpetually leaving the town, drawn by twelve
mules or horses, and in charge of drivers whose magnificent isolation
has individualized them to a degree not exceeded in the most
characteristic coachman of the Weller tribe, or the typical skipper of
the Yankee fishing-smack. There are few finer places to study _genre_
than the California ranches frequented by the captains of these
"prairie-schooners." At convenient distances for noon halts and nightly
turnings-in, the main freighting-roads of the State are adorned with
gigantic caravanseras offering every accommodation for man and beast,
provid