s both.

Neither to the traveller nor the _raconteur_ is Yreka a place to linger
in. It consists of one long street, with a tolerable brick hotel at one
end, and a kennel of straggling houses swarming with Chinese of ill odor
and worse repute at the other,--intersected by half a dozen narrow
lanes, devoted principally to stables, gambling-shops, and liquor-dens.
I only quote the language of all the inhabitants whom I conversed with,
when I say that such glory as it once held among the northern
mining-towns has entirely departed from it. The discovery of the Boise
and John-Day mines to the far northeast has attracted away all the
principal gold-seekers who once dug and panned in the vicinity; and if
there ever was a place which had nothing intrinsic to fall back upon, it
is Yreka. We were glad to leave it after one night's rest.

The day we evacuated it was atmospherically the most glorious that we
enjoyed upon our whole trip. The air had a golden look, as if it not
merely transmitted, but were stained with sunshine. The sky was
spotless, the weather as warm as our mid-June, but without the least
languor. The landscape was that broad plain I have mentioned, with
Shasta on its verge, intersected by low rolling ridges, and broken by
the cones of extinct volcanic spiracles, sometimes grouped, but oftener
isolated. Shasta himself seemed to have gained rather than lost in
majesty by our forty and now steadily increasing miles of distance.
Either from atmospheric effect, or because we now saw a new and more
irregular portion of his crown, the snow upon it became opalescent to a
degree which I have never seen surpassed by any such effect. The light
reflected from it seemed to gleam like a softened flame deep down
beneath some pearly medium, rather than any rebound of sunlight from a
surface.

The rugged hillocks between which we rode were bare and craggy at their
tops, but all about their base, and far down into the plain, grew
abundance of a plant wonderfully like the heather in its size as well as
in the shape and color of its blossoms. Broad, exquisitely claret-tinted
streaks and patches of this lovely thing softened the landscape
everywhere. We seemed to be travelling in a beautiful confusion of
Nature, where the Scottish Highlands had got together under a California
sky with the Roman Campagna. Throughout this sweet desolation reigned a
visible and audible quiet which made our horses' hoofs seem noisy.
Between Yreka and