a country store, a post-office and livery-stable, and a
great mill buzzing in an artificial desert of worn brown sawdust.

Here, after a five hours' ride, we alighted at Duncan's Mills, hard by
the river, and with a girdle of hills all about us--high, round hills,
as yellow as brass when they are not drenched with fog. In the twilight
we watched the fog roll in, trailing its lace-like skirts among the
highland forests. How still the river was! Not a ripple disturbed it;
there was no perceptible current, for after the winter floods subside,
the sea throws up a wall of sand that chokes the stream, and the waters
slowly gather until there is volume enough to clear it. Then come the
rains and the floods, in which rafts of drift-wood and even great logs
are carried twenty feet up the shore, and permanently lodged in
inextricable confusion.

I remember the day when we had made a pilgrimage to the coast, when from
the rocky jaws of the river we looked up the still waters, and saw them
slowly gathering strength and volume. The sea was breaking upon the bar
without; Indian canoes swung on the tideless stream, filled with
industrious occupants taking the fish that await their first plunge into
salt water. Every morning we bathed in the unpolluted waters of the
river. How fresh and sweet they are--the filtered moisture of the hills,
mingled with the distillations from cedar-boughs drenched with fogs and
dew!

Lounging upon the hotel veranda, turning our backs upon the last
vestiges of civilization in the shape of a few guests who dressed for
dinner as if it were imperative, we were greeted with mellow heartiness
by a hale old backwoodsman, a genuine representative of the primeval. It
was Ingram, of Ingram House, Austin Creek, Red Woods, Sonoma County,
Primeval California. It was he, with ranch-wagon and stalwart steeds.
The Artist, who was captain-general of the forces, at once held a
consultation with Ingram, whom we will henceforth call the Doctor, for
he is a doctor--minus the degrees--of divinity, medicine, and laws, and
master of all work; a deer-stalker, rancher, and general utility man;
the father of a clever family, and the head of a primeval house.

In half an hour we were jolting, bag and baggage, body and soul, over
roads wherein the ruts were filled with dust as fine as flour, fording
trout-streams, and winding through wood and brake. We passed the old
logging-camp, with the hills about it blackened and disfigured f