emptation is there
daily and hourly, and the humorist is but human--he can not long resist
it; so he will buttonhole you on the veranda of the Cliff House and
whisper in your astonished ear as if he were imparting a state secret:
"Their bark is on the sea!"

The way home was sometimes a weary one. After leaving the bluff above
the shore, we struck into an almost interminable succession of
sand-dunes. There was neither track nor trail there; there was no oasis
to gladden us with its vision of beauty. The pale poet of destiny and
despair has written:

In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree;
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

There was no fountain in our desert, and we knew it well enough; for we
had often braved its sands. In that wide waste there was not even the
solitary tree that moved the poet to song; nor a bird in our solitude,
save a sea-gull cutting across-lots from the ocean to the bay in search
of a dinner. There were some straggling vines on the edge of our desert,
thick-leaved and juicy; and these were doing their best to keep from
getting buried alive. The sand was always shifting out yonder, and there
was a square mile or two of it. We could easily have been lost in it but
for our two everlasting landmarks--Mount Tamalpais across the water to
the north, and in the south Lone Mountain. Lone Mountain was our
Calvary--a green hill that loomed above the graves where slept so many
who were dear to us. The cross upon its summit we had often visited in
our holiday pilgrimages. They were _holydays_, when our childish feet
toiled hopefully up that steep height; for that cross was the beacon
that lighted the world-weary to everlasting rest.

And so we crossed the desert, over our shoetops in sand; climbing one
hill after another, only to slide or glide or ride down the yielding
slope on the farther side. Meanwhile the fog came in like a wet blanket.
It swathed all the landscape in impalpable snow; it chilled us and it
thrilled us, for there was danger of our going quite astray in it; but
by and by we got into the edge of the town, and what a very ragged edge
it was in the dim long ago! Once in the edge of the town, we were
masters of the situation: you couldn't lose us even in the dark. And so
ended the outing of our merry crew,--merry though weary and worn; yet
not so worn and weary but we could raise at parting a gl