st shriek of defiance
flew away to pour out his vituperations on other hapless wanderers.

Adjusting our rods, and baiting our hooks with salmon roe, we crept
down to where a little fall sent the water swirling around a rock,
making a deep pool, and an ideal place for trout. Dropping our lines
into the rapids, we let the bait float down close to the rock in the
deep shadows. As soon as it struck the riffle there was a flash of
silver, and the game was hooked. Away he went, the reel humming a
merry tune as he raced back and forth across the pool, the rod bent
like a coach whip, the strain on the line sending a delightful tingle
to our finger tips. But he soon tired of the unequal contest, and was
brought safely to the landing net. He was by no means a large fish, as
game fish are reckoned, but to my mind it is not always the largest
fish that gives the keenest sport.

[Illustration: FISHING FOR BROOK TROUT]

From one pool to another we passed, wetting a line in each with
fair success, scrambling over logs and lichen-covered rocks, wading
from one side of the stream to the other, until the lengthening
shadows warned us to wind in our lines and start for home. Well
satisfied we were with the thirty-two trout reposing at the bottom of
our basket.

Our long tramp and the salt sea air had made us ravenously hungry, and
the sandwiches that provident wives had prepared for us were dug out
of capacious pockets and eaten with a relish that an epicure might
covet. I shall never forget the trip back. Night overtook us before we
were out of the first valley, the ascent was very steep, and we had to
stop every few rods to get our wind.

At last we reached the summit of Grizzly Peak, seventeen hundred and
fifty-nine feet above sea level, while to our right Bald Peak,
nineteen hundred and thirty feet high, loomed up against the sky. The
path on Grizzly was so narrow we had to walk single file, and a false
step would have sent us rolling down hundreds of feet.

The view--although seen in vague outline--was magnificent. Berkeley
and Oakland lay seventeen hundred feet below us, their twinkling
lights glowing through the darkness like fireflies. Out on San
Francisco Bay the lights flashed from the mastheads of ships at anchor
or from brightly lighted ferryboats plying from mole to mole, while
far to the left, Lake Merritt lay like a gray sheet amid the shadows.
In the middle distance off Yerba Buena Island two United States
gunboat