the stake-and-rider fence.

[Illustration]

Moonlight

The beautiful California days, with warm sunshine tempered by the cool
winds from the bay, are not surpassed in any country under the sun.
But if the _days_ are perfect, the brilliant moonlight nights lose
nothing by comparison.

To tramp the hills and woods, or climb the rugged mountains by day, is
a joy to the nature lover. But the same trip by moonlight has an
interest and charm entirely its own, and mysteries of nature are
revealed undreamed of at noonday.

The wind, that has run riot during the day, has blown itself out by
evening, and the birds have gone to sleep with heads tucked under
their wings, or settled with soft breasts over nestlings that twitter
soft "good nights" to mother love. The dark shadows of evening steal
the daylight, and canon and ravine lose their rugged outlines,
blending into soft, shadowy browns and purples. The moon peeps over
the hilltop, the stars come out one by one, the day is swallowed up in
night, and the moonlight waves its pale wand over the landscape.

In the deep woods it flickers through the branches, mottling the
ground with silver patches, and throwing into grand relief the trunks
of trees, like sentinels on duty. It touches the little brook as
softly as a baby's kiss, and transforms it into a sheen of gold. It
drops its yellow light upon a bed of ferns until each separate frond
stands out like a willow plume nodding up and down in the mellow
gleam. A flowering dogwood bathed in its ethereal light shimmers like
a bridal veil adorning a wood nymph. It lays its gentle touch on the
waterfall, transforming it into a torrent of molten silver, and
causing each drop to glisten like topaz under its witching light.

Overhead fleecy clouds, like white-winged argosies, sail high amid the
blue, or, finer spun, like a lady's veil, are drawn, gauzelike, across
the sky, through which the stars peep out with twinkling
brilliancy. The scent of new-mown hay laden with falling dew comes
floating up from the valley with an intoxicating sweetness, a
sweetness to which the far-famed perfume of Arabia is not to be
compared.

[Illustration: THE WITCHERY OF MOONLIGHT]

The crickets, those little black minstrels of the night, chirp under
the log upon which you are resting, and the katydids repeat over and
over again "Katy's" wonderful achievement, though just what this
amazing conquest was no one has been able to discover. The c