So narrow is the
road that teams can hardly pass each other. Why it should crowd
itself into such narrow quarters when there is room to spare is its
own secret.

Stretching its dusty length along, it soon broadens out as if glad to
escape from its cramped quarters, and glides under the wide spreading
branches of a California buckeye, which stands kneedeep in the
beautiful clarkia, with its rose-pink petals, and wand-like stalks of
the narrow-leaved milkweed, with silken pods bursting with fairy sails
ready to start out on unknown travels.

[Illustration: THE OLD ROAD]

Leaving the shade, it climbs the hill for a broader view of the
surrounding landscape, and looks down on the bay on one side, and the
rolling hills and valleys on the other. Yellow buttercups nod to it
from the meadow, and the lavender snap dragons wave their threadlike
fingers in silent greeting. Tall, stately teasels stand like
sentinels along the way, and the balsamic tarweed spreads its
fragrance along the outer edge.

Threading its way down a steep hill; through a wealth of tangled
grasses; past a grove of live oaks, from whose twisted and contorted
limbs the gray moss hangs in long festoons, by Indian paintbrush and
scarlet bugler gleaming like sparks of fire amid the green and bronze
foliage, it glides at last into a somber canon. There a bridge spans
the brook that gurgles its elfin song to cheer the dusty traveler on
its way.

The laurel, madrone, and manzanitas keep it company for some distance
on either side, and a catbird mews and purrs from a clump of willows
on the margin of the stream. A dozen or more yellow-winged butterflies
gathered at a moist spot, scatter like autumn leaves before a gust of
wind at my approach, dancing away on fairy wings like golden sunbeams.

[Illustration: IT CLIMBS THE HILL FOR A BROADER VIEW]

At a place where the road makes a bend to the right, and the cat-tails
and rushes grow in profusion, a blue heron, that spirit of the marsh,
stands grotesque and sedate, and gazes with melancholy air into the
water. Bullfrogs pipe, running the whole gamut of tones from treble to
bass, hidden away amid the water grasses. Darning needles dodge in and
out among the rushes in erratic flight, and a blackbird teeters up and
down on a tulle stem while repeating over and over his pleasant
"O-ko-lee."

But the road does not stop to look or listen, and once more it climbs
the hill where the golden poppy basks in the sunshi