you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is
probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one
hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies
and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so
used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a
tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty
different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed
to steal one.--M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there,
once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,
--and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt
about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it. I
have seen the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it
is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries
and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at
eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon
put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner
Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet
deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty
crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.

There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in
the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled
curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above
the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of
the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,
its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted
atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a
dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and
striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,
and savage crags and precipices.

CHAPTER LVII.

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the
most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured
by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see
such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such
places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living
creature, not a house, no stick or sto