ghest where there
are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the
stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of
news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother
to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the
famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain
roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the
doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves
coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their
driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for
the driver in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.
One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage
of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the
fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate
as I heard it, without guarantee.

I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into
Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.
Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely
called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes."
Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and
found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man
several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat
plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his
night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga
high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are
accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have
used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes
in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers,
and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to
the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with
pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
against one of these