hillocks is the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since
I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again
from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
veranda and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let
to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied
by ordinary visitors to the hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by
which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of
boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is
dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of
two stations on the Napa Valley Railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of
the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,
the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea-fog
from the Pacific was hanging thick and grey, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it
was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains
are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;
or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foothills that enclose the
valley, shutting it off from Son