ie--"Jim's" dream--"Keeping
strangers"--The inn kitchen--A reputed child-eater--Notoriety--A quiet
dance--"Jim's" resolve--The frost-fall--An unfortunate introduction.

Letter I

Lake Tahoe--Morning in San Francisco--Dust--A Pacific
mail-train--Digger Indians--Cape Horn--A mountain hotel--A pioneer--A
Truckee livery stable--A mountain stream--Finding a bear--Tahoe.

LAKE TAHOE, September 2.

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life
and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its
own way! A strictly North American beauty--snow-splotched mountains,
huge pines, red-woods, sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline
atmosphere, waves of the richest color; and a pine-hung lake which
mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of
water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1,700 feet
deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits
which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is
keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly
musical ring of the lumberer's axe.

It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San
Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early yesterday,
driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with side-walks heaped
with thousands of cantaloupe and water-melons, tomatoes, cucumbers,
squashes, pears, grapes, peaches, apricots--all of startling size as
compared with any I ever saw before. Other streets were piled with
sacks of flour, left out all night, owing to the security from rain at
this season. I pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the
crossing the bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of "lunch
baskets," which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic
party, the last view of the Pacific, on which I had looked for nearly a
year, the fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the look of long
RAINLESSNESS, which one may not call drought, the valleys with sides
crimson with the poison oak, the dusty vineyards, with great purple
clusters thick among the leaves, and between the vines great dusty
melons lying on the dusty earth. From off the boundless harvest fields
the grain was carried in June, and it is now stacked in sacks along the
track, awaiting freightage. California is a "land flowing with milk
and honey." The barns are bursting with fullness. In the dusty
orchards the apple a