fore the great day on Bunker Hill; but, although his exploring parties found "the inland to be farre different from the shoare, a goodly country, and fruitful soyle, stored with many blessings fit for the vse of man," he sailed away again, right past the Golden Gate, yet never guessed it was there. Still farther to the north, under the last purple headland, the Russians landed shortly after our War of 1812, reconnoitred, gathered plants of the region to take home, and departed as they had come, with none of that passion for new lands and ice-free harbors which is on them now. Old dates these are for so young a country; yet, after all this time, the deer and the wild-cat and the rattlesnake go unmolested within sight of a great city as they did before the city came. Thus began my acquaintance with this new far-away Adirondacks, the Tamalpais region; and at the same time I began the acquaintance of a very queer "hill tribe"a plain, rough-shod, rough-clad set of people, who prowled these hills year after year -never fished, never hunted (though trout and deer were to be had), never" picnicked"

with the usual defacement of surroundings, but always prowled on and on, over the endless trails, light of pack and light of heart, covering the ashes of their fires, and hiding their camp-kettles in mysterious places, leaving no sign behind them. Their sole object seemed to be the hills, and the far wide views from them, and the silent places. I remember a famous plant-hunter among them-a hatless, short-skirted, broad-shouldered woman of wonderful strength-who used to trudge easily twenty miles a day with the sun in her serene bronze face and the wind in her flying hair, carrying her heavy plant-presses on her back; yet botany was far from being her main object. There were artists among us whose little white tents we often came upon, hid in the foreground of some newly discovered picture which they had been living in surreptitiously for a week; but with them, living there was the main object and the canvas was incidental. We boasted a youthful poet with fair hair. "But," said he, "one is above rhyming and that sort of thing out here." Now and then came a

centive and, for aught I know, part of their religion. Whether it was stinging cold or quivering with heat, whether fair and calm or storming till the trees crashed down, somewhere on these inexhaustible trails you would meet them walking their endless journey of discovery and delight.

I finally became a "hill triber" myself. After due consideration I was told the marks and ranges by which one might discover the exact hollow stump or flat stone whereunder lay the hidden frying-pans; learned of the best springs and the softest, most sheltered pine couches to spend the night in, and received instructions how to

the incidents, however, by which I came to know and love the region well, I can tell but a few.

First, I recall a morning when the mist and rain descended upon us in the first mile of an all-day walk-a circumstance which would not commend itself to anyone but a hill triber; but we tramped merrily on with the droning voice of swollen watercourses and the soft swish of the rain in the trees for company. Our way led on through a narrow valley deep with ferns and filled with tall, straight timber; and the forest is never so fresh and beautiful as in the rain or immediately after, the flowers never so bright

as when bobbing their heads to the fall of the big drops. We felt the dampness creeping in first over our knees, then on our shoulders-till our khaki grew heavy with it, but our good spirits refused to dissolve. Soon, however, we left forest, watercourse, and all to ascend the smooth hills by a labyrinth of old cattle trails, slipping, sliding, splashing through flooded meadows, chaffing whichever of us sank deepest. We wound on and up, and back and forth till the forests below faded away like spectres in the mist, leaving us alone. Then passed an hour in blind solitude, then a halt and a seven-handed argument. Sure enough, we were lost-wholly and collectively, lost —and the trail had vanished. A conservative census of the party revealed that, among the seven of us, there were seven ideas as to our whereabouts, and seven right directions in which to proceed. One of us had a small pocket compass. We laid it on a flat stone and regarded it solemnly, only to find it full of water, like the pockets of its owner. We coaxed it into activity with the steel blade of an axe, but it lied and contradicted itself. Then someone produced a rude tracing from some Government survey. The rain pelted holes in it for a moment, and then it fluttered away on the wind, a limp pulp, leaving us as before. All the hills looked strangely alike; all directions seemed the same; the rain fell everywhere, and we began to feel sticky and cold. Gradually the great loneliness and wildness of the hills sank in upon me, and I remembered the globe-trotter who came to San Francisco, having "learned all about mountains in Switzerland," and how, years after his mysterious disappearance, they found a bleak skeleton in a wild part of the hills bearing his watch. I realized how no man knows the region surely when the mist sweeps in from the sea, ghostly, silently, and bearing the panic fear. But presently we came to our senses. We found a stump, diagnosed the lichens on it for north and south, noted the direction of the wind, and, holding fast to this for a straight line, cut impartially through brush and bramble, although the foliage drenched us till the water ran down and out over our boot-tops. In a short time we were rewarded by a faint, dull roar-the sea-and we knew where we were once more. Later on, came faint streaks of open sky, then a sudden

furling of the mists into troubling bundles, which rolled over the mountains and disappeared, leaving us suddenly among glistening rocks and bright new colors bounded by long reaches of the sea, with the clean, cool wind tossing the water out of the wild flowers.

I remember another time when a wee handful of us walked one night under snapping bright stars, set very big and thick in an inky sky. The north-west wind howled and pushed us this way and that, and the weary old forest groaned, letting go a limb now and then with a startling crash. We cooked that night over a fire that had to be held down with green twigs to keep it from blowing away, and we slept in the brush. Now the brush on the Eastern hills is not so thick but a man can get through it in any direction—and, barring blackberry vines— a girl in a golf skirt can follow; but the brush on the California hills is so tough, and stands so high, that a strong man would do well to crawl three miles a day through some of it flat on his face, and each day he would need a new suit of clothes. This is very inconvenient in a deer hunt, but when you have burrowed into it and pulled your blankets tight about you for the night, be assured you will not be disturbed by the gale; for only the gentlest breezes will come to you under its thick covering, though the trees may be falling in the next canyon. So slept we on the night of this gale, and it seemed as though the sky was never so clear and black before.

When I awoke the next morning the east shone wide, and three great planets were miraculously hung high in the coming light, as though they floated there. It was a wonderful sight; yet close on the eastern horizon lay a long black silhouette which was more wonderful still. Strange new mountains I had never heard of, and that were not on that part of the map, stood before me plain as day. I went back to bed and got up all over again to make sure I was awake, but the phantom mountains still persisted. I scanned their entire length for a familiar peak, but none appeared. There was a great dome standing up among the rest like a cathedral in a city, and it was split sheer in two, like the South Dome in the Yosemite! It was the South Dome! The idea came to me at last. I was looking clear across California and into the Yosemite itself, two hun

dred miles away. Even as I looked, the sun rose and the whole chain dissolved in golden light and vanished.

Then there were the countless nights" on the ridge," when we sat perched eighteen hundred feet high above the sea, and watched thirty miles of white breakers turn to flashing red gold, as the sun disappeared behind the edge of all that wide ocean. There's a little inn perched there in the wilderness, a mere shack with the grandest of views and the greatest of driftwood hearths; and old Constantine, the Greek hermit who kept it, could cook, even though he served everything in one plate and finished with apple sauce poured out of a bedroom pitcher. We used to feel sorry for the old man, because he slept tilted back in a cane chair on his veranda when the house was full to avoid sending us awayuntil we discovered that he slept there when the house was empty to avoid the troublesome task of going to bed and getting up again.

There were the many mornings when we awoke far above the clouds and, while all

the world below was complaining of the weather, looked down and away from our island peak upon a wondrous rolling cloud sea which the rising sun turned all the beautiful colors of an inverted sky.

Such is the region of Tamalpais, a mere dot on the map, yet inexhaustible, like its trails, and of infinite beauty and variety. It is hemmed in on all sides by trade and civilization-like the Adirondacks; yet, although several wee hamlets have perched perilously near its barriered wilderness, and the "crookedest railroad in the world" has scarred it just a little, in its endeavor to make it somewhat accessible to the traveller from afar, it has still preserved its pristine loveliness. Like the gentle region of the Scottish lakes in spring, like Naples in the autumn, save that its ancient crater smokes no longer, steep and blue, windswept and surf-beaten like the coast of Wales in summer, and fairest of all California in the winter time-all these different ways it is beautiful; and yet, by some oversight, unknown to the world in general and unsung!