NAPA VALLEY AND MT. ST. HELENA.
From San Francisco to Vallejo.—What we Saw while Crossing the Bay of San Pablo.—The Valley of Napa.—A Moonlight Evening in the Mountains.—Calistoga by Moonlight and Sunlight.—The Baths.—Hot Chicken-Soup Spring.—The Petrified Forest of Calistoga.—The Great Ranch and Vineyards.—Ascent of Mount St. Helena.—What we Saw from the Summit.—Reminiscences of the Flood.—Story of the Judge and the Stranger.—"Presently, sir, presently!"—Good Joke on the Robbers.—What happened to Me in Arizona.—A Good Story, but too Appreciative an Audience.
A soft September afternoon; cloudless, warm, quiet, hardly a breath or breeze to ruffle the Bay of San Francisco. The summer winds, the curse of San Francisco, have died out, and one can enjoy life once more in the immediate vicinity of the metropolis of the Pacific. Brown, and looking as old as the hills on which she stands, is San Francisco, the wonderful city of a day, in her russet coat of summer dust, as we look back at her from the steamer's deck. Straw color, mauve, and ashes of roses, are the tints displayed by all the mountains around the Bay, save old Tamalpais, who, clad in royal purple, looks grandly down upon us on the westward as our steamer glides swiftly past frowning Alcatraz, Angel Island and the Red Rock, the Dos Hermanos and the Dos Hermanas (Two Brothers and Two Sisters,
