over, we sit, chat, and smoke our cigarritos around the doorway until bedtime; then give orders for a guide, an early breakfast and a lunch to take with us up the mountain, and retire to rest.
Daybreak sees us up and making ready for the ascent of the mountain which looms up right before us with its walls of rugged rock, which look altogether impassable. A good breakfast disposed of and we are all in the saddle—no carriage can ascend the mountain—and away up a little valley, dotted with patches of vineyards and young orchards, into a deep, dark canon which leads right into the depths of the mountain. Larks and robins are singing in the black beech and water-maple trees by the roadside, as we gallop along; and, as we ascend the defile, we look down upon the bright waters of a purling brook coming out of the mountain, in which we see the spotted mountain trout of California playing as we used to see them in the brooks of New England so long ago that we do not care—I might say do not dare—to count the years between. Soon the road leaves the bed of the stream, and becomes a narrow path, cut with infinite labor along the side of a precipice, over which you can look as you ride along, and drop a stone down hundreds of feet before it strikes the rocks, and goes bounding and awakening echoes down to the bottom of the canon. There is no room for two horses to go abreast, and we wind along in Indian file up, up, up, toward the blue sky above us. The bridle-path becomes at last a mere trail—dim and indistinct; but we press on, passing the first peak, and arrive at a
