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92. Dana, Derby, Colton, and Herman Melville have invested the shores of this glorious bay, and that famous old city, with a romantic charm such as few localities on our continent can boast. South-eastward the red and black outlines of the Gabilan Mountains cut against the rose-tinted horizon. They look down upon the broad and fertile valley of the Salinas, which debouches into the Bay of Monterey on the eastward; and northward of the last, due east or nearly so from where I stood, towers the great peak of Loma Prieta, wrapped to its very summit in a dark green mantle of chemisal. The Valley of Santa Cruz, dotted with white houses embowered in green shady groves, with the trim fresh-looking little city of the Holy Cross nestled quietly in the centre, stretched away to the eastward from our point of observation, and formed the immediate foreground of the picture.

I met a party of acquaintances coming out from the city to visit the natural bridge of Santa Cruz, some three miles from the town, and, turning off with them from the main road, went down through the fields and broad meadows a mile or so to the shore of the bay. The gray limestone which here underlies the soil at every point, and at no great depth, crops out boldly at the shore, and the unceasing assaults of the waves, lasting through centuries on centuries, have worn it into a thousand curious and fantastic forms. This limestone buttress is at this point from fifty to one hundred feet in height, and the natural bridge is out at its very edge, overlooking the Lay and ocean. A deep gulley or