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 18 paused to watch a party of "dagos," who were wading in the bay up to their necks, hauling a seine, while their felucca-rigged craft rode at anchor as it might have done in the Levant or the Grecian Archipelago. Cut out that section of the blue bay, with the felucca and its crew of red-capped fishermen, put it into a frame, and you have a matchless "Scene in the Levant," by one of the very oldest of the masters. Great white pelicans winged their way in silence over the waters, and flocks of gulls, shaugs, and crooked-billed curlew, rose as we galloped along. Long streamers of snowy vapor hung out like flags of truce from the summits of the mountains on the west, and looking back to the north we saw the mist driving in through the Golden Gate and scudding across the bay.

Leaving the shore of the bay at last, some ten or twelve miles from San Francisco, we galloped over an open plain, and at San Bruno crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad track, and turned by a by-road into a long, winding canon leading up to the summit of a range of hills to the westward, between which and the higher and forest-crowned Sierra Morena, still farther on towards the sea, lies, hidden wholly from the outer world, the lovely valley of San Andreas. The plain upon the western shore of the bay, and all the Contra Costa and Alameda valley and hill country on the eastern side, was brown and dry, and sear as it ever is in the interior of California in summer and autumn; and the valley of San Andreas, embowered in shade, and the cool, green, mist-nourished forests on the mountains