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Rh time," now gone forever, gathering the luscious fruit for the San Francisco market, and emerge at last on the open farming country which stretches up to the high hills of Alameda, over which our road leads. At the foot of the hills we halt a moment, to rest and water man and beast, then strike into a winding cañon, which leads us up by an easy grade toward the summit of the hills. A little stream of pure, bright water comes down the canon, and, as we splash through it from time to time, we catch glimpses of hares and rabbits scudding away into the chapparal, and the beautiful tufted quail of California rise in pairs and whirr away to the leafy coverts where their nests are concealed. The sides of the canon are densely covered with the vine- like shrub known as the "poison-oak" which affects some people so terribly, even the wind blowing over it poisoning them so as to produce frightful swellings and eruptions of the face and glands, blindness, deafness, and sometimes even death itself. This plant has no effect whatever on any animal, nor on many men. The writer has chewed its fresh leaves, and handled it with perfect impunity. There are dog-roses and many wild flowers of brilliant hue, of which we do not know the names. The summit reached at last, we stop at a roadside inn to rest and "recruit"—gentle reader, if you ever travel in California you will learn what that means—and look back for a few minutes at the glorious panorama of the Bay of San Francisco and its surroundings: the white-winged ships coming and going from and to the uttermost parts of the earth—the steamers