Page:A La California.djvu/43

 Rh the air, cutting sharply against the horizon, stand great pines, from whose broad-spreading branches float long steamers of green-gray moss, giving an air of great are and venerableness to the forest. Densely wooded are all the intervening hill-sides with the fragrant laurel, tea-oak and many flowering shrubs interwoven with the glorious madroño, whose crown of bright-green leaves contrasts so pleasingly with its bark of brilliant scarlet—the madroño ought to be the favorite tree with the Fenian Brotherhood, who are so fond of seeing the green above the red. Sitting on the broad piazza, in the cool evening, we hear the whistle of the locomotive at San Mateo, only four miles away over the hills to the eastward. As the last faint echoes die away in the cañons, a coyote wolf, which has been prowling stealthily in the vicinity of the hotel, sets up a sharp, shrill yell in answer. Other wolves, far and near—there may be half a dozen of them, but it seems as if there were a thousand—take up the cry, and in an instant the woods and the night are filled with music, not exactly such as Longfellow sines of, but which for want of better will serve to induce "the cares which infest the day" to "fold their tents like the Arab, and as silently steal away."

Half a dozen huge Newfoundland dogs, good-natured, lazy fellows enough at the best, but anxious to convince the generous public that they are of some importance in the world, and make a show of earning their bread and butter now that their master is at home, roused from their slumbers by the