Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/172

 140 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA health for one of their number, the bridegroom, " R. L. S." They passed, as we may, up the lovely valley to Napa and St. Helena, a region known best for its mineral springs and miles of vineyards, and came to Calistoga in the lee of Mt. St. Helena. Stevenson wrote, " Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hill- tops." He and his wife and step-son found a shack, " three rooms plastered against the hill," in " a deserted mining-camp, eight miles up the moun- tain." "There, sir," he wrote to Colvin, "we are to fish, hunt, sketch and study." In this " land of stage-drivers and highwaymen," they lived until the end of July, when they went to Scotland. Some months later The Silverado Squatters was begun in Switzerland and finished on the Mediterranean. A wood-cut illustrating the interior of the cabin shows Stevenson in a familiar attitude, propped with pillows and writing in one of a " triple tier of beds where miners once had lain." The site of Silverado is now overgrown with grape-vines, but many of the characters he de- scribed are still remembered by the people there- abouts. Calistoga is the touring-point for the marvelous