wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come
in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down
the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins
mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The
interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of
thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by
this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and
there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and
hunters. A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The
crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the
kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the
skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of
turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard.
Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey
from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other
things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first
fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of
the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up
into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean,
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where