the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of
open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through
the underwood into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result
of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been
run up to convenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I
went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite
distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater
vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious
power upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet,
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the
hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is
always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow
still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession
of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;
they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often
of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the
seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back
and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as
they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh,
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and
filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It