^10 Beyond t/ic SicrraK. 



valleys. In some places these winds in summer are hot as a furnice blast, 

 at least for a few hours in the day. Scarcely can men endure the h<;l breath 

 of this semi-simoom. The vicissitu le, however, is grateful. With the com- 

 ing of evening there is always a rapid fall of temperature. It becomes cool 

 with nightf.ill: an i in nearly all pirts of California your midsummer slum- 

 bers depend for their comfort upon the comfort. 



I will mention one other circumsUmce relative to the climate of this 

 Pacific State. The atmosphere has a very high electrical tension. I think 

 that a good part of the physical inspiration which the traveler from other 

 parts experiences on coming to these valleys and coasts is traceable to what 

 may be called the lire and lizzie of the atmosphere. You are magnetized ; 

 but the electricity is of the static, not the galvanic, variety. You .sparkle and 

 snap and stand up as to your hair. The sensations of the thing range all 

 the way from funny to instructive. I believe th.it the spirits arc greatly 

 exhilarated by this condition, and that a in \n feels better for it, whether he 

 is better or not. 



So then, on the whole, I praise the glorous climate of California; I join 

 in the chorus with the Californians themselves; but man is a fault-finding 

 animal; and they mu^t permit me to say that in their country there is on 

 the whole a scarciti/ if life/ I mean a scarcity of animal life. What there is 

 is vigorous to the last degree; but I was everywhere struck with the absence 

 or infrequency of those multifarious forms and varieties of living creatures 

 which we have in our Ohio valley forests. I believe I never saw a country 

 with so little life to the square acre as California. It gives to the close ob- 

 server a strange suggestion of calm and quiet unlike the chattering loq lacity, 

 the flutter and splash with which he is familiar, and without which he has a 

 certain sensation of lonesomene.ss. There were times during my stay in 

 California when, on waking in the early morning, I would have given live 

 dollars to hear a bravura or two from the grand bird concerto in C major, 

 with Madame Li Thrush and Fraiilein von Lark in the leading parts. True 

 enough, California has some birds, but they are not our kind. Here, for 

 instance, is that universal genius, the great North American crow. He is 

 everywhere, from the rivers to the end of ihe earth. I siw him on a Yucca 

 palm in Arizona watching the Marquis of Leap. I saw him in the Colorado 

 desert, and circling around a sheep ranch in the S.icramento valley. At 

 Pasadena they have a Hock of blackbirds and some robins. On my return, 

 by the Central Pacilic, I saw at Clipper G.ip some vultures, and in the 

 mountains behind Colfax one or two eagles. Down on the coast there is an 

 abundance of water-fowl, strangely diU'jrentiated into (to me) unknown 

 varieties; but the land birds in California seem to me conspicuous by their 

 alisence 



So, also, of the four-footed forms of life. I speak of the scarcity of varie- 

 ties rather than of paucity of numbers in a given species. Here and there 

 the ground animals of certain tribes are monotonously abundant. But these 

 thick patches of life are sparsely scattered over the land.scapc. In the mid- 



