FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



August, our better-behaved thermometers fluctu- 

 ate between sixty and seventy-five degrees, with 

 now and then, not to be entirely out of the fash- 

 ion, an hour-long mid-afternoon ascension into 

 the lower eighties ; and night after night, the mer- 

 cury in the meantime having subsided into the 

 sixties, or, not unlikely, into the upper fifties, 

 we sleep soundly under a double thickness of 

 blankets. 



For my own part I have spent my third sum- 

 mer here, and in that time I have endured — in 

 September — one ^'heated term," when for five 

 days the sea-breeze failed us, and, as if for our 

 sins, the dry, burning breath of the desert found 

 its way over the mountains ; and even that vis- 

 itation, unwelcome as it was, might truthfully 

 have been called something like comfort in com- 

 parison with those periods of day-and-night mis- 

 ery, so many of which I have sweltered through 

 in my old Boston neighborhood. It is pleasant 

 in one's age to escape the freezings and thawings 

 and, worst of all, the indoor confinement of a 

 New England winter ; but it is pleasanter still, 

 if you leave the question to me, to escape those 

 wilting, melting, vitality-destroying, homicidal 

 heats of a New England summer. 



Dear old New England ! say I. Dear old New 

 England ! For me there can never be any other 

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