Rounding the pass through these hills, I never saw the Perris Valley more weirdly beautiful.  The clouds were high.  On the north Mt.  San Bernardino loomed up, grim, snow-capped and forbidding.  To the east old Tahquitz, guardian of the passes to the desert, reared his snow-capped head, far above the surrounding country.  To the south Mt.  Palomar stretched his long, lazy looking form, with his rounded back and indented outline, from east to west.  His distance from us made him look like a line of low, outlying hills, instead of the sturdy old mountain that he is.  All of these mountains bore most exquisite purple hues.  The same coloring was assumed by those groups of lesser hills that, cone-like, are scattered over the easterly edge of the Perris Valley, and which separate the Hemet and the San Jacinto country from the rest of the valley.  The coloring of the floor of the valley itself was particularly exquisite.  There was just enough light, just enough of sunbeams struggling through the sodden clouds to illuminate, here and there, an alfalfa field, or here and there a grove of trees, so as to bring them out in startling contrast to the somber colors of the shaded portions of the valley.  But with it were signs of the dying year, a premonition of storms to come, storms unpleasant while they last, but revivifying in their effects.

Many Quail—­Too Cold.

In the fifteen years during which I have shot upon these grounds, I never got up more or larger bands of quail than we did that morning.  The day was too cold for good shooting.  Give me the good old summer time, with the thermometer about 80 degrees, for good quail shooting.  In the cool days the birds run or get up and fly a half mile at a time.  They will not scatter out and lie close, so that you can get them up one by one and fill your bags.  On the cold days they also break cover at very long range.  They led us a merry chase up the steepest hills and down the most abrupt declivities.  All of the time we were slowly making good.

Lloyd Newport was there on his buckskin horse.  Now you could see him way up on a hillside, then again down in some deep valley, running like mad to check the flight, or turn the running march of some band of birds that was leading those of us on foot a double-quick run.  Shooting as he rode, now to the right, now to the left, then straight ahead, he got his share of the birds.

Little Fred Newport, only 14 years old, was shooting like a veteran, and long before the rest of us had scored, he proudly announced that he had the limit.  The final round-up found us with 109 birds for seven guns—­a good shoot, under very adverse circumstances.  We had the satisfaction of knowing that we left plenty of birds on the ground for next year.

The quail shooting of 1911 is at an end.  Only the memory of it remains.  I shall cherish the memory deeply in my affections, and let it stir my enthusiasm for the out-of-door life when the world seems all balled up, and things are going wrong.