Ah, there was richness!  Perennial groves, dazzling white cottages snow-flaking them with beauty; a beach with afternoon bathers; and two straggling piers that had waded out into deep water and stuck fast in the mud.  A stroll through Santa Cruz does not dissipate the enchantment usually borrowed from usurious distance; and the two-hours’-roll in the deep furrows of the Bay, that the pilgrim to Monterey must suffer, is apt to make him regret he left that pleasant port in the hope of finding something pleasanter on the dim opposite shore.

We re-embarked for Monterey at dusk, when the distant horn of the Bay was totally obscured.  It is seldom more than a half-imagined point, jutting out into a haze between two shades of blue.  Stars watched over us,—­sharp, clear stars, such as flare a little when the wind blows.  But the wind was not blowing for us.  Showers of sparks spangled the crape-like folds of smoke that trailed after us; the engine labored in the hold, and the sea heaved as it is always heaving in that wide-open Bay.

In an hour we steamed into a fog-bank, so dense that even the head-light of our ship was as a glowworm; and from that moment until we had come within sound of voices on the undiscovered shore, it was all like a voyage in the clouds.  Whistles blew, bells rang, men shouted, and then we listened with hungry ears.  A whistle answered us from shore—­a piercing human whistle.  Dim lights burned through the fog.  We advanced with fearful caution; and while voices out of the air were greeting us, almost before we had got our reckoning, we drifted up under a dark pier, on which ghastly figures seemed to be floating to and fro, bidding us all-hail.  And then and there the freedom of the city was extended to us, saturated with salt-sea mist.  Probably six times in ten the voyager approaches Monterey in precisely this fashion.  ’Tis true!  ’Tis pity!

Having been hoisted up out of our ship—­the tide was exceeding low and the dock high; having been embraced in turn by friends who had soaked for an hour and a half on that desolate pier-head—­for our ship was belated, groping her way in the fog,—­we were taken by the hand and led cautiously into the sand-fields that lie between the city and the sea.

Of course our plans had all miscarried.  Our Bachelors’ Hall fell with a dull thud when we heard that the chief bachelor had turned benedict three days before.  But he was present with his bride, and he knew of a haunt that would compensate us for all loss or disappointment.  We crossed the desert nursing a faint hope.  We threaded one or two wide, weedy, silent streets; not a soul was visible, though it was but nine in the evening,—­which was not to be wondered at, since the town was divided against itself:  the one half slept, the other half still sat upon the pier, making a night of it; for old Monterey had but one shock that betrayed it into some show of human weakness.  The cause was the Steam Navigation Co.  The effect was a fatal fondness for tendering a public reception to all steamers arriving from foreign ports, after their sometimes tempestuous passages of from eight to ten hours.  This insured the inhabitants a more or less festive night about once every week or ten days.