That Thursday, at 4 p.m. we were on our way to the station at 4:30; the town-houses were growing few and far between, as the wheels of the coaches spun over the iron road.  At five o’clock the green fields of the departed spring, already grown bare and brown, rolled up between us and the horizon.  California is a naked land and no mistake, but how beautiful in her nakedness!  An hour later we descended at School-house station; such is the matter-of-fact pet-name given to a cluster of dull houses, once known by some melodious but forgotten Spanish appellation.  The ranch wagon awaited us; a huge springless affair, or if it had springs they were of that aggravating stiffness that adds insult to injury.  Excellent beasts dragged us along a winding, dusty road, over hill, down dale, into a land that grew more and more lonely; not exactly “a land where it was always afternoon,” but apparently always a little later in the day, say 7 p.m. or thereabouts.  We were rapidly wending our way towards the coast, and on the breezy hill-top a white fold of sea-fog swept over and swathed us in its impalpable snow.  Oh! the chill, the rapturous agony of that chill.  Do you know what sea-fog is?  It is the bodily, spiritual and temporal life of California; it is the immaculate mantle of the unclad coast; it feeds the hungry soil, gives drink unto the thirsting corn, and clothes the nakedness of nature.  It is the ghost of unshed showers—­atomized dew, precipitated in life-bestowing avalanches upon a dewless and parched shore; it is the good angel that stands between a careless people and contagion; it is heaven-sent nourishment.  It makes strong the weak; makes wise the foolish—­you don’t go out a second time in midsummer without your wraps—­and it is altogether the freshest, purest, sweetest, most picturesque, and most precious element in the physical geography of the Pacific Slope.  It is worth more to California than all her gold, and silver, and copper, than all her corn and wine—­in short, it is simply indispensable.

This is the fog that dashed under our hubs like noiseless surf, filled up the valleys in our lee, shut the sea-view out entirely, and finally left us on a mountaintop—­our last ascension, thank Heaven!—­with nothing but clouds below us and about us, and we sky-high and drenched to the very bone.

The fog broke suddenly and rolled away, wrapped in pale and splendid mystery; it broke for us as we were upon the edge of a bluff.  For some moments we had been listening to the ever-recurring sob of the sea.  There at our feet curled the huge breakers, shouldering the cliff as if they would hurl it from its foundation.  A little further on in the gloaming was the last hill of all; from its smooth, short summit we could look into the Delectable Land by candle light, and mark how invitingly stands a bungalow by the sea’s margin at the close of a dusty day.