Another smoke under the stoop followed, and then, perhaps, a doze at the cottage, or in one of the dozen rocking-chairs about the house, or on the rustic throne hewn from a stump in the grove between the house and the barn.  The sun flooded the canon with hot and dazzling light; the air was spiced with the pungent odor of shrubs; it was time to rest a little before beginning the laborious sports of the afternoon.  Later, we all wandered on the banks of the creek and were sure to meet at the swimming-pool about four o’clock.  Meanwhile the Artist has laid in another study.  Foster has finished his tale, and is rocking in a hammock of green boughs; the Scribe has booked a half-dozen fragmentary sentences that will by and by grow into an article, and the boys have come home from school.

By and by we wanted change; the monotony of town life is always more or less interesting; the monotony of country life palls after a season.  Change comes over us in a most unexpected guise.  Our canon was decked with the flaming scarlet of the poison-oak; these brilliant bits of foliage are the high-lights in almost every California landscape, and must satisfy our love of color, in the absence of the Eastern autumnal leaf.  The gorgeous shrubs stand out like burning bushes by the roadside, on the hill-slope, in the forest recesses, and almost everywhere.  The Artist’s chum gave evidence of a special susceptibility to the poison by a severe attack that prostrated him utterly for a while.  Yet he stood by us until his vacation came to an end, and, to the last, there was no complaint heard from this martyr to circumstances.

One day he left us—­on mule-back, with nine dogs fawning upon his stirrup, and amid a hundred good-byes wafted to him from the house, the smithy, the barn, and the swimming-pool.  He had orders to send in the Kid, or his successor, immediately upon his arrival at the Bay.  We must needs have some one to indulge, some one whose interests were not involved in the primeval farther than the pleasure it afforded for the hour.  The Kid was the very thing—­a youngster with happiness in heart, luster in his eye, and nothing more serious than peach-down on his lip; yet there was gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the mere surface of men and things.  The Kid drove in one night with rifle tall as himself, fishing-tackle, and entomological truck, wild with enthusiasm and hungry as a carp.

What days followed!  Our little entomologist chased scarlet-winged dragon-flies and descanted on the myriad forms of insect-life with premature accomplishment.  “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” we heard revelations not unmixed with the ludicrous superstitions of the nursery.

There is a school-house a mile distant, on the forks of the creek; we visited it one Friday, and saw six angular youths, the sum total of the young ideas within range of the instructress, spelled down in broadsides; and heard time-honored recitations delivered in the same old sing-song that could only have been original with the sons of our first parents.  The school-mistress, with a sun-bonnet that buried her face from the world, passed Ingram’s ten times a week, footing it silently along the dusty road, lunch-pail in hand.  She lives in a lonely cabin on the trail to the wilderness over the hill.