The making of the death-bed of this monster cost Mrs. Duncan forty dollars.  Then the work began.  An ax in the hands of a skillful wood-cutter threw the tree headlong to the earth.  Then it was sawed across, yielding eighteen logs, each sixteen feet in length, with a diameter of four feet at the smallest end.  The logs were put upon wheels, and run over a light trestle-work to the mill, drawn thither by a ridiculous dummy, which looked not unlike an old-fashioned tavern store on its beam-ends, with an elbow in the air.  At the mill, it was sawed into eighty thousand feet of marketable lumber.

Reaching the forest, on our way to the Mills, we found the river had risen so that ten miles from the mouth we were obliged to climb upon the wagon-seats, and hold our luggage above high-water mark.

At Duncan’s, on the home stretch, we made our final pilgrimage, to a wild glen over the Russian River, where, a few weeks before, the Bohemian Club had held high jinks.  The forest had been a scene of enchantment on that midsummer night; but now the tents were struck, the Japanese lanterns were extinguished, and nothing was left to tell the tale but the long tables of rough deal, where we had feasted.  They were covered with leaves and dust; spiders had draped them with filmy robes.  The quail piped, the jay-bird screamed, the dove sobbed, and a slim snake, startled at the flight of a bounding hare, glided away among the rustling leaves.  So soon does this new land recover the primeval beauty of eternal youth.

INLAND YACHTING

When your bosom friend seizes you by the arm, and says to you in that seductive sotto voce which implies a great deal more than is confessed, “Come, let us go down to the sea in ships, and do business in the great waters,” you generally go, if you are not previously engaged.  At least, I do.

Much has been said in disfavor of yachting in San Francisco Bay.  It is inland yachting to begin with.  The shelving shores prevent the introduction of keel boats; flat and shallow hulls, with a great breadth of beam, something able to battle with “lumpy” seas and carry plenty of sail in rough weather, is the more practical and popular type.  Atlantic yachts, when they arrive in California waters, have their rigging cut down one-third.  Schooners and sloops with Bermudian mutton-leg sails flourish.  A modification of the English yawl is in vogue; but large sloops are not handled conveniently in the strong currents, the chop seas, the blustering winds, the summer fogs that make the harbor one of the most treacherous of haunts for yachtsmen.