A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity.  It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.  The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.  Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the valley.  “I to the hills lift mine eyes!” There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.

As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.  Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage difficult.  But now we were hard by the summit.  The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.  At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.

A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines.  The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.  In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.  There is just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through the wood.  I said croquet ground, not green; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself was the only other note of originality:  a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.

On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.