you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase, the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things long overlaid in the racial memory. Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you, whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the tule fog creeps in. You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital, the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they scattered to all its hopeful quarters. If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain. VII THE TWIN VALLEYS It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.