Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River cañon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of 'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted, lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches, by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James. Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness. The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis Bret Harte and Mark Twain. [Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY] It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its inhabitants.