Bidding good-by to what I could see of my German in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colors of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara--in the distance, the mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild oats dried by the heat made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with “chapparal.” The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the Pacific. CHAPTER XXIII. LITTLE CHINA. “The Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. _One man and a Chinaman_ have been killed, and a lady crippled for life.” That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to colored races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the _Alta Californian_ of the day of my return to San Francisco. A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humor of the _Alta_, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night. We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theater or opera house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to “show me around,” for, incomprehensible as it must have seemed to them with their New England gravity and American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Virginia. When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand Theater of London, it may have been ten or eleven o‘clock. The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last till two A.M. By the “performance” was meant this particular act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening for a month, and would be still in progress during the best part of another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave, which he reaches full of years and of honor.