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. Think of a race when the wind is blowing from twenty-five to thirty-five miles an hour! The surface current at the Golden Gate runs six miles per hour and the tide-rip is often troublesome; but there is ample room for sport, and very wild sport at times. The total area of the bay is four hundred and eighty square miles, and there are hundreds of miles of navigable sloughs, rivers, and creeks. One may start from Alviso, and sail in a general direction, almost without turning, one hundred and fifty-five miles to Sacramento city. During the voyage he is pretty sure to encounter all sorts of weather and nearly every sort of climate, from the dense and chilly fogs of the lower bay to the semi-tropics of the upper shores, where fogs are unknown, and where the winds die away on the surface of beautiful waters as blue as the Bay of Naples.