In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree; And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee. There was no fountain in our desert, and we knew it well enough; for we had often braved its sands. In that wide waste there was not even the solitary tree that moved the poet to song; nor a bird in our solitude, save a sea-gull cutting across-lots from the ocean to the bay in search of a dinner. There were some straggling vines on the edge of our desert, thick-leaved and juicy; and these were doing their best to keep from getting buried alive. The sand was always shifting out yonder, and there was a square mile or two of it. We could easily have been lost in it but for our two everlasting landmarks--Mount Tamalpais across the water to the north, and in the south Lone Mountain. Lone Mountain was our Calvary--a green hill that loomed above the graves where slept so many who were dear to us. The cross upon its summit we had often visited in our holiday pilgrimages. They were _holydays_, when our childish feet toiled hopefully up that steep height; for that cross was the beacon that lighted the world-weary to everlasting rest. And so we crossed the desert, over our shoetops in sand; climbing one hill after another, only to slide or glide or ride down the yielding slope on the farther side. Meanwhile the fog came in like a wet blanket. It swathed all the landscape in impalpable snow; it chilled us and it thrilled us, for there was danger of our going quite astray in it; but by and by we got into the edge of the town, and what a very ragged edge it was in the dim long ago! Once in the edge of the town, we were masters of the situation: you couldn't lose us even in the dark. And so ended the outing of our merry crew,--merry though weary and worn; yet not so worn and weary but we could raise at parting a glad "Hoorah for Health, Happiness, and the Hills of Home!" VIII. THE MISSION DOLORES I have read somewhere in the pages of a veracious author how, five or six years before my day, he had ridden through chaparral from Yerba Buena to the Mission Dolores with the howl of the wolf for accompaniment. Yerba Buena is now San Francisco, and the mission is a part of the city; it is not even a suburb. In 1855 there were two plank-roads leading from the city to the Mission Dolores; on each of these omnibuses ran every half hour. The plank-road was a straight and narrow way, cut through acres of chaparral--thickets of low evergreen oaks,--and leading over forbidding wastes of sand. To stretch a figure, it was as if the sea-of-sand had been divided in the midst, so that the children of Israel might have passed dry-shod, and the Egyptians pursuing them might have been swallowed up in the billows of sand that flowed over them at intervals.