The water on the coast here is too cold for comfortable bathing, and hot salt water bathing is advertised everywhere, but to any one who has enjoyed the surf anywhere on the Atlantic coast the idea of swimming in a tank of heated salt water is not very attractive. For all they have no winter here the cost of fuel is greater, if anything, than where the climate is more severe. Coal costs more per ton, and is delivered to families in fifty pound sacks. Fires are comfortable every day in the year, and sealskin cloaks are seen in the streets all summer long. Why they don't have more big fires in San Francisco is a wonder. Acres of frame dwellings and business blocks are here, a strong wind is always with them, and after four or five months without a drop of rain it naturally seems as if the buildings must be as dry as tinder. But they tell me the red wood, which is the chief building material, does not burn very readily, as there is very little if any resin. The thing they dread most is a thunder storm. A good lively earthquake is barely noticed, and the people walk along with the ground trembling and shaking under them, and the occurrence is hardly mentioned, but let an ordinary thunder storm pass over them and it is the subject of conversation for weeks. The week before I reached here a thunder storm occurred that in New England would hardly be noticed, but here it startled the whole city, and was the occasion of many an animated discussion among the natives who still gather in little groups upon the streets to express their various opinions regarding the phenomenon. CHAPTER XVIII. MONTEREY AND THE GEYSERS. My trip to Monterey, which was mentioned in the last chapter, was made in connection with an excursion arranged as a part of the Grand Army of the Republic programme. I was very glad the ride was taken on the cars, for the last fifty miles was over a section of country that strongly resembles in appearance the sage bush and sandy deserts of Wyoming and Nevada. The prospect of traveling over such roads on a wheel does not stir up in me such an enthusiastic determination to undertake their passage as it did two months ago, and the chance of meeting Eastern people on the train was quite an inducement to go by cars; but a bicycle is just the thing with which to visit the Geysers. The knapsack on this trip was left behind, not because of any inconvenience that it causes, for the longer it is used the better I like it for carrying the amount of baggage necessary on long tours, but the knapsack is the occasion of so many questions, it is such an advertisement, that whenever it is possible on these side excursions it is left behind. But although I started out wearing trousers and dressed otherwise in ordinary clothes, and entertaining the idea that I should not be so publicly bored as usual on this journey because of my ordinary appearance, this impression proved to be a false one as soon as I took the ferry for Oakland.