Between ranches, placer-diggings, and small settlements, we now thread our comparatively level way to Sacramento. Here we are met by the chief affluent of this end of the Pacific Road,--the long-projected, greatly needed, and now finally accomplished line between Sacramento and Portland. This enterprise has done for the Sacramento and Willamette valleys the same good offices of development performed by our grand line for all the central continent. The noble orchards, pastures, grain-lands, and gardens of Northern California and Oregon are now provided with a market. Their wastes are brought under cultivation, their mines are opened, their entire area is settled by a class of men who work under the stimulus of certain profit. The Northern freight-trains waiting at Sacramento to make a junction with our road are loaded with the produce of one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, now flowing to its first remunerative market. All this must pay toll to our road, and here is another source of profit. Crossing a number of tributaries to the Sacramento, and intersecting mines, ranches, and settlements, as before, we follow a nearly straight level to Stockton. Then turning westerly, we cross the San Joaquin, pass almost beneath the shadow of grand old Monte Diablo, glide among the vines and olives of San Jose Mission, and curve round the southern bend of the lovely bay to the queenly city of San Francisco. One of Leland's carriages awaits us at the terminus. We are driven to the most delightful hotel on the continent, and find our old friend, the Occidental, altered in no respect save size, which the growing demands of the Pacific New York, since the completion of our inter-oceanic line, have compelled Leland to quadruple. We are on time,--six days and eight hours exactly. Or, assuming the San-Francisco standard, we have gained three hours on the sun, and, instead of taking a two-o'clock lunch, as our friends are doing in New York, sit down to an eleven-o'clock breakfast crowned with melons, grapes, and strawberries, in the sweet seclusion of the Ladies' Ordinary. Is not all this worth doing in reality? SEA-HOURS WITH A DYSPEPTIC. BY HIS SATELLITE. I.--PRELUSIVE.