_March 9th._—Return to San Francisco by road; dine at San Mateo, as lovely a spot as I ever gazed on. The grass is kneedeep, and the chimps of buck-eye (_Esculus flava_) and handsome oaks besprinkling the rounded hills and banks of the clear stream winding its way past the village to the Bay of San Francisco, like a lake glistening in the distance, reminded me of a park in fertile Devonshire. Completely shut in, and sheltered from the wind that blows nearly all the summer, withering up the vegetation exposed to its influence, everything round about this favoured spot grows in wild luxuriance. In the garden belonging to the roadside house, the summer flowers are in full bloom, and vegetables of all kinds in rare abundance, such as for size and quality equal anything Covent Garden Market can show. The bay runs inland about forty miles, and the land on its shores is particularly fertile, and employed in great measure for dairy-farms and stock-ranches. For the first time I gather the poison-oak (_Rhus toxicodendron_), a pretty plant, that climbs by rootlets, like the ivy, and trails gracefully over both rocks and trees. Some persons are most seriously affected by it, especially such as are of fair complexion, if they only venture near where it grows. It produces swelling about the eyes, dizziness, and fever; the poisonous effects are most virulent when the plant is bursting into leaf. I picked, examined, and walked amidst the trees over which it twined thickly, but experienced not the slightest symptoms of inconvenience. Still, I know others that suffer whenever they come near it. Where the poison-oak thrives, there too grows a tuber known to the settlers as Bouncing Bet, to the botanist as _Saponaria officinalis_, the common soapwort. The tuber is filled with a mucilaginous juice which, having the property of entangling air when whisked up, makes a lather like soap. This lather is said to be an unfailing specific against the effects of the poison-oak—the poison and its antidote growing side by side! CHAPTER IX. SACRAMENTO—STOCKTON—CALIFORNIAN GROUND-SQUIRRELS—GRASS VALLEY—STAGE TRAVELLING—HYDRAULIC WASHINGS—NEVADA—MARYSVILLE—UP THE SACRAMENTO RIVER TO RED BLUFFS—A DANGEROUS BATH.