THAT is, thirty miles in length alone; in width it is as many miles as you can see on either side of the railroad and the ferry-boat, and in height as many miles as you can see upward. And moreover, it is a different thirty miles every day of the three hundred and sixty-five, and every hour of the twentyfour. So it is a good deal of country one sees, first and last, who takes his daily or even weekly cityward trip across the level farming land of Alameda County, following along the northwestward trend of the line of hills.

Take the trip in December, for instance: that will be starting at the beginning, for everybody knows December is the first month of the yearly cycle here. There is hoarfrost lingering in white patches wherever the shade of house or fence or tank falls. As you pass Haywards, where the lower hilltops along the pass give you a sight of the upper half of Diablo, you see that the rugged mass is clearly outlined, as if it were cut out of crystal; and not less so every curve and line of the lower intervening range, except where here and there white fog-banks lie upon them. The lights and shades are strongly marked; every cañon and hollow is a blank darkness on its westward, or more exactly northwestward, face, and a oright, light brown on the opposite one. The sun is just far enough south, and the hour-eight or nine in the morning just early enough, to measure all the light out exactly to one side and the darkness to the other. And though every brown clod of the sunny side is settling itself comfortably now to feel the warmth creeping and filtering deliciously through it, while on the other side the wet soil is numb with frost, still it is the dark side that is going to be green next May and even June, long after its vis-a-vis has lost every trace of color. And it is on that side that the bushes all grow southern-wood, fragrant though bitter; poison-oak, beautiful though wicked. I am

rather glad it is the bitter southern-wood and evil poison-oak that grow on the frost-bitten side of these cañons: it forbids the moralists to seize upon their later greenness and their more vigorous growth as an illustration of the uses of adversity; and I am glad, on the other hand, that the evil poison-oak is beautiful and the bitter southern-wood fragrant, and that there are a good many varieties of wildflowers to be scantily scattered among them, to offset the bare slopes' brief jubilance of poppies and buttercups and wild marigolds it all complicates the matter for the moralists.

This is early to be talking of poppies and buttercups, however. Look closely at the wet, bare ground; it is prickled thick with innumerable green points-the least little needle-points; many as they are, they cannot give a green tinge to the ground, and you have to look directly at them to see them. Probably most of these points are mallow; it is usually the first greenery to get its head above ground after the rains.

The wagons that stand at the stations, or are left behind toiling along the roads, are splashed with mud. When you come to Oakland you will see the street black with a thin mud, and sprinkled here, and there with puddles. Everything is washed clean beyond description. The white houses in the farming country, that gather back with their groves and gardens to the edge of the foothills, leaving the level fields in front empty, shine out with a curious vividness. The surface of Lake Merritt seems to have been polished like a mirror, for the East Oakland hills, the houses and trees, picture themselves in it with a peculiar distinctness. atom of dimness, even of dinginess, is gone from the oaks and cypresses and gums in Oakland; and it makes them look all the brighter and fresher that in this brilliant atmosphere, that seems to transmit without diffusing light-like an indefinitely intensi

Every

fied moonlight-every tree and every separate branch and twig is very dark on its shady side and very bright on its sunny side. The very air seems so clean and pure and so motionless that not a color can be seen through it that looks dingy, not an outline that does not give some pleasure to the eye by its perfect clearness-not railroad bridge, tank, nor squalid little house. You seem to actually see the crystal medium of air through which you look at everything as if through a great diamond. Yet, distinct as lights and shades are, the sky is all this time lightly skimmed over with feathery strata of cloud, that do not seem to interrupt the sunlight at all, only to temper it.

To-morrow, perhaps, there will be a Scotch mist all the morning. Towards noon the clouds will melt, and when you look out from your train in the afternoon you will see them resting as a white fog-bank with gray shadows on the crest of the range, from its junction with the bay to San Leandroa fog-bank on the top as level as if it had been cut off with a sharp knife drawn along the edge of a rule, and on its lower surface tossed and broken. As you watch it, Grizzly Peak pierces it almost through, and in ten minutes it has melted around him, leaving only floating films. The upper ends of the large cañons, running up into the shadow of the fog-bank, are the only shading that breaks the uniform light brown of the hills now. Though it is the middle of December, and though yesterday frost lay on the ground, you would soon find yourself uncomfortably warm if you were walking: even in the shade it is only delightfully cool-not cold.

West of the bay a mist so thin and vague that those who are under it cannot be aware of it say rather a gathered subtile dimness in the air-partly obliterates the blue mountains west of the bay, and partly outlines them in white, with a bluish upper edge, each ridge marked out against the paler background of the one behind it. The bay itself is lusterless white, shading to pale silver-blue, and intolerably burnished under the sun; for there is a thin cloud-film over the sky-so thin that the eye

cannot tell where it melts into the clear spaces that interrupt it—and it seems to act as a burning-glass to the sun's rays. It gives a fine, atmospheric quality, softened and a little unreal, like the light during an eclipse; but with none of the sickened look of that light. Scattered across the distant film and across the clear spaces, looking as if they were as far below one as the other, an irregular trail of little solid, curdy clouds seems like a bit out of an entirely different sort of day. The typical cloud for these December days is a sort of cirro-stratus, spreading fluffy levels and lines far abroad.

The cumulus-the thorough-going, solid cumulus, that leaves no possibility of doubt as to where it ends and the sky begins, but makes you realize that it is very near to earth and entirely disconnected from those blue gulfs away beyond it—such cumulus clouds belong especially to spring, say from January to May. Perhaps, though, it is not so much the clouds as their shadows on the hills that are peculiarly the property of spring; for the quality of a cloud-shadow on the hills depends not on the cloud alone, but on a combination of sun and atmosphere as well.

You may see them from your train on a bright afternoon in January, large, definite patches, resting motionless, or moving very little over the bare, round shoulders of the faintly green hills. Except for the heaps of cloud that throw the shadows, the sky is perfectly pure, down to the very edge of the hills, but pale-the shade that fashion with an unusual felicity has named "baby-blue"

and a little luminous; and where these cloud-shadows fall upon the sky-line of the hills they make the softest imaginable contrast of what your artist vis-a-vis tells you is purple, but you had ignorantly taken for dark gray, against the baby-blue. Or sometimes the purple shadow crowns a hilltop directly against one of the white cloud-heaps with its gray shadings. It is not merely spring that these particular shadows belong to: it is those days of spring when the air is purity itself and the upper sky Italian; when the hills and pastures are green and all the little streams are full; when there is a smell

of clover and filaria in the air, and the wild crimson portulaca is in bloom along all the roadsides and waste places; when-most characteristic of all, as perfect an epitome of the early California spring as Lowell's bobolink of New England June-the meadowlark is singing. This January afternoon, however, is too early for the clover and filaria; they are only beginning to be distinguishable in the light fleece of baby greenery; and the portulaca (Calandrinia Menziesii-a portulaca only by family) will not be in bloom for a few weeks yet. But it is not too early for the meadow-lark; he is never more vocal than when the January plowing is going on. From the car window you can see him jump suddenly from a furrow to a fence post-no word but "jump" describes the short, jerky dash-stand still a second as if to collect his thoughts, then flatten down toward the post, making a more ungraceful bird than ever of himself, open his beak--and if your window is open you can catch through all the rattle of the train the few delicious notes: "Sweet, sweet-oh, sweet, sweet." Or if your window is shut, you can imagine them, for you must be familiar with the song; you cannot drive by a plowed field in January or February without seeing seven or eight larks on the posts, each one sending out the same little warble like certain phrases a canary will whistle, not in his torrents of ecstasy, but when he is in a happy, quiet mood, uttering little fragments of song with meditative pauses. Don't you know how, when the sunshine is particularly pleasant, and everything has been going just right all day with your canary, and the room has been still all the long sunny afternoon, except for a little contented twittering and warbling from him, he will break a few minutes' silence with a few soft notes, so happy and so loving that you exclaim, and would have him in your arms if he were a child instead of a bird? The meadow-lark's phrase is much like that, but fuller and richer, and more liquid; it does not express sheer content, either, but a rapture that almost goes beyond gladness and touches some spring of restlessness and desire. But anything so

exquisitely pure in tone I have not heard in any other bird's song. Sometimes he prolongs it a couple of notes; sometimes he repeats it once, or even twice; but generally it is just the single five-syllabled, rapturous cry.

In the morning, in January, you will not see the cumulus clouds or their purple shadows. Probably the sky will be perfectly cloudless. But instead of cloud-shadows, the cañons and hollows, straight into whose doors the afternoon sun looks, lie in darkness sharp-edged as the shadows on snow. The sun has moved far enough north to throw the shadows of the westward slopes over upon the opposite ones, so that every hollow, gully, or cañon is sunk in shade, definitely marked out on the sunshiny surfaces of the range. They plow and cultivate the most accessible patches of these hills, and strips of fresh black or chocolate-brown crossing the faint green show where plowing has begun.

Here and there along the creeks that gully their way down the ravines and across the plain toward the bay cluster thickets of willow. You might find at this date, if you knew just where to look, some precocious pussies showing their fur on willows fortunate in situation, in some sunny deepsoiled cañon; but these lowland thickets show you only their bare, orange stems. The leafless orchards that line the way so thickly from Haywards to San Leandro make another variation of color, with their acres of red twigs. It is the peach-trees that draw your eye to the orchards with the brightest purplish red; but demurer reddish tinges come out in the bare bark of all the other trees when you look at them in a mass and from a distance. The peach will be the color-bearer of the orchard again in March, when the trees are heaps of pink. Even the apple blossoms will only carry shell-like pink touches on their white petals; the almond blossoms will be yet more faintly flushed, the apricot dependent upon its brown-pink calyx for color, and the pear on its red-andblack-tipped stamens; and the cherry and plum will be ghost-white. But the color