eyes, wooden legs, and other Boston notions to the chiefs.




NOTES BY FLOOD AND FIELD


PART I--IN THE FIELD

It was near the close of an October day that I began to be disagreeably
conscious of the Sacramento Valley. I had been riding since sunrise, and
my course through the depressing monotony of the long level landscape
affected me more like a dull dyspeptic dream than a business journey,
performed under that sincerest of natural phenomena--a California sky.
The recurring stretches of brown and baked fields, the gaping fissures
in the dusty trail, the hard outline of the distant hills, and the
herds of slowly moving cattle, seemed like features of some glittering
stereoscopic picture that never changed. Active exercise might have
removed this feeling, but my horse by some subtle instinct had long
since given up all ambitious effort, and had lapsed into a dogged trot.

It was autumn, but not the season suggested to the Atlantic reader under
that title. The sharply defined boundaries of the wet and dry seasons
were prefigured in the clear outlines of the distant hills. In the dry
atmosphere the decay of vegetation was too rapid for the slow hectic
which overtakes an Eastern landscape, or else Nature was too practical
for such thin disguises. She merely turned the Hippocratic face to the
spectator, with the old diagnosis of Death in her sharp, contracted
features.