an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I
strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd
thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young
countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel,
with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely
level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a
hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some
chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is
the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since I was there the place has
been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn
runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a
weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let to
residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are
occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way
this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,
without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur
and of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the
great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.
Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur
Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad;
and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a