boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of the hotel enclosure are
the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a
child seriously while I was there. At the other end, the tenant of
a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.
It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it
was sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both
sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully
green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian
year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set
in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across
Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the
breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something
satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us
to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or
whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose
the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo
on the east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter
streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore
dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint
Helena. She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.