on the Berkeley hills in summer. But I find only one direct allusion to
the beauty of the fog itself: -

[1]"There lies a little city in the hills;
White are its roofs, dim is each dwelling's door,
And peace with perfect rest its bosom fills.

"There the pure mist, the pity of the sea,
Comes as a white, soft hand, and reaches o'er
And touches its still face most tenderly."

In 1887 I had not read "The Silverado Squatters." Part of it had been
published in Scribner's Magazine. It was only in the following year that
I got hold of the book and found an almost adequate expression of my own
feeling about the sea fogs. Stevenson did not know all their beauty, for
he was not here long enough, but he could tell what be saw. In other
words, he had a gift which is denied to most of us.

Silverado is now a quite impossible place for squatting. When I first
tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak and rattlesnakes
that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know
at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that
the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal
as John Muir has since assured us that be is. The last time that I
passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid of a gang of
wood-choppers.

Curiously, the last great fog effect that I have seen was almost the
same which Stevenson has described. Last summer we had been staying for
a month with our friends who have a summer home about three miles beyond