One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I
rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
The night had been very still. The little private gale that blew
every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
entirely changed. Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as
though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen
these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.
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