The spot is every
way beautiful, but its chief charm is its isolation. Though within a
few hours' ride of San Francisco, and only two miles from a
railroad-station, you feel as if you were in the very heart of nature
--and so you are. Winding along the banks of a sparkling stream, the
mountains--great masses of leafy green--rise abruptly on either hand;
the road bends this way and that until a sudden turn brings you to a
little valley hemmed in all around by the giant hills. A bold, rocky
projection just above the main hotel gives a touch of ruggedness and
grandeur to the scene. How delicious the feeling of rest that comes over
you at once!--the world shut out, the hills around, and the sky above.
It was in 1863, when the civil war was at its white heat. Circumstances
had given me undesired notoriety in that connection. I had been thrust
into the very vortex of its passion, and my name made the rallying-cry
of opposing elements in California. The guns of Manassas, Cedar
Mountain, and the Chickahominy, were echoed in the foothills of the
Sierras, and in the peaceful valleys of the far-away Pacific Coast. The
good sense of a practical, people prevented any flagrant outbreak on a
large scale, but here and there a too ardent Southerner said or did
something that gave him a few weeks' or months' duress at Fort Alcatraz,
and the honors of a bloodless martyrdom.
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