At this place a hill encroaches upon the road at the right, covered thickly with underbrush and blackberry vines, its crest surmounted with a stately grove of eucalyptus trees, while on the left there is an almost perpendicular drop to the valley below.  So narrow is the road that teams can hardly pass each other.  Why it should crowd itself into such narrow quarters when there is room to spare is its own secret.

Stretching its dusty length along, it soon broadens out as if glad to escape from its cramped quarters, and glides under the wide spreading branches of a California buckeye, which stands kneedeep in the beautiful clarkia, with its rose-pink petals, and wand-like stalks of the narrow-leaved milkweed, with silken pods bursting with fairy sails ready to start out on unknown travels.

[Illustration:  The old road]

Leaving the shade, it climbs the hill for a broader view of the surrounding landscape, and looks down on the bay on one side, and the rolling hills and valleys on the other.  Yellow buttercups nod to it from the meadow, and the lavender snap dragons wave their threadlike fingers in silent greeting.  Tall, stately teasels stand like sentinels along the way, and the balsamic tarweed spreads its fragrance along the outer edge.

Threading its way down a steep hill; through a wealth of tangled grasses; past a grove of live oaks, from whose twisted and contorted limbs the gray moss hangs in long festoons, by Indian paintbrush and scarlet bugler gleaming like sparks of fire amid the green and bronze foliage, it glides at last into a somber canon.  There a bridge spans the brook that gurgles its elfin song to cheer the dusty traveler on its way.

The laurel, madrone, and manzanitas keep it company for some distance on either side, and a catbird mews and purrs from a clump of willows on the margin of the stream.  A dozen or more yellow-winged butterflies gathered at a moist spot, scatter like autumn leaves before a gust of wind at my approach, dancing away on fairy wings like golden sunbeams.

[Illustration:  It climbs the hill for A broader view]

At a place where the road makes a bend to the right, and the cat-tails and rushes grow in profusion, a blue heron, that spirit of the marsh, stands grotesque and sedate, and gazes with melancholy air into the water.  Bullfrogs pipe, running the whole gamut of tones from treble to bass, hidden away amid the water grasses.  Darning needles dodge in and out among the rushes in erratic flight, and a blackbird teeters up and down on a tulle stem while repeating over and over his pleasant “O-ko-lee.”

But the road does not stop to look or listen, and once more it climbs the hill where the golden poppy basks in the sunshine, and the dandelions spread their yellow carpet for it to pass over, or, nodding silken heads scatter their tiny fleet of a hundred fairy balloons upon the wings of the summer winds.