This thought occurred to us as we watched a passenger train slowly winding its way around the famous Cape Horn, some four miles from Colfax.  Although several miles in an air line intervened, one seemed to feel the vibrations in the air caused by the panting monster, while great jets of steam shot up above the pine trees.  I confess to a sense of elation at the spectacle.  Nature in some of her moods seems so malignant, that I felt proud of this magnificent exhibition of man’s victory over the obstacles she so well knows how to interpose.

The road between Colfax and Grass Valley — the next stopping place on our itinerary — lay through so lovely a country that we passed through it as in a dream.  Descending into the valley we were joined by several small boys, attracted, I suppose, by our — to them — unusual costume and equipment, who plied us with questions.  They asked if “we carried a message for the mayor,” and were visibly disappointed when we regretted we had overlooked that formality.  For several minutes they kept us busy trying to give truthful answers to most unexpected questions.  They had never heard of Tuolumne and wanted to know if it was in California.  Their world, in fact, was bounded by Colfax on the south and Nevada City on the north.

Grass Valley received its name from the meadow in which the town, for the most part, is situated.  The ground is so moist that, notwithstanding the heat, the grass was a vivid green.  Apple trees growing in the grass, as in the orchards of England and in the Atlantic States, and perfectly healthy, conveyed that suggestion of the Old World which lends a peculiar charm to these towns.  And Grass Valley really is a town, having seven thousand inhabitants; and is, withal, clean, picturesque and altogether delightful.  One understood why “Tuolumne” sounded meaningless to those small boys.  Thus early in life they were under influences which will probably keep them in after years — as they kept their fathers — permanent citizens of the town of Grass Valley.

Grass Valley was one of the richest of the old mining camps.  There was literally gold everywhere, even in the very roots of the grass.  The mining is now all underground and drifts from the North Star and Ophir mines underlie a part of the town.

After a methodical search, we discovered an excellent restaurant and made a note of it as a recurrent possibility.  A judicious choice of a suitable place in which to eat and eke, to pass the night, is to the tramp a matter of vital interest.  Robert Louis Stevenson, in those entertaining narratives “An Inland Voyage” and “Travels with a Donkey,” lays heartfelt stress on these particulars; when things were not to his liking, roundly denouncing them, but if agreeably surprised, lifting up his voice in song and praise.