It would be unjust for me not to add that, for the amount of liquor consumed, it was the soberest and the best-natured crowd I ever saw.

I would like to write "respectable" also, but it would be ridiculous to apply that term to men whose every word almost is an oath, and whose language in many cases corresponds too accurately with their clothes and persons.
From Round Valley there is a "good enough" horseback trail, as they call it, over a steep mountain into the Sacramento Valley; but a pleasanter journey, and one, besides, having more novelty, is by way of Potter Valley to Lakeport, on Clear Lake.

The road is excellent; the scenery is peculiarly Californian.

Potter Valley is one of the richest and also one of the prettiest of the minor valleys of this State, and your way to Lakeport carries you along the shores of two pleasant mountain lakelets--the Blue Lakes, which are probably ancient craters.
Two days' easy driving, stopping overnight in Potter Valley, brings you to Lakeport, the capital of Lake County, and the only town I have seen in California where dogs in the square worry strangers as they are entering the place.

As the only hotel in the town occupies one corner of this square, and as in Californian fashion the loungers usually sit in the evening on the sidewalk before the hotel, the combined attack of these dogs occurs in their view, and perhaps affords them a pleasing and beneficial excitement.