The interior valleys are warm, and during the summer quite hot, and yet the dry heat does not exhaust or distress one, and cool nights refresh you.

In the valleys and on much-traveled roads there is a good deal of dust, but it is, as they say, "clean dirt," and there is water enough in the country to wash it off.

You need not ride on horseback unless you penetrate into Humboldt County, which has as yet but few miles of wagon-road.

In Mendocino, Lake, and Marin, the roads are excellent, and either a public stage, or, what is pleasanter and but little dearer, a private team, with a driver familiar with the country, is always obtainable.

In such a journey one element of pleasure is its somewhat hap-hazard nature.