You do not travel over beaten ground, and on routes laid out for you; you do not know beforehand what you are to see, nor even how you are to see it; you may sleep in a house to-day, in the woods to-morrow, and in a sail-boat the day after; you dine one day in a logging camp, and another in a farm-house.

With the barometer at "set fair," and in a country where every body is civil and obliging, and where all you see is novel to an Eastern person, the sense of adventure adds a keen zest to a journey which is in itself not only amusing and healthful, but instructive.
[Illustration: WOOD-CHOPPER AT WORK.] Marin County, which lies across the bay from San Francisco, and of which the pretty village of San Rafael is the county town, contains the most productive dairy-farms in the State.

When one has long read of California as a dry State, he wonders to find that it produces butter at all; and still more to discover that the dairy business is extensive and profitable enough--with butter at thirty-five cents a pound at the dairy--to warrant the employment of several millions of capital, and to enable the dairy-men to send their product to New York and Boston for sale.
For the coast journey the best route, because it shows you much fine scenery on your way, is by way of Soucelito, which is reached by a ferry from San Francisco.

From Soucelito either a stage or a private conveyance carries you to Olema, whence you should visit Point Reyes, one of the most rugged capes on the coast, where a light-house and fog-signal are placed to warn and guide mariners.

It is a wild spot, often enveloped in fogs, and where it blows at least half a gale of wind three hundred days in the year.
Returning from Point Reyes to Olema, your road bears you past Tomales Bay, and back to the coast of Mendocino County; and by the time you reach the mouth of Russian River you are in the saw-mill country.