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Sisson put his money on kindly fortune, I believe," said Arthur, who rosy and fresh with wine, looked as if he would make a marvelous bonne bouchee for a finely-discriminating cannibal. "Ah, yes, indeed! A much more ingratiating lady to lift our glasses to. Mr. Sisson's kindly fortune. Fortuna gentil-issima! Well, Mr. Sisson, and may your Lady Fortune ever smile on you."
As for chickens and eggs, it "snewe in Sisson's house" of that sort of "mete and drinke," he was Chaucer's Franklin transported to Shasta. Cream flowed in upon us like a river; potatoes were stewed in it; it was the base of chicken-sauce; the sirupy baked pears, whose secret Mrs.
With a certain sense of triumph over that unpleasant and dissuasive child, we saw a lantern gleam from a corral about ten P. M., and had our interrogative hail of "Sisson's?" answered in welcome affirmative by Sisson himself. At Sisson's, or exploring with him in the neighborhood of Shasta, we passed one of the most delightful weeks in our diary of travel through any land.
Our capital host and hostess became our personal friends; and all that they did for us was so heartily kind and so cheerily comfortable, that, if we were asked where, on the whole, we passed the pleasantest, as distinct from the grandest, week in California, I think we should answer, "At Sisson's, in Strawberry Valley." Sisson was, without exception, the best rifle-shot I ever saw.
No man who has not built up his system during a long expedition with brick after brick of pork fried hard in its own ooze, who has not turned all his brain's active phosphorus into phosphate of soda by alkali-biscuits drawn from the oven in the hot-dough stage, who has not drunk his pease-coffee without milk at the tables of repeated Pike settlers too shiftless to milk one of their fifty kine, who has not slept myriads in a bed with Cimex lectularius and his livelier congener of the saltatory habits, can imagine what a blissful bay in the iron-bound coast of bad-living Sisson's seemed to us both in fruition and retrospection.
In the mean time tourists are dropped at Sisson's, about twelve miles from the summit, whence as headquarters they radiate in every direction to the so-called "points of interest"; sauntering about the flowery fringes of the Strawberry Meadows, bathing in the balm of the woods, scrambling, fishing, hunting; riding about Castle Lake, the McCloud River, Soda Springs, Big Spring, deer pastures, and elsewhere.
Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson's, and is one of the principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it takes its name. It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage plain of Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high.
After a day's rest at Sisson's, we bade the capital fellow and his excellent wife a good-bye which had more regret in it than we ever felt before for comrades of a single week's standing, and resumed our northward journey, Bierstadt's color-box the fuller by a score of Shasta studies taken under every possible variety of position, sky, and time of day.
Nevertheless, before noon of the second of November I was in the frosty azure of the utmost summit. When I arrived at Sisson's everything was quiet. The last of the summer visitors had flitted long before, and the deer and bears also were beginning to seek their winter homes.
It also occurs in a bog near Sothern's Station on the stage road, where I first saw it, and in other similar bogs throughout the mountains hereabouts. The "Big Spring" of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above Sisson's, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting.
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