But there was more than illicit pleasure in his mood. It
was as though he were going through a sort of cleansing bath. No
room here for all the sordidness, meanness, and viciousness that
filled the dirty pool of city existence. Without pondering in
detail upon the matter at all, his sensations were of
purification and uplift. Had he been asked to state how he felt,
he would merely have said that he was having a good time; for he
was unaware in his self-consciousness of the potent charm of
nature that was percolating through his city-rotted body and
brain--potent, in that he came of an abysmal past of wilderness
dwellers, while he was himself coated with but the thinnest rind
of crowded civilization.
There were no houses in the summit of Sonoma Mountain, and, all
alone under the azure California sky, he reined in on the
southern edge of the peak. He saw open pasture country,
intersected with wooded canons, descending to the south and west
from his feet, crease on crease and roll on roll, from lower
level to lower level, to the floor of Petaluma Valley, flat as a
billiard-table, a cardboard affair, all patches and squares of
geometrical regularity where the fat freeholds were farmed.
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