and dear to every Spanish-American epicure, known as tamals. "Tamal-pais" may possibly mean simply "tamal country," or as we would say, "the country of tamals" from somebody having in early days produced tamals there. Tamales—or Tomales—Bay, lying in the rear of Mount Tamalpais, on the ocean side, helps to give a color of probability to this proposed solution of the question. However that may be, the mountain has been known as Tamalpais since the time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, and it may be after all merely an Indian name signifying nothing at all, like Alabama, Ohio, and Iowa. Quien sabe?
The mountain looks well from any point of view, in summer or in winter; but its outlines seem boldest, and the dim blue haze, which envelops it always, the softest and most beautiful I think, when looked upon from the Bay of San Francisco, or the heights of Telegraph or Russian Hill. It stands in Marin County, or rather it is Marin County; for take away Tamalpais, and what is left of Marin County would hardly fill a wheelbarrow.
We three—Dr. Murphy, the eminent physician of San Francisco, Lloyd, the rising young criminal lawyer, and myself—had looked with longing eyes in that direction, even as Moses looked toward the Promised Land, for months and years, and at last the longing to go over there and explore the mysterious fastnesses of the mountain became too great for further repression. We knew that quail, deer, hare, and rabbits abounded there, that deer were often killed there, that California lions had been seen there,
