Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as you please.

Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either. Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land.... The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (selling, mind you, not merely being offered) for just a thousand times that sum.

Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.

Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every building has its portales, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for, though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an open furnace door.

When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful lights of many bungalows.

“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”

And I agreed with him that it was.

From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks, bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches, and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself with interest.

To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world, is Coronado.

Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during the polo season tout le monde goes pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.

There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions, rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere” and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers, explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible. They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.

San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms which were planted by the padres in the valley that nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied, and the most interesting.

I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack his things. In a country where both population and property values have increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and harmonious design.

The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles. And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance. Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised entrepôt, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.

“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble which will shortly burst?”

“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing several millions.”

So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for people of modest means.

Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam, I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road stretched away ... away ... away.

I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found. About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress? Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish caballeros and Mexican vaqueros and American pioneers, by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England. It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness. He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West, had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.

I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the English highways or the routes nationales of France, and mountains as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in 1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his tires all the way.

It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house famous as the home of Ramona; dips down into Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns; climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having “done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you please—and stopping.

Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.

Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling their beads and muttering their prayers.

Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only indifferently smooth, is the asistencia or mission chapel of San Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside, it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its picturesque campanario, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping in for evening prayer.

But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality which was a characteristic of the Spanish padres in the days when the travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and shelter.