It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned in his saddle.

“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”

“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside.

“The grapes, mon général,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”

It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.

“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.

“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and, standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.

“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”

What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community per caput—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any “show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and, incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite of themselves.

I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!

Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just what I mean.

From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from “Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a fruit-store window.

Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called, is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed, and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord, Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his “God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.

It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly from an arid plain.

I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time, however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart, we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”

There is one word that you should never, never mention in the orange belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes, thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside turns out en masse as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they are infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange belt.

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water. The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.

Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal, technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country. No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or his acreage.

Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges.

“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton stockings, either.”

I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for yourself.

Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is, to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the same cielo sereno that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from La Puebla de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles, to give the second city of California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the following:

It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street.

Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three “sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horticultural pousse-café to be wholly satisfying. Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges and the jets d’eau suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.

The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you speculate as to what would happen if the cable should break. When two thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums) and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely equalled.

Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa Monica, Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling, happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals, and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind that I know.

Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast. When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast.

“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”

Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of Nova Scotia.

Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, it takes the Cabrillo, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage, which is as notorious for producing mal de mer as that across the Straits of Dover.

The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.

Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the tail, being connected with the main body of the island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more, V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet, sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert, cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side, dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves, with characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions. Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary diversity of amusements, Avalon’s raison d’être is angling with rod and reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.

If you will glance to starboard as the Cabrillo steams slowly into Avalon Harbour, you will notice a modest, brown frame building, with a railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water. This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold, silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail, and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P. Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo, a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and Zanzibar, and I give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.

Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long, whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.

Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn by the waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France. The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses, of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New. There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick the grapes in September and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches, and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.

Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport. These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man without the slightest hesitation.

Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique. Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from the trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate of perpetual spring?