Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of eastern America and Europe put together.

That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average Easterner, who has heard all his life of California’s winter climate, finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain. In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on the morning of the appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof? That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go, the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey, the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right, for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered nuances of green and purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.

California may best be described as a great walled garden with one side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending, the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills, the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled, fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain, forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains, of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.

Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, unless you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins, to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado, where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates, triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint bungalows with deep, cool verandas, half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them, have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.

Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission which the Franciscan padres founded here a year after the Battle of Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain meadows carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt, for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of each summer, they habitually turn their backs.

To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped valley, ten miles long perhaps and a fifth of that in width, entirely surrounded by a wall of purple mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with lush green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled and hoary live-oaks with venerable grey beards of Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the shingled, weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its leafy lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, and its collection of country stores with the inevitable group of loungers chewing tobacco and whittling and settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and unspoiled a hamlet as you can find west of Cape Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai Valley Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have been held each spring on the pretty oak-fringed courts behind the inn, attract the crack players of the coast, and here have been developed no less than six national champions. As you ascend the mountain slopes the character of the vegetation abruptly changes, the oak groves giving way to orchards of orange, lemon, fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides of the valley an almost tropical appearance. The Ojai is said to have more varieties of birds and flowers than any place in the United States, and I think that the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a botanical garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at the back of the Ojai are two equally enchanting but much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse along a mountain trail which is precipitous in places and nowhere overwide. In the spring and summer the streams which tumble through these mountain valleys are alive with trout jumping-hungry for the fly. If you can accommodate yourself to simple accommodations and plain but wholesome fare you can eat and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at the rate of two dollars a day or ten a week.

High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija, hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will happen to it which happened to a dear little albergo in Venice which I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:

“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.

“Si, si, signor,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.

Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to locate my beloved little hotel.

“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally, pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly be erected on this site. Meals prix fixe or à la carte. Music every evening.”

And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to mention it to any one.

Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long succession of barrancas, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough to take a look at a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference, which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar, as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with picturesque hovels of adobe.

Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art, with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed, flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps, fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the liveried chauffeur for a match—Muchas gracias, Señor. On State Street stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand in front of that building and toss an orange into the patio of a long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks could be induced to sell them.

Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala, Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in the United States of the twentieth century at all. Why on earth, while they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand. This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for, however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses, gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band; here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old Spain.

To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars that they are out of it and to challenge each other to a game of golf. Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a court ball.

The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief attraction, provides the motif for the city’s architecture, and the citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces and campanarios, suggesting a Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the picture as a New England schoolmarm at a thé dansant, comes up and hits you in the eye.

Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers, spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep within the focal radius of the camera.

Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They represent the San Salvador and the Vittoria, the little caravels in which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for he put California on the map.

Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County, sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its aridity is so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.

The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal, left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight miles in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude, while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley and turns it into a cul-de-sac. Seen from the summit of the Panamint Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus, which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair. But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One, the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death Valley.

Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is insufferably oppressive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level until its percentage of moisture is less than one half of one per cent! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either. Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine. A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, atop his wagon. “He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man who saw the body.

But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy, balmy, dolce far niente land, the home of the Indian summer. Later in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50 below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however, are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles, sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken volcanic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.

The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake. Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment of objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold, sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.

From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids adios to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock, which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the Gaviota Pass (gaviota, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on the top of a back-yard fence.

From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass the trail of the padres ran when, a century ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor, which runs the length of the convento’s front, where the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.

“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.

“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the padres to shield themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at Sonoma.”

One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value, there will be no missions left to preserve.

Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside fondas in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet à la Espagnole, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the gastronomical highway.

More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish castillo used to stand, which is now surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later, Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate Natalia, on which Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the fiestas and other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and stars.

In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the green pathways which he wandered.

In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out for him from Spain. The padre-presidente preferred Carmel over the hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.

From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know, while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing, polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into a fairyland.

The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the padres; so it was quite natural that our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and where the fiestas used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?