ing-room--literally "a linked suiteness long
drawn out." It is one eighth of a mile from my bedroom to my seat in the
dining-room, so that lazy people are obliged to take daily
constitutionals whether they want to or not, sighing midway for trolley
accommodations. The dining-room may safely be called roomy, as it seats
a thousand guests, and your dearest friends could not be recognized at
the extreme end. Yet there is no dreary stretch or caravansary effect,
and to-day every seat is filled, and a dozen tourists waiting at the
door.

Every recreation of city or country is found in this little world:
thirty billiard-tables, pool, bowling, tennis, polo, bathing (where
bucking barrel-horses and toboggan slides, fat men who produce tidal
waves, and tiny boys who do the heroic as sliders and divers, make fun
for the spectators), hunting, fishing, yachting, rowing, riding to
hounds, rabbit hunts, pigeon shoot, shooting-galleries, driving,
coaching, cards, theatre, ballroom, lectures, minstrels, exhibitions of
the Mammoth and Minute from Yosemite with the stereopticon, to Pacific
sea-mosses, the ostrich farm, the museum or maze for a morning hour,
dressing or undressing for evening display, watching the collection of
human beings who throng everywhere with a critical or humorous eye,
finding as much variety as on Broadway or Tremont Street;
dancing-classes for children; a chaperon and a master of ceremonies for
grown folks; a walk or drive twelve miles long on a smooth beach at low
tide, not forgetting the "dark room" for kodak and camera f--amateurs.

You see many athletic, fine-looking men, who ride daringly and ride to
kill. Once a week the centre of the office is filled with game:
rabbits, quail, snipe, ducks, etc., everything here--but an undertaker.
And old Ocean eternally booming (the only permanent boom I know of in
Southern California).

And that is what you see and hear at the Hotel del Coronado. The summer
climate is better than the winter--never too warm for comfort, the
mercury never moving for weeks. I expected constant sunshine, a
succession of June's fairest days, which would have been monotonous, to
say nothing of the effect upon crops and orchards. The rainy season is
necessary and a blessing to the land-owners, hard as it is for "lungers"
and the nervous invalids who only feel well on fine days and complain
unreasonably.

Ten inches is the average needed just here. Rain is rainy and wet
weather is wet, b