varieties.

In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms;
for there are no farms--only ranches. The particular ranch to which you
have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough
beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch,
where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight
hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model
of its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They build
ranches.

Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an
arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile
road, which--when it is completed--will extend without a break from the
Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best
thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the
Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their
public-utility plans in the West.

Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with
seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin to
skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental
landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge
from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of
incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that
inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of
you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San
Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more
writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires--cries of
Question! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation--more good fiction
and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.

You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a
hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf
on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of
architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate
another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the
Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the
friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and
the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful
harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San
Francisco has an even mor