t of all and most striking in its contrasts, you will see a hill
all green, with a nap on it like a family album; and right on the top of
it an old, crumbly gray mission, its cross gleaming against the skyline;
and, down below, a modern town, with red roofs and hipped windows, its
houses buried to their eaves in palms and giant rose bushes, and huge
climbing geraniums, and all manner of green tropical growths that are
Nature's own Christmas trees, with the red-and-yellow dingle-dangles
growing upon them. Or perhaps it is a gorge choked with the enormous
redwoods, each individual tree with a trunk like the Washington
Monument. And, if you are only as lucky as we were, up overhead, across
the blue sky, will be drifting a hundred fleecy clouds, one behind the
other, like woolly white sheep grazing upon the meadows of the
firmament.

Everywhere the colors are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a
theatrical, touch. It's a regular backdrop of a country; its scenery
looks as though it belonged on a stage--as though it should be painted
on a curtain. You almost expect to see a chorus of comic-opera brigands
or a bevy of stage milkmaids come trooping out of the wings any minute.
Who was the libelous wretch who said that the flowers of California had
no perfume and the birds there had no song? Where we passed through
tangled woods the odors distilled from the wild flowers by the sun's
warmth were often almost suffocating in their sweetness; and in a
yellow-tufted bush on the lawn at Coronado I came upon a mocking-bird
singing in a way to make his brother minstrel of Mobile or Savannah feel
like applying for admission to a school of expression and learning the
singing business all over again.

[Illustration: OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK SOMEWHERE WILL CRAWL A REAL ESTATE
AGENT]

At the end of the valley--top end or bottom end as the case may be--you
come to a chain of lesser mountains, dropped down across your path like
a trailing wing of the Indians' fabled thunder-bird, vainly trying to
shut you out from the next valley. You climb the divide and run through
the pass, with a brawling river upon one side and tall cliffs upon the
other; and then all of a sudden the hills magically part and you are
within sight--almost within touch--of the ocean; for in this favored
land the mountains come right down to the sea and the sea comes right up
to the mountains. It may be upon a tiny bay that you have emerged, with
the meadows sloping straigh