t to tidemark, and out beyond the wild fowl
feeding by the kelp beds.

Or perhaps you have come out upon a ragged, rugged headland, crowned
belike with a single wind-twisted tree, grotesquely suggesting a frizzly
chicken; and away below, straight and sheer, are the rocks rising out of
the water like the jaws of a mangle. Down there in that ginlike reef
Neptune is forever washing out his shirt in a smother of foamy lather.
And he has spilled his bluing pot, too--else how could all the sea be so
blue? On the outermost rocks the sea-lions have stretched themselves,
looking like so many overgrown slugs; and they lie for hours and sun
themselves and bellow--or, at least, I am told they do so on occasion.
There was unfortunately no bellowing going on the day I was there.

The unearthly beauty of the whole thing overpowers you. The poet that
lives in nearly every human soul rouses within you and you feel like
withdrawing to yon dense grove or yon peaked promontory to commune with
Nature. But be advised in season. Restrain yourself! Carefully refrain!
Do not do so! Because out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a
real-estate agent to ask you how you like the climate and take a dollar
down as first payment on a fruit ranch, or a suburban lot, or a seaside
villa--or something.

Climate did it and he can prove it. Only he doesn't have to prove
it--you admit it. I had never seen the Mediterranean when I went West;
but I saw the cypresses of Del Monte, and the redwood grove in the canyon
just below Harry Leon Wilson's place, down past Carmel-by-the-Sea; and
that was sufficient. I had no burning yearning to see Naples and die, as
the poet suggested. I felt that I would rather see Monterey Bay again on
a bright March day and live!

And for all of this--for fruit, flowers and scenery, for real-estate
agents, and for a race of the most persistent boosters under the
sun--the climate is responsible. Climate advertised is responsible for
the rush of travel from the East that sets in with the coming of winter
and lasts until well into the following spring; and climate realized is
responsible for the string of tourist hotels that dot the Coast all
along from just below San Francisco to the Mexican border.

Both externally and internally the majority of these hotels are
singularly alike. Mainly they are rambling frame structures done in a
modified Spanish architecture--late Spanish crossed on Early
Peoria--with a lobby so large that,