no to Mariposa, from Tahoe to the Farallones,
lake, crag, or chasm, forest, mountain, valley, or island, river, bay,
or jutting headland, every one bears the stamp of its own peculiar
beauty, a singular blending of richness, wildness and warmth. Coastwise
everywhere sea and mountains meet, and the surf of the cold Japanese
current breaks in turbulent beauty against tall "rincones" and jagged
reefs of rock. Slumbering amid the hills of the Coast Range,

"A misty camp of mountains pitched tumultuously",

lie golden valleys dotted with wide-limbed oaks, or smothered under
over-weighted fruit trees. Here, too, crumble to ruins the old
Franciscan missions, each in its own fair valley, passing monuments of
California's first page of written history.

Inland rises the great Sierra, with spreading ridge and foothill, like
some huge, sprawling centipede, its granite back unbroken for a thousand
miles. Frost-torn peaks, of every height and bearing, pierce the blue
wastes above. Their slopes are dark with forests of sugar pines and
giant sequoias, the mightiest of trees, in whose silent aisles one may
wander all day long and see no sign of man. Dropped here and there rest
turquoise lakes which mark the craters of dead volcanoes, or which swell
the polished basins where vanished glaciers did their last work. Through
mountain meadows run swift brooks, over-peopled with trout, while from
the crags leap full-throated streams, to be half blown away in mist
before they touch the valley floor. Far down the fragrant canyons sing
the green and troubled rivers, twisting their way lower and lower to the
common plains, each larger stream calling to all his brooks to follow
him as down they go headforemost to the sea. Even the hopeless stretches
of alkali and sand, sinks of lost streams, in the southeastern counties,
are redeemed by the delectable mountains that on all sides shut them in.
Everywhere the landscape swims in crystalline ether, while over all
broods the warm California sun. Here, if anywhere, life is worth living,
full and rich and free.

As there is from end to end of California scarcely one commonplace mile,
so from one end of the year to the other there is hardly a tedious day.
Two seasons only has California, but two are enough if each in its way
be perfect. Some have called the climate "monotonous," but so, equally,
is good health. In terms of Eastern, experience, the seasons may be
defined as "late in the spring and ear