at can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower
places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those
roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great
perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies
from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the
wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a
thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this
resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with
rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with
thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the
rocks we will try to relate.

[Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of
that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of
roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative
processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not
seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one
hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point,
feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at
some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm
weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of
spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the
nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have
fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it
away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and
figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra,
Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds
the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the
ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific,
that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.
Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was
moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the
sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a
power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length
of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other p