hem a beautiful play of light and
shadow. Very early one morning I saw a great gray eagle fly overhead,
back to his home in their dark recesses. Some of the slopes are covered
with grape-vines, and some with olive-trees. Far up in the hollows can
be seen the little white houses of the people who keep the bee-ranches.
They live up so high because the flowers last longer there. The
mountains form a semicircle on one side of the town; on the other is the
beach. An immense bed of kelp, extending for miles and miles along the
shore, forms the most beautiful figures, rising and falling as it floats
on the water,--so gigantic, and at the same time so graceful. It is of
every beautiful shade of pale yellow and brown. In winter the gales
sometimes drive it shoreward in such vast quantities that vessels are
compelled to anchor outside of it.

There is an old mission there, built in the Moorish style, where all
visitors are hospitably received by the Franciscan friars in charge.
This mission, like all those we have seen, has a choice situation,
sheltered from wind, and with good soil about it. The old monks knew how
to make themselves comfortable. Their cattle roamed over boundless
pastures, herded by mounted _vaqueros_; their grain-fields ripened under
cloudless skies; their olive-orchards, carefully watered and tended by
their Indian subjects, yielded rich returns.

We made the acquaintance of a gentleman from Morocco, who says that the
climate there is almost the same as that of Santa Barbara. I suppose the
simoom we had there in the summer was a specimen of it. A fierce, hot
wind blew from the Mojave desert. There was no possibility of comfort in
the house, nor out of it. We could escape the storm of wind and dust by
going in, but there was still the choking feeling of the air. The
residents of the place could say nothing in defence of it,--only that
did not occur often.

We are told that on the 17th of June, 1859, there was much more of a
genuine simoom. So hot a blast of air swept over the town as to fill the
people with terror. This burning wind raised dense clouds of fine dust.
Birds dropped dead from the trees. The people shut themselves up in
their thick adobe houses. The mercury rapidly rose to 133 degrees, and
continued so for three hours. Trees were blighted, and gardens ruined.

Sailors approaching the coast in a fog can recognize the Santa Barbara
Channel by the smell of bitumen which floats on the water. Some of