ve been needful
to make man the conqueror. One finds a fascination in contrasting
these two children of old Mother Earth, and thinks of Heine's lines:

"A pine tree standeth lonely
On a northern mountain's height;
It sleeps, while around it is folded
A mantle of snowy white.

"It is dreaming of a palm tree
In a far-off Orient land,
Which lonely and silent waiteth
In the desert's burning sand."

[Illustration: HERMIT VALLEY NEAR SAN DIEGO.]

On my last day at San Diego, I walked in the morning sunshine on
Coronado Beach. The beauty of the sea and shore was almost
indescribable: on one side rose Point Loma, grim and gloomy as a
fortress wall; before me stretched away to the horizon the ocean
with its miles of breakers curling into foam; between the surf and
the city, wrapped in its dark blue mantle, lay the sleeping bay;
eastward, the mingled yellow, red, and white of San Diego's buildings
glistened in the sunlight like a bed of coleus; beyond the city
heaved the rolling plains, rich in their garb of golden brown, from
which rose distant mountains, tier on tier, wearing the purple veil
which Nature here loves oftenest to weave for them; while, in the
foreground, like a jewel in a brilliant setting, stood the Coronado.

[Illustration: THE PACIFIC.]

The fascination of Southern California had at last completely
captured me. Its combination of ocean, desert, and mountain, its
pageantry of color, and its composite life of city, ranch, and beach
had cast over me a magic spell. It was, however, a lonely sea that
spread its net of foam before my feet. During my stay I had not seen
a single steamer on its surface, and only rarely had a few swift
sea-birds, fashioned by man's hand, dotted the azure for a little
with their white wings, ere they dipped below the horizon's rim.
Hence, though the old, exhilarating, briny odor was the same, I felt
that, as an ocean, this was unfamiliar. The Atlantic's waves are
haunted by historic memories, but few reminders of antiquity rise
ghostlike from the dreary waste of the Pacific. Few battles have been
fought, few conquests made upon these shores. On the Atlantic coast
one feels that he is looking off toward civilized and friendly lands,
across a sea which ocean greyhounds have made narrow; but here three
purple islands, floating on the limitless expanse, suggest mysterious
archipelagoes scattered starlike on its area, thousands of miles
away, before a contin