ons. There are at most but three.
Spring may be said to begin with December and end in April; summer, with
May (whose days, however, are often cooler than those of January), and
end with September; while October and November are a mild autumn, when
nature takes a partial rest, and the leaves of the deciduous trees are
gone. But how shall we classify a climate in which the strawberry (none
yet in my experience equal to the Eastern berry) may be eaten in every
month of the year, and ripe figs may be picked from July to March? What
shall I say of a frost (an affair of only an hour just before sunrise)
which is hardly anywhere severe enough to disturb the delicate
heliotrope, and even in the deepest valleys where it may chill the
orange, will respect the bloom of that fruit on contiguous ground fifty
or a hundred feet higher? We boast about many things in the United
States, about our blizzards and our cyclones, our inundations and our
areas of low pressure, our hottest and our coldest places in the world,
but what can we say for this little corner which is practically
frostless, and yet never had a sunstroke, knows nothing of
thunder-storms and lightning, never experienced a cyclone, which is so
warm that the year round one is tempted to live out-of-doors, and so
cold that woollen garments are never uncomfortable? Nature here, in this
protected and petted area, has the knack of being genial without being
enervating, of being stimulating without "bracing" a person into the
tomb. I think it conducive to equanimity of spirit and to longevity to
sit in an orange grove and eat the fruit and inhale the fragrance of it
while gazing upon a snow-mountain.

[Illustration: SCENE IN SAN BERNARDINO.]

This southward-facing portion of California is irrigated by many streams
of pure water rapidly falling from the mountains to the sea. The more
important are the Santa Clara, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel, the
Santa Ana, the Santa Margarita, the San Luis Rey, the San Bernardo, the
San Diego, and, on the Mexican border, the Tia Juana. Many of them go
dry or flow underground in the summer months (or, as the Californians
say, the bed of the river gets on top), but most of them can be used for
artificial irrigation. In the lowlands water is sufficiently near the
surface to moisten the soil, which is broken and cultivated; in most
regions good wells are reached at a small depth, in others
artesian-wells spout up abundance of water, and consid