ring from the fastnesses of
the mountains rivers of clear water taken at such elevations that the
whole arable surface can be irrigated. The development of the country
has only just begun.

[Illustration: FAN-PALM, LOS ANGELES.]

[Illustration: YUCCA-PALM, SANTA BARBARA.]

If the reader will look upon the map of California he will see that the
eight counties that form Southern California--San Luis Obispo, Santa
Barbara, Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, and San
Diego--appear very mountainous. He will also notice that the eastern
slopes of San Bernardino and San Diego are deserts. But this is an
immense area. San Diego County alone is as large as Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, and the amount of arable land in
the valleys, on the foot-hills, on the rolling mesas, is enormous, and
capable of sustaining a dense population, for its fertility and its
yield to the acre under cultivation are incomparable. The reader will
also notice another thing. With the railroads now built and certain to
be built through all this diversified region, round from the Santa
Barbara Mountains to the San Bernardino, the San Jacinto, and down to
Cuyamaca, a ride of an hour or two hours brings one to some point on the
250 miles of sea-coast--a sea-coast genial, inviting in winter and
summer, never harsh, and rarely tempestuous like the Atlantic shore.

Here is our Mediterranean! Here is our Italy! It is a Mediterranean
without marshes and without malaria, and it does not at all resemble the
Mexican Gulf, which we have sometimes tried to fancy was like the
classic sea that laves Africa and Europe. Nor is this region Italian in
appearance, though now and then some bay with its purple hills running
to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and canons blooming in
semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some
golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some
refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some
ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue in the sky, will remind the
traveller of more than one place of beauty in Southern Italy and Sicily.
It is a Mediterranean with a more equable climate, warmer winters and
cooler summers, than the North Mediterranean shore can offer; it is an
Italy whose mountains and valleys give almost every variety of elevation
and temperature.

But it is our commercial Mediterranean. The time is not distant when
this cor