regular gradation from point to point all the way from Puget Sound to
the Mexican boundary. At Neah Bay it is 111 inches, and it steadily
lessens down to Santa Cruz, 25.24; Monterey, 11.42; Point Conception,
12.21; San Diego, 11.01. There is fog on the coast in every month, but
this diminishes, like the rainfall, from north to south. I have
encountered it in both February and June. In the south it is apt to be
most persistent in April and May, when for three or four days together
there will be a fine mist, which any one but a Scotchman would call
rain. Usually, however, the fog-bank will roll in during the night, and
disappear by ten o'clock in the morning. There is no wet season properly
so called, and consequently few days in the winter months when it is not
agreeable to be out-of-doors, perhaps no day when one may not walk or
drive during some part of it. Yet as to precipitation or temperature it
is impossible to strike any general average for Southern California. In
1883-84 San Diego had 25.77 inches of rain, and Los Angeles (fifteen
miles inland) had 38.22. The annual average at Los Angeles is 17.64; but
in 1876-77 the total at San Diego was only 3.75, and at Los Angeles only
5.28. Yet elevation and distance from the coast do not always determine
the rainfall. The yearly mean rainfall at Julian, in the San Jacinto
range, at an elevation of 4500 feet, is 37.74; observations at
Riverside, 1050 feet above the sea, give an average of 9.37.

It is probably impossible to give an Eastern man a just idea of the
winter of Southern California. Accustomed to extremes, he may expect too
much. He wants a violent change. If he quits the snow, the slush, the
leaden skies, the alternate sleet and cold rain of New England, he would
like the tropical heat, the languor, the color of Martinique. He will
not find them here. He comes instead into a strictly temperate region;
and even when he arrives, his eyes deceive him. He sees the orange
ripening in its dark foliage, the long lines of the eucalyptus, the
feathery pepper-tree, the magnolia, the English walnut, the black
live-oak, the fan-palm, in all the vigor of June; everywhere beds of
flowers of every hue and of every country blazing in the bright
sunlight--the heliotrope, the geranium, the rare hot-house roses
overrunning the hedges of cypress, and the scarlet passion-vine climbing
to the roof-tree of the cottages; in the vineyard or the orchard the
horticulturist is following the