it. The Netherlands are dismissed with one adjective--flat. For a
country to be flat is, in the opinion of the Californiac, to relinquish
its final claim to beauty. A Californiac once made the statement to me
that Californians considered themselves a little better than the rest
of the country. I considered that the prize Californiacism until I heard
the following from a woman-Californiac in Europe: "I saw nothing in
all Italy," she said, "to compare with the Italian quarter of San
Francisco."

Now I am by no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England scene
and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in which
we played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of temperamental
shyness. They are still like the English from whom they are descended.
It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which they feel
most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his native place
with no more ease than he would discuss his father and mother. In
California I often had the impulse to break through that inhibiting
silence--to talk about Massachusetts; the lovely, tender, tamed,
domesticated country; its rolling, softly-contoured, maternal-looking
hills; its forests like great green cathedral chapels; its broad,
placid rivers, its little turbulent ones; its springs and runnels and
waterfalls and rivulets all silver-shining and silver-sounding; the
myriads of lakes and countless ponds that make the world look as though
the blue sky had broken and fallen in pieces over the landscape; the
spring when first the arbutus comes up pink and delicate through the
snow and later the fields begin to glimmer with the white of white
violets, to flash with the purple of purple ones, and the children
hang May baskets at your door; the summer when the fields are buried
knee-deep under a white drift of daisies or sealed by the gold planes of
buttercups, and the old lichened stone walls are smothered in blackberry
vines; the autumn with the goldenrod and blue asters; the woods like
conflagrations burning gold and orange, flaming crimson and scarlet;
and especially that fifth season, the Indian summer, when the vistas are
tunnels of blue haze and the air tastes of honey and wine; then winter
and the first snow (does anybody, brought up in snow country, ever
outgrow the thrill of the first fluttering flakes?) the marvel of the
fairy frost world into which the whole country turns.

Do you suppose I ever talked abo