ss and ran out into that most
alluring garden, she must have felt much as I did long ago when I
stepped off the Santa Fe Limited and found myself in Southern California
for the first time! It isn't just the palm trees and the sunshine,
though they are part of the charm. It isn't even the mocking-birds and
the orange blossoms altogether. It is something you can't really put
your finger on, that lures you from your old habits and associations. At
first you are simply glad that you have left the cold and snow behind
you, and that the earth is so sweet with flowers, and then you begin to
find a new world of possibilities. There are all sorts of little garden
gates with golden keys on glass tables, and you set about growing
shorter or taller, as the case may be, to make yourself a proper height
to reach the key and slip through the door. You don't even need to
hurry, if you are firm about not grasping the hand of any Red Queen that
may come your way, and yet it isn't a land of manana; it's a land of
"Why Not?" The magic has nothing to do with one's age; I feel it now
even more than I did twenty years ago, and Grandmother felt it at eighty
just as I did at eighteen. Ulysses could have himself lashed to the mast
and snap his fingers at the Sirens, but I know of no protection against
the Southwest except to somehow close the shutters of your imagination.
However, let me not be a Calvinist; because it is enchanting, why should
I fear it?

I shall never forget my first experience of the spell. I was invited by
my Grandmother to go to California for several months. There were four
of us, and we were all tired, for one reason or another; Grandmother
because she was eighty, and it's a strenuous matter to live eighty
years; my Aunt because she had been desperately ill; C. C. because she
had nursed my Aunt back to comparative health, and I because I had been
a debutante that winter, and every one knows that that is the hardest
work of all. We went as far south as the train would take us, and
settled ourselves at Coronado to bask in the sunshine until the
tiredness was gone and we became a band of explorers, with the world
before us! A pair of buggies drawn by nags of unblemished reputation for
sagacity and decorum, driven by C. C. and me, carried us over many a
picturesque and rough road. It invariably took us all day to get
anywhere and back, irrespective of what the distance was supposed to be.
The outfit was so old that I often had