for a little church far away, at five
hundred dollars per annum.

I saw at Riverside large crops of oranges frozen upon the trees;
but the real estate sharks never allow these facts to be published,
because they fatten on the profits made by selling lands to the
gullible "tender feet" from the east, who, when they have bought these
farms at enormous prices, find to their utter discouragement, that
they must also buy water for irrigation from monopolists, at ruinous
rates, else the soil is worthless. Here as nowhere else is illustrated
the truth of the Scriptural adage: "To him that hath shall be given,
but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he
hath."

When you go to a place scarcely thirty miles distant, which, in New
England, you would reach in an hour, you are obliged to travel all
night, as you must climb cloud-touching mountains, going many miles to
cover what would be only one mile in a straight line; now you glide
along close to the long, lazy waves of the great Pacific Ocean, where
the grass kisses the salt lips of the sea; now from the tops of the
Santa Cruz mountains, you survey the world at your feet; now you rush
through the red-wood primeval forests, giants touching the clouds with
their tops, while in the hollow trunk of one of these trees a family
of twelve can live quite comfortably; then on to Los Angeles,--"City
of the angels," they call it--a beautiful city for those possessed of
means or who are dispossessed of bodies which must be clothed and fed.

[Illustration: The Dome of Mount Shasta Gleams like "the Great White
Throne."]

Some have "struck oil" here, and the stench and grime from the
spouting wells have ruined the houses of hundreds who have reaped no
profit from the petroleum, because they did not own the adjoining lots
where it was found; then on we go to lovely Passadena on a table-land
surrounded by snow-capped mountains; but the winds from the cold
summits come suddenly when you are melting with the heat, bringing
plenty of catarrh for all; then on to San Diego on the hill by the
sea, where the fog is sometimes so thick you can cut it into blocks
with an axe; then on to the far-famed Coronado Hotel, close by the
sea.

In the boom-time, this was claimed to be the veritable "Garden of
Eden," and soil was considered worth its weight in gold, but now my
guide offered me six house lots which cost him three thousand dollars,
for two hundred dollars; the bubble had