Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (4)

San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms which were planted by the _padres_ in the valley that nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied, and the most interesting.

I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack his things. In a country where both population and property values have increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and harmonious design.

The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles. And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance. Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised _entrepôt_, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.

“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble which will shortly burst?”

“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing several millions.”

So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for people of modest means.

* * * * *

Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam, I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road stretched away ... away ... away.

I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found. About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress? Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish _caballeros_ and Mexican _vaqueros_ and American pioneers, by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England. It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness. He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West, had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.

I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the English highways or the _routes nationales_ of France, and mountains as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in 1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his tires all the way.

It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _Ramona_; dips down into Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns; climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having “done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you please—_and stopping_.

Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.

Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling their beads and muttering their prayers.

Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only indifferently smooth, is the _asistencia_ or mission chapel of San Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside, it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its picturesque _campanario_, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping in for evening prayer.

_From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._

NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.

“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and charm.”]

But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality which was a characteristic of the Spanish _padres_ in the days when the travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and shelter.

V

WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES

“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?
Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”

V

WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES

It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned in his saddle.

“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”

“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside.

“The grapes, _mon général_,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”

* * * * *

It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.

“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.

“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and, standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.

“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”

* * * * *

What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community _per caput_—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any “show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and, incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite of themselves.

I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!

Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just what I mean.

From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from “Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a fruit-store window.

* * * * *

Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called, is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed, and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord, Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his “God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.

The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.”]

It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly from an arid plain.

I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time, however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart, we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”

There is one word that you should never, _never_ mention in the orange belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes, thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside turns out _en masse_ as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they _are_ infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange belt.

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water. The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.

Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal, technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country. No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or his acreage.

Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges.

“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton stockings, either.”

I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for yourself.

* * * * *

Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is, to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the same _cielo sereno_ that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from _La Puebla de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles_, to give the second city of California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the following:

“My Lady would remind you, please,
Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’
Nor Angy anything whatever.
She trusts her friend will be so clever
To share her fit historic pride,
The _g_ should not be jellified;
Long _o_, _g_ hard and rhyme with ‘yes’
And all about Los Angeles.”

It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street.

Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three “sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horticultural _pousse-café_ to be wholly satisfying. Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges and the _jets d’eau_ suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.

The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you speculate as to what would happen if the cable _should_ break. When two thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums) and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely equalled.