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morning and evening since the beginning of the century have sounded the Angelus to Spaniard, Mexican, and Indian, was a statue of Barbara, the patron saint of mission and town.

It is a long time between the dates A.D. 218, and A. D. 1895, and half the world lies between the little town of Nicomedia in Asia Minor, where she was born, and the town that bears her name, but the life that she so freely gave for her religion has brought her immortality among men. The mission may crumble away, but the memory of sweet Santa Barbara will live as long as California is found on the map of the world.

Beneath the statue is the entrance to the church proper,- a quaint old interior with a long narrow nave and six side chapels. The coloring is crude and the

ornamentation in cedar on the sides and ceiling was cut by the Indian neophytes. The fourteen stations as you go down to the altar, and the wooden statue of Santa Barbara, flanked on either side by paintings of St. Ann and St. Joachim, brought from Mexico in 1798. There was one worshiper when we entered, a wrinkled old Mexican woman. Her cotton mantilla was frayed and torn, and there were so many things that she evidently. needed that I dropped a dollar into her trembling hand as she crossed herself, and asked her for what she prayed.

"That the weather may be good for La Fiesta, señor," she said in broken English.

Only pictures can describe the Flower Festival at Santa Barbara and they cannot do it justice. There are not more

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hundred other varieties. But roses are not all, for there are hedges of geraniums that reach to the second floor and fight for room with the roses, delicate passion flowers, covering arbors and running up the trunks of trees to a height of forty and fifty feet, beautiful ivy pelargoniums, covering fences densely with masses of rich foliage and flowers; sweet-scented daturas, with their long trumpet-shaped, pendent blossoms like one vast bouquet, fuchsias as large as small trees; banks of carnations and heliotrope, beds of pansies and violets, and screens of smilax.

And these are not all, for along the foothills even into the town itself are

poppy, purple-hued brodiaeas, delicate pink and white gillias, clinging to the interstices of the rocks; the nodding mahogany-colored fritillarias, mariposa lilies, wild peonies, delicate blue "babyeyes," purple and white godetias; buttercups, shooting stars," clematis, Spanish bayonets, and O, so many, many others.

We could have filled our four-horse coach with flowers of a hundred different varieties the day we drove out the Modoc Road to the Laguna Blanca and over the famous Hope Ranch.

In 1841, when the old Catholic Bishop Garcia Diego came to Santa Barbara to build his cathedral and locate his episcopal acres upon acres of the ever beautiful see, he was met by the Mission Fathers "Cups of Gold," the famous California and hundreds of kneeling Indians and

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Mexicans with arms filled with flowers. His carriage was laden with them, his path was hidden beneath them, and had he chosen he could have slept in a veritable bed of roses. If he had not protested he would have been smothered before he could have uttered an Ave. He had reached the land of flowers in truth and he raised his hands as his people loosed his plunging horses from the carriage, fighting for the honor of taking their places, and thanked the Virgin and the blessed Santa Barbara that he had lived to see Eden with his mortal eyes.

Such a scene might have been the genesis of the flower fetes that have placed Santa Barbara by the side of Nice as the spot where once a year a genuine riot breaks out, laws of assault

and battery are broken, and every one, old and young, is pelted with-flowers.

Just in front of the handsome Arlington Hotel, on both sides of a street that is eighty feet wide and runs for two miles straight down through the heart of the town until it kisses the Pacific at the Place del Mar, and which street has been paved with bitumen by these seven thousand people at a cost of over $175,000, are the handsomely decorated Judges' and Tribunes' stands. Between them and directly beneath us are to pass the competitors for the silken prizes.

I had been told in detail what to expect, yet I was taken wholly by surprise. The enthusiasm of the place got possession of me long before it was time to begin the "Bataille des Fleurs," and I

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