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fornian's boasting be true, traverses a section of the State which will give him an idea of what California really is. The hundred miles ride between San Francisco and Monterey must be a continual surprise, if he be looking for the buffalo and the Digger. Orchards, vineyards, grain fields, forests of oak, stately country mansions, charming little villages, modern cities, form a picture that only needs here and there a red-petticoated woman in wooden shoes tilling the rich earth to make one believe that the "Wild West" is a dream and that the scene from the car window is but a mirage of some one of the fertile vineclad valleys of Southern France.

Outside of San Francisco are the suburban towns of San Mateo, Belmont, Redwood, Menlo Park, Palo Alo, and Burlingame, set in forests of oak, and famous as being the out-of-town homes. of the city's millionaires, whos great

residences and flower-strewn parks are without rival. Beyond San José, among the blue and purple shadows of the Coast Range Mountains, on the denuded top of Mount Hamilton, the dome of the great Lick Observatory is plainly seen.

Until the first glimpse of Monterey Bay is caught between sage-brush covered sand dunes, the country is massed with ranches, vineyards, homes, and cattle. The Pajaro and Salinas valleys contain little to remind one of Bret Harte's stories. It is a land of sunshine and plenty. It has prepared the traveler for what is to come; for the park at Del Monte and its mansion-hotel might be the home of the Prince of this sun-kissed empire. Yet after all there can be no preparation. What the architect and the landscape gardener have done is and must remain a surprise. About this "Hotel of the Forest" and overshadowing its miles of drives, stand great gnarled,

moss-hung oaks, no more resembling the stately oaks of New England than the adobe casa of the Spaniard resembles the turreted castle on the Rhine. Like the Monterey cypress they are broken, distorted, low spreading, twisted, warped, uncouth as though they had defied the earthquake and the thunderbolt; pines, tall, towering, and symmetrical; spruces, sycamores, madroños, and palms. Here roses grow like weeds, and pansies, callas, heliotropes, honeysuckles, nasturtiums, and all the flowers of the tropics, riot, while the strange cactus growths of the deserts and the moisture-loving plants of the equator thrive and blossom in perfect abandon.

Along the shores of the charming little Laguna Del Rey, which is but a step across the emerald green lawns, pond lilies, lotus flowers, and superb Victoria Regias, float. There are "Lovers' Lanes" without number, tennis courts,

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the stunted cypresses, which resemble nothing on earth save the cedars of Lebanon or the artificially dwarfed foliage of a Japanese garden; the next, among a grove of oaks low hung with silver pendants of Florida moss; then dashing through a forest of pine, which carried the mind to Maine or among the Adirondacks. The rocky shore in places was a network of coves and inlets that might have harbored the smuggler. At others, it was as wild and tempestuous as the Bay of Fundy. From Cypress Point we could look out on the Seal rocks covered with hundreds of great, barking, fighting seals and thousands of gulls. Big-billed pelicans in quest of their prey skimmed the crests of the waves, while sea ducks darted here and there with eyes alert for the scraps left by the seals. By the side. of the road a Chinese boy was selling brightly polished abalone shells and the wonderful harvest of the sea.

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THE OLD MEXICAN CUSTOM-HOUSE, MONTEREY, AND THE STAFF ON WHICH COMMODORE SLOAT RAISED THE AMERICAN FLAG.

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