reins were covered with pink silk. Two outriders in the holiday attire of the Mexican vaquero guided with silk ribbons the plunging horses, while two more. followed close behind. Over a thousand dollars had been spent on the decorations and costumes of this equipage alone. Two handsome girls followed (they were all handsome, so why repeat?) in a Victoria. trimmed with scarlet carnations and geraniums. They were dressed in red with big green hats. Another was covered with gray moss and wild lupin, another with wild mustard, another with marigolds, and a sixth with sweet peas,pampas plumes, brodiaea, La Marque roses with costume and harness to match, and so on until all the flowers

and all the pretty girls in Santa Barbara were exhausted.

Then there were floats: a Venetian gondola, covered with seventy-five thousand white roses and eighteen thousand stems of lupin each bearing from fifty to seventy-five blossoms, and ten thousand bunches of wisteria. Blue flowers were the canal on which the boat floated. Two gondoliers plied their oars, while sweet strains from the guitar and mandolin in the hands of the gay party within the boat greeted tribunes and onlooker. Another bore the Queen of Flowers on a flowery throne and protected by four swans made of daisies, driven by little chubby two year olds. And so they passed beneath us one after

the other, "Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls," each more beautiful than its predecessor, until the eyes were incapable of judging and the senses overpowered by the scent of the flowers. Back they came and the battle began anew. The fair riders in carriage and on horseback fought valiantly; they gave rose for rose, lily for lily; but we were too many for them, and before the day was over they were buried in flowers

down upon the plunging steeds and the Flower Festival was over.

I have not half pictured what I saw, or expressed what I felt, but the whole play was so novel, so new, so exquisite, that I made up my mind then and there that I would not even try.

Arches of flowers and pampas grass spanned State Street from the Arlington to the sea. There was none of the gimcrack decorations of the usual Fourth of no fire-crackers or

moss-hung oaks and sycamores or the purple shadow of a cloud broke the uniformity of deep rich earth and velvety lawns, but the Eastern farmer's great enemy, bowlders and a flinty soil, were absent.

A rancher was following behind three horses and a drag between the bluffs and a stretch of waist-high mustard. He paid the Pacific Improvement Company, which owns the ranch, two thousand dollars a year rental for fifteen hundred acres, and makes the entire sum from the lease of grazing rights after the crops are off the ground. At Montecito ranch land sells as high as seven hundred dollars an acre, but I imagine that the purchaser of a seven hundred dollars an acre ranch was paying for climate rather than for soil. Yet if Santa Barbara

climate is ever put on the market I predict that it will not be considered dear in New York or London at that figure.

When one attempts to put down a list of things that can be raised in this soil it will be found easier to tell what cannot be grown. All varieties of fruits found in the Eastern and Northeastern States, besides prunes, figs, olives, peanuts, English walnuts, grapes, plums, oranges, loquats, guavas, persimmons, cherimoyas, dates, bananas, barley, mustard, oats, wheat, and flax, are a few of the items that can be charged to the soil.

Thirty-six hundred-weight of beans, one hundred and thirty bushels of corn, eighty bushels of barley, four hundred bushels of potatoes, forty tons of squashes, four tons of hay, and sixty tons of beets, have been raised in a sea