But we must return to the Saturday which intervened before that dinner. The morning was spent in a drive through the town--through the garden would better describe it, for it was all a garden, with rose-embowered roofs or stately mansions framed in by towering palms and stately growths of other graceful trees. It is strange to see the effect which this semi-tropical climate produces on familiar plants. The sweet geranium towers up until it becomes almost a tree, covering the whole ends of houses with its perfumed leaves, and the English lavender emerges from its island modesty, and stands up on this American soil with all the self-assertion of an independent shrub. In one of the parks we saw the little English daisy, but that was the same "wee crimson-tipped flower" that it ever was. It brought tears to the eyes of some of our party, as the springs of home memories welled up within the breast. What volumes do blossoms ever speak to us! A bunch of red primroses, discovered once by chance among the myriad common yellow blooms which gladdened the woods all about us, stands out forever in our memory, as a sudden revelation of beauty--and all for us who found it--which no subsequent possession of far greater worth, has ever yet excelled. But the friends, the flowers, the fruits, and the foliage of San Jose, charming as they all were, could not detain us. We were bound for the stars; and at noon or thereabouts, a happy party of us took passage in a large brake, with four horses, for the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. We were armed with an introduction to Professor Schaeberle, the astronomer in charge, and the electric wire had flashed also our coming, beforehand.