At Santa Barbara, some three hundred miles down the Coast, we touched for an hour or two, and put ashore several passengers, and some thirty tons of freight. While discharging the latter, we sauntered up into the town, and found it to be a pleasant place of some fifteen hundred inhabitants--county-seat to a county of the same name. The buildings were mostly adobe, of course, and all quite old; but the town had an appearance of comfort and respectability, if not of thrift, and the few Americans we met were sanguine of its future. The Santa Barbara plains, just back of the town, consist of a broad and beautiful valley, enclosed by two imposing mountain ranges, that here jut obliquely into the ocean, and they have a climate that is no doubt seldom equalled even on the Pacific Coast. As a sanatarium, Santa Barbara was already being much resorted to by invalids, and doubtless will become more so when better known. With great evenness of temperature the year round,[18] without either snow or frost, or intense heat, the grape, fig, orange, peach, pomegranate, olive, all nourish here in the open air; and Nature seems so prodigal of her gifts, the Santa Barbarans appear exempted from the primal curse, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, etc." Mountain streams from the neighboring ranges, they had, however, trained into irrigating ditches, and by these cultivated a considerable breadth of land. They said, they had water sufficient to irrigate thousands of acres more, and needed only capital and population to build up a prosperous and thriving community. In old times--"before the flood," as a Forty-Niner would say--the Jesuit Fathers had one of their most flourishing Missions here, and their old Mission Church on a plateau back of the town was still standing, though now used chiefly as a school. Dr. O. formerly of the Army, but now married to a señorita and settled at Santa Barbara, escorted us through the town, and afterwards regaled us with wine from his own vineyard, of an excellent brand. He pronounced Santa Barbara, with its fruits and its flowers, a second paradise, the only place fit to live in--where one would about never die--and half persuaded some of us to the same way of thinking. The petroleum wells near there, as yet, had produced but little; but there seemed no doubt of the petroleum being there in large quantities. We had noticed it floating on the sea for miles before reaching Santa Barbara; and, if it issues beneath the sea sufficient for this purpose, it ought to be struck somewhere in that vicinity in paying quantities. The Santa Barbarans by no means despaired of doing this yet, and thus hoped to add another item to their already large and growing products. . At San Pedro, the seaport of Los Angelos, a hundred miles or so farther down the Coast, we put off some four hundred tons of freight, and parted with the bulk of our passengers. Of this place, more hereafter. Thence,