At San Mateo, a town with the usual shaven and parked immaculateness of highclass suburbs, we have luncheon in a simple little pastry shop. The woman who gaily serves us with excellent ham sandwiches, cake, and coffee, tells us that she is from Alsace-Lorraine. She and her husband have found their way to California. From San Mateo we drive to Palo Alto, where we spend some time in visiting Leland Stanford University. The University buildings of yellow sandstone with their warm red tiled roofs look extremely well in the southern sun. Here are no hills and inequalities. All the buildings stand on perfectly level ground, the situation well suited to the long colonnades and the level lines of the buildings themselves. It is worth the traveler's while to walk through the long cloisters and to visit the rich and beautiful church, whose restoration from the ravages of the earthquake is about completed. With its tiling and mosaic work, its striking mottoes upon the walls, and its fine windows, it is very like an Italian church. The town of Palo Alto is a pretty little settlement, depending upon the University for its life. From Palo Alto we drive on into the Santa Clara Valley. We are too late to see the fruit trees in bloom, a unique sight; but the valley stretches before us in all its exquisite greenness and freshness after the spring rains. Miles of fruit trees, as carefully pruned and weeded and as orderly in every detail as a garden, are on every side of us. Prune trees, cherry trees, and apricot trees; there are thousands of them, in a most beautiful state of cultivation and fruitfulness. No Easterner who has seen only the somewhat untidy and carelessly cultivated orchards of the East can imagine the exquisite order and detailed cultivation of the California fruit orchards. We saw miles of such orchards always in the same perfect condition. Not a leaf, not a branch, not a weed is left in these orchards. They are plowed and harrowed, sprayed and pruned, down to the last corner of every orchard, and the last branch of every tree. Through the clean aisles, between the green rows, run the channels for the precious water that has traveled from the mountains to the plains to turn tens of thousands of acres into a fair and fruitful garden. The Santa Clara Valley is one of the loveliest valleys of all California, and indeed of all the world. Set amid its orchards are tasteful houses and bungalows, commodious and architecturally pleasing; very different from the box-like farmhouses of the Middle West and the East. On either side rise high green hills. It is a picture of beauty wherever one looks. At Santa Clara, on our way to San Jose, we stop to see the Santa Clara Mission, just at the edge of the town. All that remains of the first Mission is enclosed within a wall, the new church and the flourishing new school standing next to the enclosure.