This wonderful land of California into which we have come has a name the meaning of which is unknown. One Ordonez de Montalva in 1510 published a Spanish romance wherein he referred to the "island of California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Terrestrial Paradise." When Cortez conquered Mexico, his annalist, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, gave this name, it is said in derision, about 1535, to the lower peninsula of California, then supposed to be an island, it having been discovered the previous year by the Spanish explorer Ximenes. The Jesuit missionaries came in the seventeenth century to the lower peninsula, and in the eighteenth century to California proper. It is an enormous State, stretching nearly eight hundred miles along the Pacific, and inland for a width of two hundred or more miles. It is mainly a valley, between the Coast Range of mountains on the west and the Sierra Nevada, meaning the "snowy saw-tooth mountains," on the east. The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers flow in the central valley, which stretches north and south for five hundred miles. To the southward the mountain ranges join, and below them is the special and favored region of Southern California. When first settled, there were established from San Diego up to Sonoma twenty-one Jesuit Missions, whose ruins and old buildings are now found so interesting, and these early establishments converted the Indians, of whom it is said that the charming climate offered them no inducements to develop savagery, so that when the conversion time came they were easily made serfs for the Missions, and worked in a way that few other Indians ever did. There are two California seasons, the rainy and the dry, the former lasting from November to May, while there is almost unchanging dry weather from May till October. The rainy season, however, is not as in the tropics, where there are deluges daily, but it means that then it will rain if ever, and there are in fact days without rain at all. California is a land of climatic attractiveness, where, as it has been well said, "it is always afternoon." Through vast irrigation systems, despite the dry season, much of the surface has been made a garden. Water runs everywhere copiously down from the mountains, and the shrubbery of all parts of the world has been brought hither and successfully grown. The region presents an universal landscape of foliage and flowers, luxuriant beyond imagination. In Southern California the wild flowers, of which the golden poppy is one of the most prominent, are extraordinary in their number, variety and brilliancy. "The greatest surprise of the traveller," writes Charles Dudley Warner, "is that a region which is in perpetual bloom and fruitage, where semi-tropical fruits mature in perfection, and the most delicate flowers dazzle the eye with color the winter through, should have on the whole a low temperature, a climate never enervating, and one requiring a dress of woollen in every month."