[Illustration: _Cloister of Mission, San Juan Capistrano_] LOS ANGELES AND SAN JOAQUIN. The metropolis of this land of sunshine, fruits and flowers, fifteen miles back from the sea, is _La Puebla de la Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles_, or "the City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels;" a lengthy title which the matter-of-fact Americans some time ago happily shortened into Los Angeles. From it Los Angeles River flows south to the sea at San Pedro Bay. The Spaniards founded the town in 1781, but it had only a sleepy existence until 1880, when the railways came along, and it became a centre of the pleasure and health-resorts, and the extensive fruit growing of Southern California, expanding so rapidly that it has seventy thousand people. Originally, the houses were of adobé, but now it has many fine buildings and a magnificent development of residences, the whole city being embowered in luxuriant vegetation. In the neighborhood are petroleum wells and asphalt deposits, while the adjacent district has many irrigation canals. Down on the ocean shore is San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, where the harbor has been improved by a large outlay, and twenty miles away is the beautiful mountainous island of Santa Catalina, a popular resort, which is in reality an ocean mountain top. Santa Monica Bay, to the southwest, is the coast bathing-place of Los Angeles, and near by is the popular Redondo Beach, with its spacious Chautauqua Assembly Building. Pasadena is a charming suburb of the city off to the northeast, a perpetual garden and favorite place of residence. It is in San Gabriel Valley, over which rises the great Sierra Madre Range, eleven thousand feet high, the glossy green orange groves on its sides gradually melting into the white snow-capped summits of this towering mountain wall. A railway ascends Echo Mountain north of Pasadena, on which is the Lowe Observatory. To the southeast is the old San Gabriel Mission in the valley, surrounded by vineyards and orchards.