One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus. All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite to such a degree the air of the _habitué_; one wonders indeed if it could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre. It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely señoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and with them will cease to be a feature of local interest.