attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things. [Illustration: PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE, MONTEREY BAY] The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific, quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among the old in rural neighbourhoods. They grow freely back into the hills till they are warned away from the cañons by the more sequestered _palo colorado_. The Monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above Monterey, crowned with them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and sparse-limbed to be interesting. The oaks do better by the landscape, all of the _encinas_ variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There are no redwoods on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from Palo Corona on Carmel Bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of friars walking against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and in small groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the genus _Pasania_, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than Siam. How it came here, survivor of an earlier world, or drifting in on the changing Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no one cares, for the only use the Santa Crucians have found for it is to tan shoe leather. [Illustration: CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL]