From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far to the north under a violet mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect the imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies upon the Gulf of Dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on Salonica, Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are reconciled for a moment to the chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish Occupation. They could never have lived up to it. But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very poignantly. The bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the connoisseur's collection,--blue like the eye of a peacock's feather, fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a great cat sleeping in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay by way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland. Above its source the peaks of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern bulwark, Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters. [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE] Where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea, sits the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital of Alta California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him the other Padre Presidentes, held the administration of Mission affairs, and from here he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from San Diego to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. Here on the walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with his own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his own inward flame. Here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel side of the altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk to the doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under the August sun, on the heaven-blue water and the white hands of the surf beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the fields and the orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down and slept. It is further reported in the annals of the Mission that it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a relic of the blessed remains. Had I lived at that time I should have been among them, for he was a great soul, and have I not felt even at this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the