GARDEN OF PALMS AT INDIO, NEAR SAN DIEGO, CAL.—No wonder the people of California love their State and its “glorious climate” when they are able to produce such ideal homes as the one reproduced in this superb photograph. It is one of many others like it in the same region, and shows what may be accomplished in a short time with a combination of natural advantages and industry. The picture is so perfect that we can almost imagine we see the waving of the palm leaves and smell the perfume of the flowers. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: VERNAL FALLS AND LADY FRANKLIN ROCK, YOSEMITE.] San Francisco is a center from which many interesting itineraries may be conveniently made, several of which we performed, with the particular view of photographing the most attractive features. Chief of these excursions is to the Yosemite Valley, which is 267 miles from San Francisco, the last sixty-seven miles being journeyed by stage. Leaving that city at 4 P. M., we reached Raymond at 6 A. M. the following day, at which point the stage is taken to Wawona, which is only six miles from the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. These giants of the primeval forest are in a Government reservation two miles square, and compose two distinct groves some half a mile apart. In the upper grove there are 365—one for each day in the year—trees, 154 of which exceed fifteen feet in diameter, and several are more than 300 feet in height. The largest, known as the Grizzly Giant, in the lower grove, is thirty-one feet in diameter, and the first limb which makes out from the trunk, 200 feet above the earth, is six feet in diameter. There is a prostrate tree in this grove which originally measured forty feet in diameter, and was 400 feet in height. The body is hollow, and is large enough to admit three horsemen abreast a distance of seventy feet.