Now you climb to the crest of the cordillera. Before you is the circling bay with its border of white beaches. Beyond, Frémont's Peak, the tall sentinel that first proclaimed the advent of the dominant American. At your feet the quaint capital that Junípero founded, half adobe, half modern. You can distinguish the time-tumbled walls that tell of Spain's departed glory, and you see the crumbling Cuartel and Custom-House of the Mexicans, who lacked the Spaniards' Moorish taste in their homes and public buildings. The old capital has outlived its day. It thrives now on trinkets and abelone shells, painted with memories of the past. But on your left, set in the midst of five hundred acres of flowers and oaks and pines, are luxurious touches of modern life where business comes to forget its cares, and romance spends its honeymoon. [Illustration ANCIENT ADOBE CABIN, MONTEREY.] Descend the slope toward the city, passing on your way ruined adobe cabins. Rounding a turn in the historic road you see the smoke of an incoming steamer bringing holiday passengers through waters where, aforetime, Spanish corvettes lurked for wily smugglers. From the Cuartel as you near the old capital you hear, instead of the war ballads of quixotic guerreros, the merriment of school-children at play. On the streets, instead of the alférez coming on caparisoned horse to announce the presence in the harbor of a stranger craft, you encounter hotel-runners clattering in 'buses to the pier. On surviving fragments of villa walls you discern no solemn reglamentos. Advertisements of swimming suits and fishing tackle have supplanted the rhetorical decrees of the Spanish governors. The descendants of the naked Indians that crowded round the royal carriage of Doña Eulalia of Catalonia a century ago, shocking that titled lady to throw them some of her purple and fine linen, now shamble by you in slattern calico and jeans, bearing bundles of laundry to a neighboring lagoon. The cleansing process of their trade has for them no personal contagion. In curio shops that crowd the site of the old presidio where the soldiers of Charles III. performed their part in the programme of civilization Junípero had outlined, you buy your souvenirs. Then climb to Vizcanio's oak. Beyond the cross reared here are the tottering memorials in the ancient graveyard. A century of strange and stirring romance is buried there. From this weed-grown cemetery haunted by memories which your guide cannot recall, you again see the town and harbor in panorama, and you get clearer glimpses of the paradise into which landscape-gardeners have transformed surrounding acres of sand-dunes over which pobladores once ranged seeking pasturage for their herds.