Our Western literary disciple, Bret Harte, is responsible for some such statement as this, through the mouthpiece of one of his lively mountaineers: "Tain't no use, you ain't got good sense no more. Why, sometimes you talk jest as if you _lived in a valley_!" Doesn't that epitomize the contempt of the highlander for the lowlander? A lover of the Californian Sierra reasonably would be expected to originate such a philosophy. For while all mountains approach perfection, existence in the California cordillera is as near Utopian as this old earth offers. That, of course, applies only to the out-of-door lover. For the others I dare venture no judgment; in their blindness they love best their cities and their rabbit-warren homes, and the logical desires of sunshine and forest are dried out of them by steam heat and contaminated by breathing much-used oxygen. Humans, generally speaking, have their chief habitat in the lowlands. Compelling reasons, aside from choice, are responsible for this state of affairs. For instance, there are not enough highlands to go around. Then, too, valleys and plains are better adapted to the customary occupations of the genus _homo_, especially that obsessing mania for the accumulation of cash. But despite their habits and their environment, a satisfactory proportion of the valley dwellers love the hill country, and when they have mountains for neighbors revel in the opportunities thereby afforded. In California the lot of the lowlander is blessed beyond compare, for the most enticing playland imaginable is at his beck, and he is offered a scenic menu _à la carte_, so to speak, which includes about everything the Creator devised in the way of out-of-door attractions. There is sea beach and forest, poppy-gilded plain and snow-quilted mountain. From a semi-tropical riviera, with the scent of orange blossoms still in his nostrils, he may mount above the snow line in a few brief hours. One day he bathes in the Pacific, inhaling the dank, sea-smelling fog, and the next finds himself in the grandest forests of America, breathing the crisp air of lofty altitudes. Revel in the gentle south of France or Alpine Switzerland; enjoy the mildness of Florida or the rugged mountaineering of the Rockies; drink Chianti in an Italian vineyard or cast a trout fly in a brawling Scottish stream; view fragments of Canton within gunshot of the Golden Gate and then glimpse utter desert by the shores of the Salton Sea--in short, choose what you will, and in California it awaits you. * * * * *