"You said it!" spoke up Richard, the chauffeur, who had doffed his uniform and imperceptibly slipped back into his earlier relationship with the family, even to the point of eating with us; a fact which seemed curiously without offense. "You said it, Aunt Mary! Los Angeleans are the Smiths of California, and San Franciscans are the Talbots. And yet I come from Los Angeles myself." "I should say so, if I get you right!" exclaimed Peaches. "Why, Free, southern California has nothing but the climate--absolutely nothing! While San Francisco is full of--of----" "Fogs," said Richard promptly; "and earthquakes!" "It was a fire!" said Peaches fiercely. "Hey, you!" interrupted Mr. Pegg, laying down his Kansas City paper. "Hey, you two--you was both raised in Oroville ever since I knew you." "But, dad, I don't want Free to get a wrong idea about the south," replied Peaches. "You know it's just one vast mixture of real estate and movie enterprises." "Better than living among a lot of hop pickers!" retorted Dick. "Burning up in summer and getting your trees frozen in winter!" "Thank the Lord!" said Mr. Pegg reverently. "There is some doubt as to if I was born in Santa Monica or Oroville. It has kep' me unprejudiced, what with owning orchards in both ends of the State. Let me tell you, Miss Freedom, that our golden land is a bower and a horn of plenty from one end to the other. It is all good enough for this native son!" Now, of course, when people discourse to you in such a fashion of any land you expect it to be green, at least. You anticipate great groves of trees, wooded hills and flowery dales with rushing streams, o'erhung with primrose and--er--tortillas and other native fruits and flowers. But California was not green that particular first week in September. There were not even any trees to be seen except an occasional lonely yellow clump of cotton-wood or a thin straggling line of eucalyptus. We were headed straight for San Francisco, and from the moment when we branched north I looked in vain for redwoods such as I had seen pictures of in geography books and other printed sources of information. Indeed, I began to fear that there existed but the one redwood I had seen pictured and that it was not situated near the railroad track. At the railroad stations were a few palmettos, and as for the rest--brown--brown--brown; burned hills and almost improperly naked purple mountains. It was a shock, a disappointment beyond belief. I felt I had been deliberately misled and made game of. But Peaches suddenly came to life. Her drooping figure had straightened and her eyes glistened. Her eager golden head turned this way and that. She seemed to see things in the barren landscape that were invisible to me.