The minister climbed up on the platform--a tall man, with a thick crop of hair and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and as mobile as an actor's, the face of a born orator. He could talk, too, that preacher! In language that was poetic without being sloppy he paid a tribute to the spirit of fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our chairs. Every man there was touched, I think--and deeply touched; no man who believed in the brotherhood of man, whether he practiced it or not, could have listened unmoved to that speech. He spoke of the absent ones. Some of them he said had answered the last rollcall, and some were stretched upon the bed of affliction, and some were unavoidably detained by business in the East; and he intimated that those in the last category who had been away for as long as three weeks wouldn't know the old place when they got back!--Applause. This naturally brought him round to the subject of Los Angeles as a city of business and homes. He pointed out its marvelous growth--quoting freely from the latest issue of the city directory and other reliable authorities to prove his figures; he made a few heartrousing predictions touching on its future prospects, as tending to show that in a year or less San Francisco and other ambitious contenders along the Coast would be eating at the second table; he peopled the land clear back to the mountains with new homes and new neighbors; and he wound up, in a burst of vocal glory, with the most magnificent testimonial for the climate I ever heard any climate get. Did he move his audience then? Oh, but didn't he move them, though! Along toward the close of the third minute of uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof was gone. On the day after my arrival I made one very serious mistake; in fact, it came near to being a fatal one. I met a lady, and naturally right away she asked me the customary opening question. Every conversation between a stranger and a resident begins according to that formula. Still it seemed to me an inopportune hour for bringing up the subject. It was early in March and the day was one of those days which a greenhorn from the East might have been pardoned for regarding as verging upon the chilly--not to say the raw. Also, it seemed to be raining. I say it seemed to be raining, because no true Southern Californian would admit any actual defects in the climatic arrangements. If pressed he might concede that ostensibly an infinitesimal percentage of precipitation was descending, and that apparently the mercury had descended a notch or two in the tube. Further than that, in the absence of the official reports, he would not care to commit himself.