I'd be absolutely sure of the papers, because the papers are the last to concede that there ever was or ever will be a flaw in the climate anywhere. In a certain city out on the Coast there is one paper that refuses even to admit that a human being can actually expire while breathing the air of Southern California. It won't go so far as to say that anybody has died--"passed away" is the term used. You read in its columns that Medulla Oblongata, the Mexican who was kicked in the head by a mule last Sunday afternoon, has passed away at the city hospital; or that, during yesterday's misunderstanding in Chinatown between the Bing Bangs and the Ok Louies, two Tong men were shot and cut in such a manner that they practically passed away on the spot. When I was there I traveled all one day over the route of an unprecedented cold snap that had happened along a little earlier and mussed up the citrus groves; and, though I will not go so far as to say that the orange crop had died or that it had been killed, it did look to me as though it had passed away to a considerable extent. This sort of visitation, however, doesn't occur often; in fact, it never had occurred before--and the chances are it never will occur again. Next to taxes and the high cost of living, I judge the California climate to be about the most dependable institution we have in this country--yes, and one of the most satisfactory, too. To its climate California is indebted for being the most extravagantly beautiful spot I've seen on this continent. It isn't just beautiful in spots--it is beautiful all over; it isn't beautiful in a sedate, reserved way--there is a prodigal, riotous, abandoned spendthriftiness to its beauty. I don't know of anything more wonderful than an automobile ride through one of the fruit valleys in the Mission country. In one day's travel--or, at most, two--you can get a taste of all the things that make this farthermost corner of the United States at once so diversified and so individual--sky-piercing mountain and mirage-painted desert; seashore and upland; ranch lands, farm lands and fruit lands; city and town; traces of our oldest civilization and stretches of our newest; wilderness and jungle and landscape garden; the pines of the snows, the familiar growths of the temperate zone, the palms of the tropics; and finally--which is California's own--the Big Trees. All day you may ride and never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace or trumpery.