Everywhere the colors are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It's a regular backdrop of a country; its scenery looks as though it belonged on a stage--as though it should be painted on a curtain. You almost expect to see a chorus of comic-opera brigands or a bevy of stage milkmaids come trooping out of the wings any minute. Who was the libelous wretch who said that the flowers of California had no perfume and the birds there had no song? Where we passed through tangled woods the odors distilled from the wild flowers by the sun's warmth were often almost suffocating in their sweetness; and in a yellow-tufted bush on the lawn at Coronado I came upon a mocking-bird singing in a way to make his brother minstrel of Mobile or Savannah feel like applying for admission to a school of expression and learning the singing business all over again. [Illustration: OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK SOMEWHERE WILL CRAWL A REAL ESTATE AGENT] At the end of the valley--top end or bottom end as the case may be--you come to a chain of lesser mountains, dropped down across your path like a trailing wing of the Indians' fabled thunder-bird, vainly trying to shut you out from the next valley. You climb the divide and run through the pass, with a brawling river upon one side and tall cliffs upon the other; and then all of a sudden the hills magically part and you are within sight--almost within touch--of the ocean; for in this favored land the mountains come right down to the sea and the sea comes right up to the mountains. It may be upon a tiny bay that you have emerged, with the meadows sloping straight to tidemark, and out beyond the wild fowl feeding by the kelp beds. Or perhaps you have come out upon a ragged, rugged headland, crowned belike with a single wind-twisted tree, grotesquely suggesting a frizzly chicken; and away below, straight and sheer, are the rocks rising out of the water like the jaws of a mangle. Down there in that ginlike reef Neptune is forever washing out his shirt in a smother of foamy lather. And he has spilled his bluing pot, too--else how could all the sea be so blue? On the outermost rocks the sea-lions have stretched themselves, looking like so many overgrown slugs; and they lie for hours and sun themselves and bellow--or, at least, I am told they do so on occasion. There was unfortunately no bellowing going on the day I was there. The unearthly beauty of the whole thing overpowers you. The poet that lives in nearly every human soul rouses within you and you feel like withdrawing to yon dense grove or yon peaked promontory to commune with Nature. But be advised in season. Restrain yourself! Carefully refrain! Do not do so! Because out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a real-estate agent to ask you how you like the climate and take a dollar down as first payment on a fruit ranch, or a suburban lot, or a seaside villa--or something.