Coronado Beach, with its great Hotel Del Coronado, is one of the most famous of year-round resorts. The beach, some 15 miles long, lies on the peninsula which forms the outer arm of the San Diego Bay, and is a very beautiful stretch. The hotel, like the Del Monte at Monterey, is set in a tropical garden; the flower beds, great sheets of colour, are an endless delight to the Easterner; here may be enjoyed every luxury of modern life with all the ease and freedom of the tropics. In the old town one may see the Estudillo House, made famous by Helen Hunt Jackson as the place where Ramona was married. This is a very picturesque spot, the courtyard especially so, and in the garden the old oven still stands. Point Loma, a small peninsula which juts into the ocean at the most northern point of San Diego Bay, should be visited; fine views can be had from the point, and interesting caves, on the ocean side, are visited en route. “The Theosophical Institute of Universal Brotherhood” is on this peninsula. Here, under the leadership of Katharine Tingley, this society has established itself and its model school. The colony is open to tourists. The architecture is unusual. THE AMERICAN SAHARA The Great American Desert was almost better known a generation ago than it is to-day. Then the hardy Argonauts traversed that fearful waste on foot with their dawdling ox trains, and hundreds of them left their bones to bleach in that thirsty land. The survivors of these deadly journeys had a very definite idea of what that desert was, but now that we can cross it in a day in Pullman cars, its real and still-existing horrors are largely forgotten. “The first scientific exploration of this deadly area was Lieutenant Wheeler’s United States survey in the early fifties; and he was the first to give scientific assurance that we have here a desert as absolute as the Sahara. It is full of strange, burnt, ragged mountain ranges, with deceptive, sloping, broad valleys between. There are countless extinct volcanoes upon it and hundreds of square miles of black, bristling lava flows. The summer heat is inconceivable, often reaching 136 degrees in the shade; even in winter the mid-day heat is sometimes insufferable, while at night ice frequently forms on the water tanks. “There are oases in the desert, chief of which are the narrow valleys of the Mojave River and the lower Colorado. It is a strange thing to see these soft green ribbons athwart the molten landscape. “The Arabian simoon is not deadlier than the sandstorm of the Colorado Desert (as the lower half is generally called). Man or beast caught in one of these sand-laden tempests has little chance of escape.