But stay a moment. Can you not call them plants? Look! See those superb blossoms of crimson upon that footstool of thorns, those golden stars upon the telegraph-pole yonder, those beautiful flowers of rosy pink upon that besom-head. Yes, they are plants, and worthy of all admiration, for they have the genius of a true originality, and the sudden splendour of the flowers they put forth are made all the more admirable by the surprise of them and the eccentricity. And with them grows the yucca, that wonderful plant that sends up from its rosette of bayonets--they call it the "Spanish bayonet" in the West--a green shaft, six feet high, and all hung with white waxen bells. I got out of the train at one of its stoppages, and cut a couple of heads of this wonderland plant, and found the blossoms on each numbered between 400 and 406. And there was a certain moral discipline in it too. For we found these exquisite flower-hung shafts were smothered in "blight," those detestable, green, sticky aphides, that sometimes make rose-buds so dreadful, and are the enemy of all hothouses. Looking out at the yuccas as we passed, those splendid coronals of waxen blossoms--pure enough for cathedral chancels--it seemed as if they were things of a perfect and unsullied beauty. My arrival with them was hailed with cries of admiration, and for the first moment enthusiasm was supreme. But the next, alas for impure beauty! the swarms of clinging parasites were detected. Hands that had been stretched out to hold such things of grace, shrank from even touching them, known to be polluted, and so, at last, with honours that were more than half condescension, the yucca-spikes were put out on the platform, to be admired from a distance. Passing through the cactus land we saw numbers of tiny rabbits--the "cotton tails," as distinguished from the "mule-ears" or jack-rabbits--dodging about the stems and grass; but in about an hour the grotesque vegetable began to sober down into a botanical conglomerate that defies analysis, and gives the little rabbits a denser covert. The general result of this change in the botany was as Asiatic, as Indian as it could be, but why, it were difficult to say, unless it was the prevalence of the baboon-like "muskeet," and the beautiful but murderous dhatura--the "thorn-apple" of Europe. Yet there was sage-brush enough to make Asia impossible, while the variations of the botany were too sudden for any generalizations of character. And so on, past an oil-mill on the left--petroleum bubbling out of the hillock--and a great farm "Newhall's," on the right; past Andrews and up the hill to the San Fernando tunnel, 7000 feet in length, and then down the hill again into San Fernando. Has any one ever "stopped off" at San Fernando and spent any time with the monks at their picturesque old mission, smothered in orangeries, and dozed away the summer hours amongst them, watching the peaches ripen and the bees gathering honey,