and opening bottles of mellow California wine to help along the intervals between drowsy mass and merry meal-times? I think when my sins weigh too heavily on me to let me live among men, I will retire to San Fernando, to the bee-keeping, orange-growing fathers, ask them to receive my bones, and start a beehive and an orange-tree of my own. It does not seem to me, looking forward to it, a very arduous life, and I might then, at last, overtake that seldom-captured will-o'-the-wisp, fleet-footed Leisure. The bees, by the way, are kept on a "ranch," whole herds and herds of bees, all hived together in long rows of hives, hundreds to the acre. They fly afield to feed themselves, and come home with their honey to make the monks rich. I am not sure that these fathers have done all they might for the country they settled in, and yet who is not grateful to the brethren for the picturesqueness of comparative antiquity? Their very idleness is a charm, and their quiet, comfortable life, half in cloisters, half in orange groves, is a delight and a refreshment in modern America. But the loveliness of their country, and the wonder of its possibilities! Can any one be surprised that we are approaching the city of Los Angeles? A bright river comes tumbling along under cliffs all hung with flowering creepers, and between banks that are beautiful with ferns and flowers, and the land widens out into cornfield and meadow; and away to right and left, lying under the hills and overflowing into all the valleys, are the vineyards, and orchards, and orangeries that make the City of Angels worthy of a king's envy and a people's pride. As yet, of course, it is the day of small things, as compared with what will be when water is everywhere; but even now Los Angeles is a place for the artist to stay in and the tourist to visit. There is a great deal to remind you of the East, in this valley of dark-skinned men, and in the "bazaars," with their long ropes of chilis dangling on the door-posts, the fruit piled up in baskets on the mules, the brown bare-legged children under hats with wide ragged brims, there are all the familiar features of Southern Europe, hot, strong-smelling, and picturesque. But Los Angeles shares with the rest of California the disadvantage under which all climates of great forcing power and rudimentary science must lie, for its fruits, though exquisite to look upon, often prodigious in size, and always incredible in quantity, fail, as a rule, dismally in flavour. The figs are very large, both green and black, but they seem to have ripened in a perpetual rainstorm; the oranges look perfection, and are as bad as any I have had in America; the peaches are splendid in their appearance, for their coarse barbaric skins are painted with deep yellow and red, but they ought not to be called "peaches" at all. They would taste just as well by any other name, and the traveller who knows the peaches of Europe,