Some one, too, ought to visit these old Franciscan missions in Southern California--some one who could write about them, and sketch them. They are very delightful; the more delightful, perhaps, because they are in the United States, in the same continent as "live" towns, as Chicago, and Omaha, and Leadville, and Tombstone. Scattered about among the rolling grassland are hollows filled with orchards, in which old settlements and new are fairly embowered, while the missions themselves are singularly picturesque; and San Gabriel's Church, they say, has a pretty peal of bells, which the monks carried overland from Mexico in the old Spaniard days, and which still chime for vespers as sweetly as ever. What a wonder it must have been to the wandering Indians to hear that most beautiful of all melodies, the chime of bells, ascending with the evening mists from under the feet of the hills! No wonder they had campanile legends, these poor poets of the river and prairie, and still speak of Valleys of Enchantment whence music may be heard at nightfall! Past Savanna and Monte, with its swine droves, and its settlement of men who live on "hog and hominy," past Puente, and Spadra, and Pomona, into Colton, where we dine, and well, for half a dollar, enjoying for dessert a chat with a very pretty girl. She tells us of the beauties of San Bernardino, and I could easily credit even more than she says. For San Bernardino was settled by Mormons some fifty years ago, and has all the charms of Salt Lake City, with those of natural fertility and a profusion of natural vegetation added. But I can say nothing of San Bernardino, for the train does not enter it. And then, reinforced by another engine--a dumpy engine-of-all-work sort of "help"--clambers up the San Gorgonio pass. All along the road I notice a yellow thread-like epiphyte, or air-plant, tangling itself round the muskeet-trees, and killing them. They call it the "mistletoe" here but it is the same curious plant that strangles the orange trees in Indian gardens, and the jujubes in the jungles, that cobwebs the aloe hedges, and hangs its pretty little white bells of flower all over the undergrowth. On the bare, sandy ground a wild gourd, with yellow flowers and sharp-pointed spear-head leaves, throws out long strands, that creep flat upon the ground with a curious snake-like appearance. Clumps of wild oleander find a frugal subsistence, and here and there an elder or a walnut manages to thrive. But the profuse fertility of California is fast disappearing. And so to Gorgonio, at the top of the pass; and then we begin to go down, down, down, till we are not surprised to hear that we are far below the level of the sea. The cactus has once more reasserted itself, and to right and left are "forests" of this grotesque candelabra-like vegetable, with stiff arms, covered apparently with some woolly sort of fluff. The soil beneath them is a desperate-looking desert-sand, and here and there are bare