Southern California, and this its exquisite metropolis, have been a terra incognita even to the intelligent, until the steam horse lately caracoled this way. Now it is thronged by emigrants and tourists, men and women of small means reaping from half a dozen acres here what a large farm in Illinois could hardly yield, and invalids hitherto only an expense to their friends, finding the elixir of life in this balmy air, and joyously joining once more the energetic working forces of the world. Flowers are so plenty here that banks and pyramids alone can satisfy the claims of decorative art; baskets of roses are more frequent than bouquets or even _boutonnieres_ with us. Heliotropes and fuchsias climb to the apex of the roof, while the common garden trees are oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, figs, olives and pomegranates. Strawberry short-cake can be had all the year round from the fresh fruit of one’s own garden, and oranges at the rate of nine thousand to one tree, and in some cases fifteen inches in circumference, have been raised in this vicinity. Riverside and Pasadena are adjacent colonies and bear a stronger resemblance to one’s ideal Garden of Eden than any other places I ever expect to see. Through groves of rarest semi-tropic fruit trees you ride for miles, in the midst of beautiful, modern homes, for the American renaissance is not more manifest in the suburbs of Boston or Chicago than in Southern California. Fences are nowhere visible, the Monterey cypress furnishing a hedge which puts to blush the choicest of old England; the pepper tree with drooping branches, and the Australian gum tree, tall and umbrageous, outlining level avenues whose vistas seem unending. Above all this are skies that give back one’s best Italian memories, and for a background the tranquil amplitude of the Sierra Madre Mountains. What would you more? “See Naples and die” is an outworn phrase. “See California and live” has been the magic formula of how many restored and happy pilgrims! The tonic of cold water has electrified this soil, seven years ago an utter desert, so that now three years of growth will work a transformation that fifteen would fail to bring about east of the Mississippi. To my thinking this result is but a material prototype of the heavenly estate that shall come to our America when its arid waste of brains and stomachs, usurped by alcohol, shall learn the cooling virtues of this same cold water. In Riverside my host planted in May of 1880, two thousand grape cuttings (not roots, remember), and in September, 1881, gathered from them two hundred boxes of grapes. Pasadena was founded by a good man from Maine, and is exempt from saloons by the provisions of its charter. Here, from six acres, a gentleman realized thirteen hundred dollars, clear of all expenses, last year, by drying and sacking his grapes, instead of sending them to the winery. “The profits were so much larger that hereafter his pocket-book will counsel