This little nickel will take you to a mountaintop overlooking city and ocean, where you can sit under the Eucalyptus trees which shed their bark instead of their leaves, and enjoy the music and the not overmodest dramas, without extra charge. The saloons, stores and theatres are open seven days and nights in the week, and multitudes of all nationalities, clad in their peculiar costumes, hobnob with each other in the most free and easy manner imaginable, without waiting for introductions, in this the most cosmopolitan city on earth. Sometimes you will see the harbor literally covered with the most delicious fruits and vegetables, dumped into the water, because the transportation charges to market would more than eat up the proceeds of their sale. I visited at San Jose, the large flourishing fruit orchard of a college classmate who had spent years of hard labor and the earnings of a lifetime, to bring his trees into bearing; but I found he had deserted his ranch because he could not make a living thereon, and had gone to preach for a little church far away, at five hundred dollars per annum. I saw at Riverside large crops of oranges frozen upon the trees; but the real estate sharks never allow these facts to be published, because they fatten on the profits made by selling lands to the gullible "tender feet" from the east, who, when they have bought these farms at enormous prices, find to their utter discouragement, that they must also buy water for irrigation from monopolists, at ruinous rates, else the soil is worthless. Here as nowhere else is illustrated the truth of the Scriptural adage: "To him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." When you go to a place scarcely thirty miles distant, which, in New England, you would reach in an hour, you are obliged to travel all night, as you must climb cloud-touching mountains, going many miles to cover what would be only one mile in a straight line; now you glide along close to the long, lazy waves of the great Pacific Ocean, where the grass kisses the salt lips of the sea; now from the tops of the Santa Cruz mountains, you survey the world at your feet; now you rush through the red-wood primeval forests, giants touching the clouds with their tops, while in the hollow trunk of one of these trees a family of twelve can live quite comfortably; then on to Los Angeles,--"City of the angels," they call it--a beautiful city for those possessed of means or who are dispossessed of bodies which must be clothed and fed. [Illustration: The Dome of Mount Shasta Gleams like "the Great White Throne."]