These driving expeditions are best, however, in the winter, spring, and early summer, when the sun is not so hot, and when the roads have been rained upon, and the terrible dust is laid. Is there any dust like the Californian dust after a dry season, I wonder? My husband insists that in Australia and the Cape, and other places where he and I have never been, the dust is infinitely worse than in California; he also reminds me of the dust in railway travelling at home, and insists that this was quite as disagreeable and much more dirty. We do not agree on this point. But as I said before, one accustoms oneself to almost anything, and though we certainly take fewer pleasure drives at the end of the summer, waiting rather always for the first rains, yet when I remember my first horror at San Sebastian, on driving through waves, and clouds, and curtains of dust, then I know by comparison that I have reached a very philosophical state of mind about this, one of the necessary and undeniable evils. What one enjoys most in this life is, I think, the absolute freedom; that and the great stretches of space around one are a constantly increasing delight. To look across these great sweeps of mountains, range after range, and see in the distance the silver line of the Pacific, and to feel the clean, pure wind in one’s face, is like a baptism of new life. At first the strange bareness of these mountains almost wounds one’s eyes, and their true beauty is not recognised. But as one learns to know them better, their charm grows more and more striking, and I almost doubt if after a few years one would wish for any change in their bold bare lines. In the full midday sun they are not lovely, and in some moods one would call them almost ugly, so uncompromising are they in their grimness and bareness: but their time of triumph is when the changing lights of sunset begin, when they are flooded with such matchless colouring, so delicate and rich, that they seem positively unreal. During the winter rains all the odd jobs of repairing are done: soldering, harness-cleaning and mending, painting of waggons or carts, and carpentering. Most Americans are clever-handed, and can turn from one job to another with unusual facility. To see a man, who earns his living by driving a delivery waggon, turn to in his spare time and build a neat and comfortable addition to his house, an extra bedroom, and perhaps an enlargement of the sitting-room, with a nice bit of verandah out of this, and all well planned and well finished, is apt to knock the conceit out of the young fellow from home, who prides himself on being so “clever with his tools.”