But we found the climate most exquisite all the winter. The sunshine was perfectly glorious; the colours, the distances and the sunsets were like fairyland. Indeed, they were quite an excitement to us, and we would often come to a sudden standstill in our evening walks to watch the splendid transformation scene, saying how exaggerated everyone would think our descriptions, if we tried to put them all down exactly, on paper. It is true Holman Hunt had such colours in his pictures of Palestine, but it needs a genius to make such impossible colours accepted as realities. The little town is built near the edge of the bluffs, and it was delightful to sit under the eucalyptus trees and look out at the sea, so wonderfully blue, with its broad white fringe all round the bay, where the big rollers broke on the yellow sands, and rushed away up the level shore. The happiness too of all the living creatures seemed quite infectious. We saw flocks of dainty wee sea-ducks, tumbling and swimming about in the sea, just where the huge rollers broke, vying with each other in the show of bravery, going under with the huge crest of a wave and bobbing up again, so rapidly, and with a jaunty toss of the head. Enormous golden brown butterflies came floating down the soft air and hung over the white surf. Schools of porpoises made the most demonstrative show of enjoyment, jumping high out of the sea and careering round, in a rushing mass, that would churn up the water as they went into a perfect whirlpool. Here and there, in the quiet evening, the head of a friendly seal would appear silently, and then go under without a ripple. Stately, solemn-looking pelicans, too, flew past constantly, always in single file, as though they were going to some grave and important function. There were crowds of blue birds, looking like jewels in the bright sunshine; and the humming-birds made quite a noise with their wee wings round our honeysuckle-covered verandah. Every living thing seemed to have just discovered how gay and charming a thing life was. All this helped to give us a very favourable impression of the new land, and to heal a little the painful home-sickness and longing that beset us almost at once, when we realised more and more the strangeness of much around us. Finding, on arriving there, that this little town would suit us for some months, we "rented" a pretty little house of seven or eight rooms, with a good verandah, shaded with honeysuckle, and a small garden, for which we paid thirty dollars a month. Many of the ranchers from the inland valleys come there for three or four of the summer months, as the heat is then almost unendurable anywhere out of reach of the sea breeze. We had been advised to bring a servant with us from England; for help of every kind is very expensive, all over the States, and especially in California. The usual wages are twenty-five dollars a month for women servants, and thirty to forty dollars for a Chinaman.