"It is very heavily timbered and watered with clear living streams running through valleys of the most fertile soil, on which delicious vegetables grow ten months of the year. The region is especially famed for potatoes, which become almost a fruit here. The farm I live on is charmingly situated about a mile from the old Mission, and two from the beach, on which a tremendous surf breaks and thunders day and night. From my house I look over the coast-table and range of mountains, the hills of Monterey, the bay, and a near landscape, exquisitely diversified by plain and wood, hill and valley, and almost every shade that herbage and foliage, in a country without frost, can show. The rainy season is about a month old, and the earth as green as it is at home in June. Another month will pile it with clover, and less than another variegate it with an inconceivable variety of the most exquisite flowers--for this is the land of flowers as well as of gold. Our prairies are quite insignificant in their floral shows, compared to it. The country and climate are faultless--except in the lack of showers through the dry months. Nearly every thing one can desire may be grown upon one's own farm here." * * * * * Mr. Charles Gayarre, a gentleman distinguished in the affairs of Louisiana, in which state he has held some important offices, has just published in a handsome octavo, _Louisiana, its Colonial History and Romance_, (Harper & Brothers.) It appears from the preface, that Mr. Gayarre has had excellent opportunities for the collection of materiel for a really good book of the sort indicated by his title; but this performance is utterly worthless, or worse than worthless, being neither history nor fiction, but such a commingling of the two that no one can tell which is one or which the other. The uncertainty with which it is read will be disagreeable in proportion to the interest that it excites; and, knowing something of the colonial history of Louisiana, we are inclined to think that a book quite as entertaining as this might have been composed of authenticated facts. Indeed the _Historical Collections of Louisiana_, by Mr. French, (published by Daniels and Smith, Philadelphia,) must be to even the most superficial reader a far more attractive volume. * * * * *