San Diego is another spot to which the tide of immigration must turn. It stands on the border line of Alta California, and opens on a land-locked bay of surpassing beauty. The climate is soft and mild the year round; the sky brilliant, and the atmosphere free of those mists which the cold currents throw on the northern sections of the coast. The sea-breeze cools the heat of summer, and the great ocean herself modulates into the same temperature the rough airs of winter. The seasons roll round, varied only by the fresh fruits and flowers that follow in their train. I would rather have a willow-wove hut at San Diego, with ground enough for a garden, than the whole peninsula of San Francisco, if I must live there. The one is a Vallambrosa, where only the zephyr stirs her light wing; the other a tempest-swept cave of Æolus, where the demons of storm shake their shivering victims. The lust of gold will people the one, but all that is lovely in the human heart spread its charm over the other. Before the eyes that fall on these pages are under death’s shadow, San Diego will have become the queen of the south in California encircled with vineyards and fields of golden grain and gathering into her bosom the flowing commerce of the Colorado and Gila. THURSDAY, MARCH 8. The town-hall, on which I have been at work for more than a year, is at last finished. It is built of a white stone, quarried from a neighboring hill, and which easily takes the shape you desire. The lower apartments are for schools; the hall over them—seventy feet by thirty—is for public assemblies. The front is ornamented with a portico, which you enter from the hall. It is not an edifice that would attract any attention among public buildings in the United States; but in California it is without a rival. It has been erected out of the slender proceeds of town lots, the labor of the convicts, taxes on liquor shops, and fines on gamblers. The scheme was regarded with incredulity by many; but the building is finished, and the citizens have assembled in it, and christened it after my name, which will now go down to posterity with the odor of gamblers, convicts, and tipplers. I leave it as an humble evidence of what may be accomplished by rigidly adhering to one purpose, and shrinking from no personal efforts necessary to its achievement. A prison has also been built, and mainly through the labor of the convicts. Many a joke the rogues have cracked while constructing their own cage; but they have worked so diligently I shall feel constrained to pardon out the less incorrigible. It is difficult here to discriminate between offences which flow from moral hardihood, and those which result, in a measure, from untoward circumstances. There is a wide difference in the turpitude of the two; and an alcalde under the Mexican law, has a large scope in which to exercise his sense of moral justice. Better to err a furlong with mercy than a fathom with cruelty. Unmerited