This is the real California. The mountains have already become accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland, a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants--December, January and February--and calls itself summer the whole year round. This palm has brought you to a sense of your location--to California. The romance that has been spelled into you of a distant land, and of the men who toiled that it become a great state peopled with great cities, of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon it, came into your heart and soul and body at the first glimpse of that tree. Before the train is under way again your camera has been called into action--mental processes are supplemented by a permanent record chemically etched upon a film of celluloid. After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these little yellow depots and more of these rarely beautiful palms standing beside them. The ranches multiply, this valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing. Growth stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation. California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And again and again you will be declaring it the most mountainous of all our states. The flat-lands carry you beyond daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a glow of arc reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento a dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, a halt at a junction station, and mail is being gathered from the impromptu literature makers on our train to go east. The main line is reached. And a little later the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might declare that Holland, not Switzerland, had been transplanted into California. The sea laughs at bridges, and so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great ferryboat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger locomotive--all of us together. For twenty minutes we slip across the water, breathing fresh air once again and standing in the ferry's bow looking toward the shadowy outline of a high, black hill carelessly punctuated here and there by yellow points of light. A new land is always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mysterious, doubly fascinating.