Through dominions of forest;
Drives the thundering train;
Through fields where God’s cattle
Are turned out to grass,
And his poultry whirl up
From the wheels as we pass;
Through level horizons as still as the moon
With the wilds fast asleep and the winds in a swoon.”
From a palace car with every eastern luxury, we gaze out on the dappled, pea-green hills of New Mexico and the wide, empty stretches of Arizona, stopping in Santa Fe—Columbia’s Damascus, in Albuquerque—a pocket edition of Chicago, and in Tucson—the storm-center of semi-tropic trade. But the “W. C. T. U.” is a plant of healing as indigenous to every soil for good as the saloon for evil, and in the first city the Governor’s wife has accepted leadership; in the second that place is held by a lovely Ohio girl, the wife of a young lawyer; and in the third a leading woman of society and church work, whose husband is one of Arizona’s most honored pioneers, consents to be our standard-bearer. These way-side errands, with their delightful new friendships and tender gospel lessons over, we hasten on to California. Some token of its affluent beauty comes to us on Easter Sabbath in the one hundred calla-lilies sent from Los Angeles, five hundred miles beyond, to adorn the church where we worship in Tucson, that marvelous oasis in the desert. “Go on, and God be with you,” says the friend who escorts us to the train; “you’ll find Los Angeles a heaven on earth.” And so, indeed, we did, coming up out of the wilderness on a soft spring day, between fair, emerald hills that stood as the fore-runners of the choicest land on which were ever mirrored the glory and the loveliness of God.
We visited the thirty leading centers of interest and activity in the great Golden State during the two months of our stay, but when the courteous mayor of this “city of the angels” welcomed us thither, and children heaped about us their baskets of flowers, rare, save in California, we told “His Honor” that of all the towns we had yet visited—and they number a thousand at least—his was the one most fitly named.