including some very fetching drinks called "pink skirts." You wouldn't believe me if I told how little!
One more delicacy of which we make rather a specialty: I should call it a climate sandwich. If you live in the invigorating air of the foothills, to motor to the sea, a run of some thirty miles from where we live in winter, spend several hours on the sand, and before dark turn "Home to Our Mountains" gives a mountain air sandwich with sea-breeze filling—a singularly refreshing and satisfying dainty.
Perhaps my enthusiasm for California sounds a little like cupboard love. There is a certain type of magazine which publishes the most alluring pictures of food, salads and desserts, even a table with the implements laid out ready for canning peaches, that holds a fatal fascination for
me. I have even noticed J—— looking at one with interest. When my father comes out to visit us every spring, the truck gardens, the packing houses, and the cost of living here, I think, affect him in much the same way that those magazines do me, and I wonder if every one, except a dyspeptic, doesn't secretly like to hear and see these very things! Could it be the reason people used to paint so much still life?—baskets of fruit, a hunter's game-bag, a divided melon, etc. I frankly own that they would thrill me more if I knew their market price, so that I might be imagining what delightful meals I could offer my family without straining the household purse, which is my excuse for the intimate details concerning food and prices which I have given.
Surely human beings ought to respond
as the fruits do to this climate, in spirit as well as in body, and become a very mellow, amiable, sweet-tempered lot of people, and I think they do. Even the "culls" are almost as good as the rest, though they won't bear transportation. It is the land of the second chance, of dreams come true, of freshness and opportunity, of the wideness of out-of-doors—"Sunkist!"
The End