Professor Low, of Norristown, Pa; J. W. Scoville, a Chicago banker, and E. T. Hurlburt, a capitalist of Chicago, are owners of fine estates, and of less notable places there are owners in Pasadena by the hundred.
It strikes you as rather odd to find winter and summer together, hand in hand as it were. At your feet flowers; raise your head and snow on the mountain peaks is visible to the naked eye.
The one-horse cars which ply between Pasadena and East Pasadena, California, like some of the one-horse cars of some other cities, have a driver who acts as conductor also, but the driver in the Pasadena cars serves as collector as well. There is no automatical nor mechanical contrivance to receive the fares, nor is there any way of recording them. When a passenger gets on the driver leaves the front platform, and, letting the horse take care of himself, or handing the reins to a front-platform passenger, he runs back and collects the new fare. There are not many cars on the line—one starts only every half hour—and as most of the passengers are through passengers, and few get on or off between the two points named, the animal being very docile, there is no difficulty in one man doing the whole work. The driver getting on and off his car reminds me of the elevator in Philp’s Hotel, Glasgow, which will not budge upward if there are as many as four or five people in the car. The man who runs it gives the rope a pull, on the ground floor, then leaves the car, walks up the stairs, getting up to the second or third flight in ample time to give the rope another pull and to let the passengers out.
Some people talk of the winter months in California as “the rainy season.” This may be an old story, told of what was the case years ago. It certainly is not true to-day. Examining the records, I find that from January 5 to February 1 of this year there was no rain at all in Pasadena, and in all of that time there were but two cloudy days—January 23 and January 28.
I have been in Southern California now for about three weeks and have seen it rain only on two days and one night—two days in Los Angeles and one night, for one hour, at Coronado Beach.
I don’t advise you to throw away your umbrella, as did a tourist from Colorado when coming here, but my experience would show that there is very little use for such an article in Southern California, even in what used to be called “the rainy season.”
