And then you haven’t eyes enough to take in and enjoy the beautiful views of ocean, river, valley and mountain as the train dashes along—the Coast Range mountains on your left, on the right the Santa Cruz mountains, with the sun setting behind them—a glorious moving panorama.
After passing what is called the most fertile valley in the State Monterey is reached, if that be your destination, but there is a more important station one mile this side of Monterey. When the conductor calls out “Hotel del Monte” very few passengers in the cars remain seated, and the train speeds on to the sleepy old town of Monterey, almost empty.
The first action which the Pacific Improvement Company took when they concluded to make of this place a summer and winter resort was to purchase some land for the purpose, so they purchased seven thousand acres. Part of this domain was a forest, and of this they selected for their hotel “garden” a simple matter of one hundred and twenty-six acres. Forty acres of this they cultivated in flower-beds, lawns, vegetables and fruit; the rest they allowed to remain as nature left it, after hiring the services of a landscape gardener to lay out within their gates a few miles for drives and paths.
Then it occurred to them that it would be well to have a grand outside drive as an additional attraction, so they made one, cutting away mountain, forest and bluff; going through the woods, four or five miles; skirting the ocean for the same distance; altogether a nice little post-prandial drive of seventeen miles. But this is not much—for California. The drive being private property it is used only for the guests of the Hotel del Monte, the owners of which keep it in the best order, and in summer time have it watered. It is macadamized and in as good condition as the drives in Central Park, New York.
The road winds toward the bay through a forest of oaks and pines. For two or three miles it will be cool, dark, shaded and sweet smelling, and presently you get a view of the ocean. If the wind is high, as it was on the twenty-second of March, you will see foaming white-caps in the distance, and the spray dashing wildly on the bare brown rocks in the foreground, making a picture which, on the day we saw it, was awfully grand. I don’t mean this in the sense that girls do when they
say a thing is “awfully nice;” I mean that the boisterous waves were almost frightful with their impetuous rush and their terrible roar.
To quote dear old Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose statue in Central Park few recognize:
The winds of March were humming
Their parting song, their parting song.
It was a habit of my predecessor on the Home Journal, General George P. Morris, to publish annually this sweet song of Halleck’s in the Home Journal during the first week of March. It was a singular fancy of Morris’s and it pleased his brother poet.