When the laugh had subsided a young lady in a pink shirt waist leaned forward in her chair, and looking earnestly at the lawyer, softly inquired, “Well, what was?”
In the laugh which followed, the Englishman’s stupidity was lost sight of in astonishment at that of the American girl.
“Excuse me,” said a well dressed lady to me one morning at the hotel in Wawona, “I am a little hazy on my geography, but what I want to know is this—if I go to Denver will I be in Colorado?”
After a week’s fishing, dreaming and resting in this beautiful valley, we returned to the coast.
All up and down the Pacific coast as well as the islands of the sea are wonderful floating gardens. These gardens are composed of kelp, which attached to the bottom and to the rocks, grows from fifty to one hundred feet long, throwing out broad leaves and balloon-like air bulbs which support them. A perfect forest of broad green leaves rise upward, presenting a sharp contrast to the blue water in which they grow. Gracefully turning with every movement of the water they are among the most strikingly beautiful objects of salt sea. When near the shore these huge plants assume an upright position and become floating gardens in very truth, through which vessels plow with much difficulty.
The entrance to the bay at Santa Barbara is a perfect maze of floating sea-weed. The leaves are covered with patches of color, representing parasitic animals, or plants, greens, reds, purples and yellows, a perfect maze of color.
Delicate sea anemones looking exactly like their namesakes on land. The slightest noise causes them to close up, withdrawing their tentacles, and presently blooming out again.
Here are tiny plant-like animals growing in shrub-like forms. Wonderful jellyfish, too, fill the ocean at night with a phosphorescent light.
In place of birds and insects in a sea garden we find shell animals, crabs and fishes clinging to the leaves. Along comes a big octopus throwing out his eight sucker-lined arms in search of food. Disturbed, he throws out an inky fluid, and while you are searching the black hole for him, he slips away. Yonder comes a nautilus holding his shell high over his head, crawling lazily along. Black-hued echini, bristling with pins and needles which, waving to and fro, ward off their enemies. Fish of all sorts and sizes inhabit the sea garden. The beautiful gold and silver fishes gliding in and out remind one of the birds flitting from tree to tree. In comes a big fish, the king of the bass, and the “small fry” scatter right and left. At night these strange gardens are aglow with phosphorescent lights.
Los Angeles has been having a succession of earthquakes.