ITALIAN FISHING CRAFT AT SANTA CRUZ.
APPROACHING SAN FRANCISCO.
From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old Spanish town of Monterey, once California’s capital, now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam’s soldier boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells the Mexican-Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sherman once made love, and in whose garden yet grows the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of her soldier lover.
Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days of power, and where, among groves and lawns and gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blenheim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical verdure—giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, with ponds and fountains, and you will have some faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an object-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in California. We regretted leaving this superb place, but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it.
All the day we now hastened south on the flying “Coast Limited,” bound for Santa Barbara. First ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to San Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them; then mile after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations; then herds of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the smaller farms of the fruit growers.
Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam-covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legs, sand-pipers in flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of carriages driving close to the receding waters.