air to a point three thousand feet above our heads. Once safely out
of the cable car, however, at the upper terminus, we smile, and think
the worst is over. It is true, we see awaiting us another innocent
looking electric car by which we are to go still higher; but we are
confident that nothing very terrible can be experienced in a trolley.
This confidence is quickly shattered. I doubt if there is anything in
the world more "hair lifting" than the road over which that car
conveys its startled occupants. Its very simplicity makes it the more
horrifying; for, since the vehicle is light, no massive supports are
deemed essential; and, as the car is open, the passengers seem to be
traveling in a flying machine. I never realized what it was to be a
bird, till I was lightly swung around a curve beneath which yawned a
precipice twenty-five hundred feet in depth, or crossed a chasm by a
bridge which looked in the distance like a thread of gossamer, or saw
that I was riding on a scaffolding, built out from the mountain into
space. For five appalling miles of alternating happiness and horror,
ecstasy and dread, we twisted round the well-nigh perpendicular
cliffs, until, at last the agony over, we walked into the mountain
tavern near the summit, and, seating ourselves before an open fire
blazing in the hall, requested some restorative nerve-food. Yet this
aërial inn is only one hundred and eighty minutes from Los Angeles;
and it is said that men have snow-balled one another at this tavern,
picked oranges at the base of the mountain, and bathed in the bay of
Santa Monica, thirty miles distant, all in a single afternoon. It
certainly is possible to do this, but it should be remembered that
stories are almost the only things in California which do not need
irrigation to grow luxuriantly. I was told that although this
mountain railway earns its running expenses it pays no interest on
its enormous cost. This can readily be believed; and one marvels, not
only that it was ever built, but that it was not necessary to go to a