hill-cities of Italy; more like, I have no doubt, the ancient
plain-cities of Spain. And San Juan Bautista - with its history-haunted
old Inn, its ghost-haunted old Mission and its rose-filled old Mission
garden where everything, even the sundial, seems to sleep - is as old as
Babylon or Tyre.

You will be constantly reminded of Italy, although California is not
quite so vividly colored, and perhaps of Japan, for you are always
coming on places that are startlingly like scenes in Japanese prints.
Certain aspects from the bay of the town of Sausalito, with strangely
shaped and softly tinted houses tumbling down the hillside, certain
aspects of the bay from the heights of Berkeley, with the expanses of
hills and water and the inevitable fog smudging a smoky streak here and
there, are more like the picture-country of the Japanese masters than
any American reality.

If I were to pick the time when I should travel in California, it would
be in the early summer. All the rest of the world at that moment is
green. California alone is sheer gold. One composite picture remains in
my memory-the residuum of that single trip into the south. On one side
the Pacific - tigerish, calm, powerfully palpitant, stretching into
eternity in enormous bronze-gold, foam-laced planes. On the other side,
great, bare, voluptuously - contoured hills, running parallel with the
train and winding serpentinely on for hours and hours of express speed;
hills that look, not as though they were covered with yellow grass, but
as though they were carved from massy gold. At intervals come ravines
filled with a heavy green growth. Occasionally on those golden
hill-surfaces appear trees.

Oh, the trees of California!