California I often had the impulse to break through that inhibiting
silence - to talk about Massachusetts; the lovely, tender, tamed,
domesticated country; its rolling, softly-contoured, maternal-looking
hills; its forests like great green cathedral chapels; its broad, placid
rivers, its little turbulent ones; its springs and runnels and
waterfalls and rivulets all silver-shining and silver-sounding; the
myriads of lakes and countless ponds that make the world look as though
the blue sky had broken and fallen in pieces over the landscape; the
spring when first the arbutus comes up pink and delicate through the
snow and later the fields begin to glimmer with the white of white
violets, to flash with the purple of purple ones, and the children hang
May baskets at your door; the summer when the fields are buried
knee-deep under a white drift of daisies or sealed by the gold planes of
buttercups, and the old lichened stone walls are smothered in blackberry
vines; the autumn with the goldenrod and blue asters; the woods like
conflagrations burning gold and orange, flaming crimson and scarlet; and
especially that fifth season, the Indian summer, when the vistas are
tunnels of blue haze and the air tastes of honey and wine; then winter
and the first snow (does anybody, brought up in snow country, ever
outgrow the thrill of the first fluttering flakes?) the marvel of the
fairy frost world into which the whole country turns.

Do you suppose I ever talked about Massachusetts? Not once. And so I
have one criticism to bring against the Californiac. He is a person to
whom you cannot talk about home. He grows restive the instant you get
off the subject of California. Praise of any other place to his mind
implies a criticism of California.

On the other hand, that frenzied patriotism has its wonderful and its
beautiful side. It is a result partly of the startling beauty and