reen stalks and white crape petals
with golden hearts being very effective. I had seen the Matilija poppies
for the first time growing in the gardens of Santa Barbara. I now saw
them growing wild on the slopes of the Ojai Valley foothills. Above the
Pierpont Cottages are the buildings of a famous boys' school high in the
foothills. For those who love warmth and glowing color, long tramps and
long horseback rides into the mountain defiles above the valley, the
Ojai is an ideal place to spend a charmed winter. We came away in the
morning light, driving across the valley to the main road and ascending
a steep hill to the Upper Ojai road. A glorious view of the whole valley
unrolled before us, level as a floor, with its rich masses of fig trees
and its shining orange and lemon trees, their green broken here and
there by trim houses. Higher up were the cottages of the Pierpont Inn,
and higher still the big building of the school, all over-topped by the
great masses of the mountains behind. I felt that I should like to build
a bungalow on the spot and live and die there.

We come on by a very rough, narrow, bumpy, and precipitous mountain
road, past the summer cottages of Sulphur Springs into the Santa Paula
Valley. We pass people planting young orchards of lemons and oranges,
and we come through defiles, the bare, rugged hills rising above us on
both sides. Sometimes these hills are clay-colored. Sometimes they are
painted a delicate lavender by whole hillsides of blooming sage;
sometimes sage not yet in bloom covers the hills with a delicate
grey-green mantle. Other hillsides are a bright yellow from a yellow,
string-like plant that nets itself in great masses over the entire
slope. On the whole the country until we reach Santa Paula is rather
bare. At Santa Paula there is a very pleasant inn. It was at Santa Paula
that I saw a schoolhouse enclosure surrounded by a hedge-like row of
trees, every tree a blooming mass of glorious yellow.

At Sespe we passed a very prosperous lemon and orange orchard of immense
size where they were planting fresh orchards of slender young trees.
Before we reached Saugus we had to ford the Santa Clara River, the
bridge being down. We stuck in the soft sand in mid-river and T. was
obliged to wade through the shallow water to the shore behind us, which
happened to be nearest, to go in search of a countryman and horses. In
the meantime I took off my boots and stockings and waded across to the
far