750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers,
musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group
of men, and hospitality was their evocation. Yet the thing which set
this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High
Jinks. The club owned a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north
of San Francisco. In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could
get away from business, went up to this grove and camped out for two
weeks. On the last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great
spectacle in praise of the forest with poetic words, music and effects
done by the club. In late years this has been practically a masque or
an opera. It cost about $10,000. * * * The thing which made it
possible was the art spirit which is in the Californian.

WILL IRWIN,
in _The City That Was._

DECEMBER 2.

Nearly all is now covered with a luxuriant growth of vegetation the
most diverse, yet all of it foreign to the soil. Side by side are the
products of two zones, reaching the highest stages of perfection, yet
none of them natives of this coast.

Gay cottages now line the roads where so recently the hare cantered
along the dusty cattle-trail; and villages lie brightly green with a
wealth of foliage where the roaring wings of myriads of quail shook
the air above impenetrable jungles of cactus.

T.S. VAN DYKE,
in _Southern California._

DECEMBER 3.

* * * The chief and highest function of the University is to assert
and perpetually prove that general principles--laws--govern Man,
Society, Nature, Life; and to make unceasing war on the reign of
temporary expedients. * * * There never was a period or a country in
which the reign of fundamental law needed constant assertion and more
perpetual proof than our own period and our own country. * * * The
living danger is that society may come to permanently distrust the
reign of law. * * * A national or a personal life built on expedients
of the day, like a house built on the sand, will inevitably come to
ruin.

PRESIDENT HOLDEN,
in _Inaugural Address of University of California_, 1886.

DECEMBER 4.

And now my story is told, the story of my work, and the story of my
life. Looking back over all the long stretch of years that I have
carried this heavy burden, though I should not care to assume it
again, yet I am not sorry to have borne it. Of the various motives
which urge men to the writing of books, perhaps the most wor