o
now, let's consider the climate, even if I am invading Jesse Williams's
territory. For it has magical properties--that climate of California. It
makes people grow big and beautiful and strenuous; it makes flowers grow
big and beautiful; it makes fleas grow big and--strenuous. It offers,
except in the most southern or the most mountainous regions, no such
extremes of heat or cold as are found elsewhere in the country. Its
marvel is of course the season which corresponds to our winter.
The visitor coming, let us say in February, from the ice-bound and
frost-locked East through the flat, dreary Middle West, and stalled
possibly on the way, remains glued in stupefaction to the car window.
In a very few hours he slides from the white, glittering snow-covered
heights of the evergreen-packed Sierras through their purple, hazy,
snow-filled depths into the sudden warmth of California.

It is like waking suddenly from a nightmare of winter to a poets or a
painter's vision of spring.

Who, having seen this picture in January, could resist describing it?
Easterners, I appeal to your sense of justice.

At one side, perhaps close to the train, near hills, on which the live
oaks spread big, ebon-emerald umbrellas, serpentine endlessly into the
distance. On the other side, far hills, bathed in an amethystine mist,
invade the horizon. Between stretches the flat green field of the
valley, gashed with tawny streaks that are roads and dotted with soft,
silvery bunches that are frisking new-born lambs. Little white houses,
with a coquettish air of perpetual summer, flaunt long windows and
wooden-lace balconies, Early roses flask pink flames here and there.
The green-black meshes of the eucalyptus hedges film the distance. The
madrone, richly leaved like the laurel, reflects the sunlight from a
bole glistening as though freshly carved from wet gold.

Cheer up! We're getting out of scenery and climate into

The race--a blend of many rich bloods--that California has evolved
with the help of this scenery and climate is a rare brew. The physical
background is Anglo-Saxon of course; and it still breaks through in the
prevailing Anglo-Saxon type. To this, the Celt has brought his poetry
and mysticism. To it, the Latin has contributed his art instinct; and
not art instinct alone but in an infinity of combinations, the dignity
of the Spaniard, the spirit of the French, the passion of the Italian.

--into--

All the foregoing is put in, not