so
destructive an extent in California, it would reassure every lover of
his race to see the hearty home-building going on here and the blessed
contentment that naturally follows it. Travel-worn pioneers, who have
been tossed about like boulders in flood time, are thronging hither as
to a kind of a terrestrial heaven, resolved to rest. They build, and
plant, and settle, and so come under natural influences. When a man
plants a tree he plants himself. Every root is an anchor, over which he
rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the
joy of living. He necessarily makes the acquaintance of the sun and
the sky. Favorite trees fill his mind, and, while tending them like
children, and accepting the benefits they bring, he becomes himself a
benefactor. He sees down through the brown common ground teeming with
colored fruits, as if it were transparent, and learns to bring them to
the surface. What he wills he can raise by true enchantment. With slips
and rootlets, his magic wands, they appear at his bidding. These, and
the seeds he plants, are his prayers, and by them brought into right
relations with God, he works grander miracles every day than ever were
written.

The Pasadena Colony, located on the southwest corner of the well-known
San Pasqual Rancho, is scarce three years old, but it is growing
rapidly, like a pet tree, and already forms one of the best
contributions to culture yet accomplished in the county. It now numbers
about sixty families, mostly drawn from the better class of vagabond
pioneers, who, during their rolling-stone days have managed to gather
sufficient gold moss to purchase from ten to forty acres of land. They
are perfectly hilarious in their newly found life, work like ants in a
sunny noonday, and, looking far into the future, hopefully count their
orange chicks ten years or more before they are hatched; supporting
themselves in the meantime on the produce of a few acres of alfalfa,
together with garden vegetables and the quick-growing fruits, such
as figs, grapes, apples, etc., the whole reinforced by the remaining
dollars of their land purchase money. There is nothing more remarkable
in the character of the colony than the literary and scientific taste
displayed. The conversation of most I have met here is seasoned with a
smack of mental ozone, Attic salt, which struck me as being rare among
the tillers of California soil. People of taste and money in search of a
home wo