ween a valley and the slope of a foot-hill, with a shifting of not
more than fifty feet elevation, the change may be as marked for him as
it is for the most sensitive young fruit-tree. It is undeniable,
notwithstanding these encouraging "averages," that cold snaps, though
rare, do come occasionally, just as in summer there will occur one or
two or three continued days of intense heat. And in the summer in some
localities--it happened in June, 1890, in the Santiago hills in Orange
County--the desert sirocco, blowing over the Colorado furnace, makes
life just about unendurable for days at a time. Yet with this dry heat
sunstroke is never experienced, and the diseases of the bowels usually
accompanying hot weather elsewhere are unknown. The experienced
traveller who encounters unpleasant weather, heat that he does not
expect, cold that he did not provide for, or dust that deprives him of
his last atom of good-humor, and is told that it is "exceptional," knows
exactly what that word means. He is familiar with the "exceptional" the
world over, and he feels a sort of compassion for the inhabitants who
have not yet learned the adage, "Good wine needs no bush." Even those
who have bought more land than they can pay for can afford to tell the
truth.

The rainy season in Southern California, which may open with a shower or
two in October, but does not set in till late in November, or till
December, and is over in April, is not at all a period of cloudy weather
or continuous rainfall. On the contrary, bright warm days and brilliant
sunshine are the rule. The rain is most likely to fall in the night.
There may be a day of rain, or several days that are overcast with
distributed rain, but the showers are soon over, and the sky clears. Yet
winters vary greatly in this respect, the rainfall being much greater in
some than in others. In 1890 there was rain beyond the average, and even
on the equable beach of Coronada there were some weeks of weather that
from the California point of view were very unpleasant. It was
unpleasant by local comparison, but it was not damp and chilly, like a
protracted period of falling weather on the Atlantic. The rain comes
with a southerly wind, caused by a disturbance far north, and with the
resumption of the prevailing westerly winds it suddenly ceases, the air
clears, and neither before nor after it is the atmosphere "steamy" or
enervating. The average annual rainfall of the Pacific coast diminishes
by