In the Pullman, there was a stir of awakening interest The travel-wearied passengers, laying aside books and magazines and cards, renewed conversations that, in the last monotonous hours of the desert part of the journey, had lagged painfully.  Throughout the train, there was an air of eager expectancy; a bustling movement of preparation.  The woman of the observation car platform had disappeared into her stateroom.  The young man gathered his things together in readiness to leave the train at the next stop.

In the flying pictures framed by the windows, the dairy pastures and meadows were being replaced by small vineyards and orchards; the canyon wall, on the northern side, became higher and steeper, shutting out the mountains in the distance and showing only a fringe of trees on the sharp rim; while against the gray and yellow and brown and green of the chaparral on the steep, untilled bluffs, shone the silvery softness of the olive trees that border the arroyo at their feet.

With a long, triumphant shriek, the flying overland train—­from the lands of ice and snow—­from barren deserts and lonely mountains—­rushed from the narrow mouth of the canyon, and swept out into the beautiful San Bernardino Valley where the travelers were greeted by wide, green miles of orange and lemon and walnut and olive groves—­by many acres of gardens and vineyards and orchards.  Amid these groves and gardens, the towns and cities are set; their streets and buildings half hidden in wildernesses of eucalyptus and peppers and palms; while—­towering above the loveliness of the valley and visible now from the sweeping lines of their foothills to the gleaming white of their lonely peaks—­rises, in blue-veiled, cloud-flecked steeps and purple shaded canyons, the beauty and grandeur of the mountains.

It was January.  To those who had so recently left the winter lands, the Southern California scene—­so richly colored with its many shades of living green, so warm in its golden sunlight—­seemed a dream of fairyland.  It was as though that break in the mountain wall had ushered them suddenly into another world—­a world, strange, indeed, to eyes accustomed to snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds.

Among the many little cities half concealed in the luxurious, semi-tropical verdure of the wide valley at the foot of the mountains, Fairlands—­if you ask a citizen of that well-known mecca of the tourist—­is easily the Queen.  As for that! all our Southern California cities are set in wildernesses of beauty; all are in wide valleys; all are at the foot of the mountains; all are meccas for tourists; each one—­if you ask a citizen—­is the Queen.  If you, perchance should question this fact—­write for our advertising literature.