The area of San Francisco Bay proper is two hundred and ninety square miles; the area of San Pablo Bay, Carquinez Straits, and Mare Island, thirty square miles; the area of Suisun Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles.  The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek.  A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning.  All of this, of course, in inland waters.

CHARLES G. YALE,
in The Californian.

MARCH 15.

It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plain and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness.  Here all things rested.  Even the narrow stream ceased its turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool.  Knee-deep in the water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated, many-antlered buck.

On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a cool, resilient surface of green, that extended to the base of the frowning wall.  Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up to meet the opposing wall.  Fine grass covered the slope—­grass that was spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and purple and golden.  Below, the canyon was shut in.  There was no view.  The walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks, moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and boughs of trees.  Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big foot-hills, pine covered and remote.  And far beyond, like clouds upon the border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the Sierra’s eternal snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.

JACK LONDON,
in All Gold Canyon.

MARCH 16.

Except you are kindred with those who have speech with great spaces, and the four winds of the earth, and the infinite arch of God’s sky, you shall not have understanding of the desert’s lure.

IDAH MEACHAM STROBRIDGE,
in Miner’s Mirage Land.

MARCH 17.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY IN CALIFORNIA.

This day we celebrate is a day of faith, faith in God and the motherland.  It is a day of gratitude to the God whose grace brought our fathers into the Christian life, a day of gratitude to the nations which received our fathers and blessed them with the privileges of citizenship.  Let us not mind the minor chord of sorrow and persecution.  Let us rather take the major chord of glory and of honor, and from the days of scholarship and of freedom to the present moment of a world’s national power, let us chant the hymns of glory and sing of victory.