[Illustration:  The Pacific.]

The fascination of Southern California had at last completely captured me.  Its combination of ocean, desert, and mountain, its pageantry of color, and its composite life of city, ranch, and beach had cast over me a magic spell.  It was, however, a lonely sea that spread its net of foam before my feet.  During my stay I had not seen a single steamer on its surface, and only rarely had a few swift sea-birds, fashioned by man’s hand, dotted the azure for a little with their white wings, ere they dipped below the horizon’s rim.  Hence, though the old, exhilarating, briny odor was the same, I felt that, as an ocean, this was unfamiliar.  The Atlantic’s waves are haunted by historic memories, but few reminders of antiquity rise ghostlike from the dreary waste of the Pacific.  Few battles have been fought, few conquests made upon these shores.  On the Atlantic coast one feels that he is looking off toward civilized and friendly lands, across a sea which ocean greyhounds have made narrow; but here three purple islands, floating on the limitless expanse, suggest mysterious archipelagoes scattered starlike on its area, thousands of miles away, before a continent is reached; and one vaguely imagines unknown races, coral reefs, and shores of fronded palms, where Nature smiles indulgently upon a pagan paradise.  Nevertheless its very mystery and vastness give to the Pacific a peculiar charm, which changeful Orient seas, and even the turbulent Atlantic, never can impart.  Instinctively we stand uncovered in the presence of the mightiest ocean on our planet.  It is at once the symbol and the fact of majesty; and the appalling sense of trackless space which it inspires, the rhythm of unmeasured and immeasureable waves, together with the moaning of the surf upon the sand, at times completely overwhelm us with suggestions of the Infinite, until no language seems appropriate, unless it shapes itself in prayer.

[Illustration:  “A sea-bird fashioned by man’s hand.”]

[Illustration:  A lonely ocean.]

In Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, “Ramona,” the romance of this region has found immortality.  What “Romola” is to mediaeval Florence, “Ramona” is to Southern California.  It has embalmed in the memory of the nation a lost cause and a vanished race.  Less than one hundred years ago, where the Anglo-Saxon has since built railroads, erected manufactories, and created cities, a life was lived, so different in its character from all that followed or preceded it, that only a story like “Ramona” could make it appear real.  At that time about twenty “Missions”—­which were in reality immense ecclesiastical farms—­bordered the coast for seven hundred miles.  For when the New World had been suddenly revealed to the astonished gaze of Europe, it was not merely the adventurous conqueror who hastened to these shores.  The priest accompanied him, and many enthusiastic soldiers of