At first to an Easterner the summer landscape seems dry and dusty, but after living here one grows to love the peculiar soft tones of tan and bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the wonderful blues and greens of the water.  No one can do justice to the glory of that.  Sky-blue, sea-blue, the shimmer of peacocks’ tails and the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their madonnas, ever blend and ever change.  Trees there are few, the graceful silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps of live oaks, and on the coast road to San Diego the Torry pines, relics of a bygone age, growing but one other place in the world, and more picturesque than any tree I ever saw.  One swaying over a canyon is the photographer’s joy.  It has been posing for hundreds of years and will still for centuries more, I have no doubt.

Were I trying to write a sort of sugar-coated guide-book, I could make the reader’s mouth water, just as the menu of a Parisian restaurant does.  The canyons through which we have wandered, the hills we have circled, Grossmont—­that island in the air—­Point Loma, the southern tip of the United States, now, alas, closed on account of the war (Fort Rosecrans is near its point), and further north the mountains and orange groves—­snow-capped Sierras looming above orchards of blooming peach-trees!

Even the names add to the fascination, the Cuyamaca Mountains meaning the hills of the brave one; Sierra Madre, the mother mountains; even Tia Juana is euphonious, if you don’t stop to translate it into the plebeian “Aunt Jane,” and no names could be as lovely as the places themselves.  So much beauty rather goes to one’s head.  For years in the East we had lived in rented houses, ugly rented houses, always near the station, so that J——­ could catch the 7.59 or the 8.17, on foot.  To find ourselves on a smiling hill-top—­our own hill-top, with “magic casements opening on the foam”—­seemed like a dream.  After three years it still seems too good to be true.

They say that if you spend a year in Southern California you will never be able to leave it.  I don’t know.  We haven’t tried.  The only possible reason for going back would be that you aren’t in the stirring heart of things here as you are in New York, and the Times is five days old when you get it.  Your friends—­they all come to you if you just wait a little.  What amazes them always is to find that Southern California has the most perfect summer climate in the world, if you keep near the sea.  No rain—­many are the umbrellas I have gently extracted from the reluctant hands of doubting visitors; no heat such as we know it in the East.  We have an out-of-door dining-room, and it is only two or three times in summer that it is warm enough to have our meals there.  In the cities or the “back country” it is different.  I have felt heat in Pasadena that made me feel in the same class with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but never by the sea.