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THE LAND OF WHYNOT

When Alice stepped through the looking-glass and ran out into that most alluring garden, she must have felt much as I did long ago when I stepped off the Santa Fe Limited and found myself in Southern California for the first time!  It isn’t just the palm trees and the sunshine, though they are part of the charm.  It isn’t even the mocking-birds and the orange blossoms altogether.  It is something you can’t really put your finger on, that lures you from your old habits and associations.  At first you are simply glad that you have left the cold and snow behind you, and that the earth is so sweet with flowers, and then you begin to find a new world of possibilities.  There are all sorts of little garden gates with golden keys on glass tables, and you set about growing shorter or taller, as the case may be, to make yourself a proper height to reach the key and slip through the door.  You don’t even need to hurry, if you are firm about not grasping the hand of any Red Queen that may come your way, and yet it isn’t a land of manana; it’s a land of “Why Not?” The magic has nothing to do with one’s age; I feel it now even more than I did twenty years ago, and Grandmother felt it at eighty just as I did at eighteen.  Ulysses could have himself lashed to the mast and snap his fingers at the Sirens, but I know of no protection against the Southwest except to somehow close the shutters of your imagination.  However, let me not be a Calvinist; because it is enchanting, why should I fear it?

I shall never forget my first experience of the spell.  I was invited by my Grandmother to go to California for several months.  There were four of us, and we were all tired, for one reason or another; Grandmother because she was eighty, and it’s a strenuous matter to live eighty years; my Aunt because she had been desperately ill; C. C. because she had nursed my Aunt back to comparative health, and I because I had been a debutante that winter, and every one knows that that is the hardest work of all.  We went as far south as the train would take us, and settled ourselves at Coronado to bask in the sunshine until the tiredness was gone and we became a band of explorers, with the world before us!  A pair of buggies drawn by nags of unblemished reputation for sagacity and decorum, driven by C. C. and me, carried us over many a picturesque and rough road.  It invariably took us all day to get anywhere and back, irrespective of what the distance was supposed to be.  The outfit was so old that I often had to draw up my steed and mend the harness with a safety-pin.  Trailing Ramona was our favorite game.  Fortunately for that part of the country, she and Allessandro managed to be born, or sleep, or marry, or die in pretty nearly every little settlement, ranch, or mission in San Diego County, and it’s a great boon to the country.  Now, of course, with a motor you can cover the ground in a day, but then, with a guaranteed horse and a safety-pinned harness, Ramona was good for weeks.