land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony.  Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces—­and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.  And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently.  Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when the longed for rain does come it stays.  Even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis——­

However there are varying opinions about that.

The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable.  The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round.  It hardly changes at all.  You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar.  Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.  You wear black broadcloth—­if you have it—­in August and January, just the same.  It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other.  You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans.  It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world.  The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you choose—­three or four miles away—­it does not blow there.  It has only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was.

During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls.  But when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella.  Because you will require it.  Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly varying succession.  When you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not—­you look at the almanac.  If it is Winter, it will rain—­and if it is Summer, it won’t rain, and you cannot help it.  You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens.  And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive—­you