will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant.  You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody.  And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain—­hail—­snow—­thunder and lightning—­anything to break the monotony —­you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better.  And the chances are that you’ll get it, too.

San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.  They yield a generous vegetation.  All the rare flowers which people in “the States” rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round.  Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses—­I do not know the names of a tenth part of them.  I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow.  And I have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it—­or flower of the Holy Spirit —­though I thought it grew only in Central America—­down on the Isthmus.  In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow.  The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it.  The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed.

I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco.  Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of Sacramento.  One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco—­but they can be found in Sacramento.  Not always and unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve years, perhaps.  Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe—­people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves.  It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter.  Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth.  The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time—­except when it varies and goes higher.  It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it.  There is a tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one.—­M.  T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,