Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/363

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THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS.
343


XXIV.


THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS.


I.


I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.

It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. One of the most important districts for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and Marysville, north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five miles north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees in California. It is safe to assume, however, that all this will be found in the greater perfection as the low latitudes are approached.

San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and Southern California may conveniently be taken as all that part south of the seaport and metropolis. It was upon the area just below, around the Bay, that the Rev. Starr King lavished his most polished eulogies, describing the "flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile," which he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José, fifty miles down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should