wooden ceiling, rudely painted. It is now a part of a flourishing collegiate institution. Across the way is a clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date; but we are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since we are going presently to Monterey, which has, as it were, a grand specialty of all that kind of thing.
The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate showing for their age, and can hardly be rated equal to New Haven elms, for instance. Behind them, along both sides of the road, are houses of a bourgeois comfort, as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth and leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder of their days in peace. The Coast Mountains, they say, cut off the fogs and winds of the ocean, and a higher range on the other side bars out the heats of the country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior refinement of taste and sentiment, the abodes of these particular ones. It is a pleasant conception, that of coming here to live for the pure physical delight in living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled with their air of superior distinction, as if they, for their part, had not quite so willingly consented to abandon a world of larger opportunities. But we do not succeed. Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah; and, after all, the desire to live a life of physical contentment does not imply taste in architecture and landscape gardening.
III.
One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness from these towns, of romantic "San" and "Santa," and "Los" and "Del," and feels rather ag-
