It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that one returns again and again to the reality of Christian¹ feeling in the Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us—one of the most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion to illuminate² the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?  
There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding, snow-touched, virginal peaks, [28] visited and encompassed⁴ by the sacred spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little huddling⁵, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling⁶ fecund⁷ slopes, have in them something so richly maternal⁸; the virtue⁹ of the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the rain and sends it down laden¹⁰ with the rich substance of her granite¹¹ bosses, making herself lean to fatten¹² the valleys. The great gorges¹³ and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening glow, are wrought¹⁴ there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet even in the great avenues of palms that flick¹⁵ the light a thousand ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder¹⁶ of the host of bristling¹⁷, spiny¹⁸ growth the land once entertained. It is as if the sinister¹⁹ forces of the desert lurked²⁰ somewhere not far under the surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility, should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers must have felt these [29] two contending forces many a time when they lay down at night under the majestic²¹ Sierra, for they named the first spot where they made an abiding²² place, in honour of the protecting influence, Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles, Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. There she hovered²³, snow-whitened amid tall candles of the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable²⁴, and one of the things that go to show we are vastly more susceptible²⁵ to influences of nature than some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea, the most conspicuous²⁶ human achievement has been a new form of domestic architecture.
 
This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller: not the orchards²⁷ and the gardens, which are not appreciably²⁹ different in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy, but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability³⁰ to the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows³¹, in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they deserve a name as distinctive³² as they have in character [30] become. These little thin-walled dwellings³³, all of desert-tinted native woods and stones, are as indigenous³⁴ to the soil as if they had grown up out of it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant³⁵ roots. With their low and flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness³⁶ to the aboriginal³⁷ dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered³⁸ like wasps³⁹' nests among the chaparral along the river,—which is only another way of saying that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
 
One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago turned into an irrigating⁴⁰ ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate⁴¹ such natural boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak⁴² of original desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it receives the name of arroya, and even arroya seca as against the rio of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A rio is chiefly water, but an arroya, and especially that one which travels farthest from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most [31] seasons of the year a small trickle⁴³ of water among stones in a wide, deep wash, overgrown with button willow⁴⁴ and sycamores that click their gossiping leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the spring freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars come up between the boulders⁴⁵ worn as smooth as if by hand.
 
Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows⁴⁶, alders⁴⁷, and rock maples⁴⁸, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for trout⁴⁹. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that cinnamon bear and grizzlies⁵⁰ tracked the wet clay of its borders. This is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in the least likely to prove enervating⁵¹; men and beasts, they run pretty much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
 
All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and swift surprises as a discreet⁵² woman reveals her charms. This renders it one of [32] the most delightful⁵³ of motoring countries. The car swings over a perfect road into snug⁵⁴ little orchard²⁸ nooks as safe and secret seeming as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber⁵⁵ desertness, which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white, peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves⁵⁷, or the orderly array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and scuttle⁵⁸ mysteriously under the cactus⁵⁹ bushes, and dried seeds of the megarrhiza rattle⁶⁰ with a muffled⁶¹ sound as the pods blow about. Here one meets occasionally the last survivors⁶² of the old way of life before men found it: neotoma, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of rubbish; or a road runner, tilting⁶³ his tail and practising his short, sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the lurking⁶⁴ desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the sand, not dead, but drowsing.
 
 
A EUCALYPTUS⁶⁵ GROVE⁵⁶
 
As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's land give [33] place to airy violets, fawns⁶⁶, and rich ambers. It is curious, that obstinate⁶⁷ preference which a locality has for colour schemes of its own adoption⁶⁸; man can break up and re-form them, but he can never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued⁶⁹ by the aerial softness that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been sheared⁷⁰ by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes of orange, distilled⁷¹ from the saps and juices of the soil.
 
One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated landscape has gathered up and fixed⁷² the evanescent greens that spread thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus. All the tints⁷³ are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to the sombre darkness of the evergreen⁷⁴ oak; young shoots of it have the silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite to such a degree the air of the habitué; one [34] wonders indeed if it could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
 
It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing⁷⁵ lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if by conscious harmonious⁷⁶ movement. The pepper tree, however, most magnificent specimens⁷⁷ of which may be found lining⁷⁸ the avenues of Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping⁷⁹ grace, in the careless prodigality⁸⁰ with which it sheds its fragile crimson⁸¹ fruits. Something of old-worldliness persists in its spicy⁸² odours, and in the stir of its lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind is moving, there is the touch of mystery one [35] associates with lovely señoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and with them will cease to be a feature of local interest.
 
There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles. The last time I passed through the old plaza⁸³, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east, and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley⁸⁴. The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading inscription⁸⁵ from which the city takes its name, was never a mission, but one of the six chapels⁸⁶ or asistencias centred about the Mission San G............