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<p>Point Lobos was purchased a number of years ago by a Pacific Grove gentleman who had an eye for its rare beauty and grandeur, and who has built for himself a modest home on a green meadow at the entrance to the promontory. A small admission fee is charged for the Point, largely to exclude those who in former days, when the Point was free to excursionists, abused this privilege.
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<p>We have a new conception of our great country; her vastness, her varied scenery, her prosperity, her happiness, her boundless resources, her immense possibilities, her kindness and hopefulness. We are bound to her by a thousand new ties of acquaintance, of association, and of pride.
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<p>The Santa Clara Valley is one of the loveliest valleys of all California, and indeed of all the world. Set amid its orchards are tasteful houses and bungalows, commodious and architecturally pleasing; very different from the box-like farmhouses of the Middle West and the East. On either side rise high green hills. It is a picture of beauty wherever one looks.
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<p>At Santa Clara, on our way to San José, we stop to see the Santa Clara Mission, just at the edge of the town. All that remains of the first Mission is enclosed within a wall, the new church and the flourishing new school standing next to the enclosure.
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<p>Leaving San José, we were more and more charmed with the valley as we drove along through orderly orchards and past tasteful bungalows. This was the California of laden orchards, of roses and climbing geraniums, of green hills rising beyond the valleys, of which we had read. As we approached the foot hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains we looked back and saw the green valley with its ranks of trees unrolled below us. Passing through the little town of Los Gatos (The Cats), we began to climb. As we turned a curve on the winding mountain road, the green expanses of the Happy Valley were lost to view. We were coming now into the region of immense pine trees and of the coast redwoods, the Sequoia sempervirens. The road was fair but very winding, requiring close attention. We crossed singing brooks and passed wayside farms high in the hills, with their little patches of orchard and grain. We saw a big signboard indicating the two-mile road to the Montezuma Ranch School for boys, and shortly after were at the top of the grade. Then came the descent, the road still winding in and out among the forests. At the Hotel de Redwood, a simple hostel for summer sojourners from the valleys, we saw a magnificent clump of redwoods, around which had been built a rustic seat. At the foot of the hill we turned left instead of right, thus omitting from our itinerary the town of Santa Cruz and the redwoods of the Big Basin. We hope to see this noble group of trees sometime in the future. We took luncheon in a little at café at Watsonville. When I asked the young German waiter for steamed clams he said, "Oh! you mean dem big fellers!" From Watsonville, a bright little town, we drove on toward Salinas, making a detour which took us around the town instead of directly through it. We were crossing the green plains of the Salinas Valley, and before us rose the dark wooded heights of the famous Monterey Peninsula. On through the town of Monterey to Pacific Grove, a mile beyond, and we were soon resting in an ideal bungalow watched over by two tall pines. What a memorable week we spent at "Woodwardia"! A quarter of a mile to our right was the sea, whose sound came up to us plainly on still nights. Less than a quarter of a mile to our left were the forest and the beginning of the Seventeen Mile Drive. We took the drive once and again, paying the seventy-five cent entrance fee at the gate of the Pacific Improvement Company's domain, thus becoming free to wander about in the great wooded territory of the Peninsula. We took luncheon at the picturesque Pebble Lodge, where we had soup served in shining abalone shells, and where the electric lights were shaded by these shells. We halted in leisurely fashion along the Drive to climb over the rocks and to scramble up the high dunes, with their riot of flowering beach peas. They were ideal places to sit and dream with the blue sea before one and the dark forest behind. We photographed the wind-swept cypress trees, beaten and twisted into witchlike shapes by the free Pacific breezes. We watched the seals, lazily basking in the sun on the rocks off shore. We visited the picturesque village of Carmel, where artists and writers consort. We selected, under the spell of all this beauty, numerous sites for bungalows on exquisite Carmel Bay, where one might enjoy forever and a day the fascination of the sea and the spell of the pine forests.
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<p>The town of Palo Alto is a pretty little settlement, depending upon the University for its life.
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<p>The Lincoln Highway is already what it is intended to be, a golden road of pleasure and usefulness, fitly dedicated, and destined to inspire a great patriotism and to honour a great patriot.
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<p>A FOREWORD THAT IS A RETROSPECT
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<p>At San Mateo, a town with the usual shaven and parked immaculateness of highclass suburbs, we have luncheon in a simple little pastry shop. The woman who gaily serves us with excellent ham sandwiches, cake, and coffee, tells us that she is from Alsace-Lorraine. She and her husband have found their way to California. From San Mateo we drive to Palo Alto, where we spend some time in visiting Leland Stanford University. The University buildings of yellow sandstone with their warm red tiled roofs look extremely well in the southern sun. Here are no hills and inequalities. All the buildings stand on perfectly level ground, the situation well suited to the long colonnades and the level lines of the buildings themselves. It is worth the traveler's while to walk through the long cloisters and to visit the rich and beautiful church, whose restoration from the ravages of the earthquake is about completed. With its tiling and mosaic work, its striking mottoes upon the walls, and its fine windows, it is very like an Italian church.
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<p>We visited the Carmel Mission, now standing lonely and silent in the midst of green fields. A few of the old pear trees planted by the Mission fathers still maintain a gnarled and aged existence in an orchard across the road from the church. The church is a simple structure with an outside flight of adobe steps, such as one sees in Italian houses, running up against the wall to the bell tower. At the left of the altar are the graves of three priests, one being that of Father Junípero Serra, the founder of many of the Missions, the devoted Spanish priest and statesman who more than once walked the entire length of six hundred miles along which his Missions were planted. A wall pulpit stands out from the right wall of the church. The most touching thing in the empty, dusty, neglected little place is a partly obliterated Spanish inscription on the wall of the small room to the left of the main body of the church. It is said to have been painted there by Father Serra himself, and reads, being translated: "Oh, Heart of Jesus, always shining and burning, illumine mine with Thy warmth and light."
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<p>To turn out typewriters,<br />
To invent a new breakfast food,<br />
To devise a dance that was never danced until now,<br />
To urge a new sanitation, and a swifter automobile—<br />
Have the life-surging heavens no business but this?
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<p>I feared sublimity:<br />
I was a little afraid of God:<br />
Silence and space terrified me, bringing the thought of <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> what an irritable clod I was and how soon death </span><br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> would gulp me down... </span>
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<p>Why did you hate to be by yourself,<br />
And why were you sick of your own company?
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<p>Such the question, and this the answer:
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<p>But now myself calls me...<br />
The skies demand me, though it is but ten in the <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> morning:</span><br />
The earth has an appointment with me, not to be <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> broken...</span><br />
I must accustom myself to the gaunt face of the Sub-<br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> time...</span><br />
I must see what I really am, and what I am for,<br />
And what this city is for, and the Earth and the stars <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> in their hurry...</span>
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<p>This fear has reared cities:<br />
The cowards flock together by the millions lest they <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> should be left alone for a half hour...</span><br />
With church, theater and school,<br />
With office, mill and motor,<br />
With a thousand cunning devices, and clever calls to <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> each other,</span><br />
They escape from themselves to the crowd...
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<p>Oh, I have loved it all:<br />
Snug rooms, the talk, the pleasant feast, the pictures:<br />
The warm bath of humanity in which I relaxed and <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 3em;"> soaked myself:</span><br />
And never, I hope, shall I be without it—at times...
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<p>Rock roads and deep snow in the high Sierras were encountered and mastered, streams were forded and washouts passed, adobe mud into which the machine sank deep and became tightly imbedded failed to change the plucky operator's mind about crowding the motor eastward toward the hoped-for goal. It was the soft, shifting, bottomless, rolling sand—not so bad to look upon from car windows, but terrible when actually encountered— that caused the abandonment of the enterprise and resulted in the announcement by wire to eastern newspaper connections that the trip was "off."
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<p>Covering the North American continent from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic Ocean in an automobile has been attempted by Alexander Winton, president of The Winton Motor Carriage Company, of Cleveland. That the expedition failed is no fault of the machine Mr. Winton used, nor was it due to absence of grit or determination on the part of the operator. Neither was the failure due to roads. The utter absence of roads was the direct and only cause.
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