with the sparkle of the waters. If one could imagine himself floating on the surface of a beautifully appointed parlor aquarium magnified a million times, he might conceive of the effects of Catalina harbor.

The island itself is a tawny mountainknoll of the sea, thronged during the summer by thousands of pleasure-hunters. The fishing there is like the Pacific itself, a thing immense. The jewfish, caught to make boneless codfish, weigh a quarter of a ton apiece, the leaping tuna is as big as a sheep, the little yellowtails are the size of codfish, the swordfish are a yard and a half long, the flying-fish are larger than mackerel, the goldfish are the size of trout, and the fishermen declare that it is only by hydraulic pressure that the sardines are made small enough to get into the can. All good Southern Californians, be they of Spanish or of other tongue, insist that when they die they wish to be of Los Angeles. And such is their local pride that the only reason they will admit as rational for any one to ever leave Los Angeles, whether it be to go to Paris or to Paradise, is because he cannot take it with him.

Already, with its 115,000 population, Los Angeles gives great promise of architectural excellence. Its most artistic buildings are of the Romanesque and the classical Renaissance. Its examples of Gothic architecture are not good. Its court-house, built of red sandstone, is a handsome building, admirably adapted to the purpose for which it is intended. Its city hall of pressed brick and red sandstone is imposing and beautiful, and its tower is the handsomest piece of architecture in Southern California. A score of handsome new business blocks give a modern, substantial, and rich appearance to the main thoroughfares. The city is especially noted, however, for its thousands of beautiful cottage homes.

Pasadena, whose limits touch those of Los Angeles, is noted more for its palatial residences, being notably the abidingplace of millionaires, and the wealthiest town per capita on the Pacific Slope.

In both towns the denizen, living mostly out of doors, is apt to build his home chiefly "to keep his things in " and look

VOL. XXXIV-6

at from the outside, for "all out-doors" is home here, and the gardens and improvements to the grounds often cost as much as or more than the house itself.

Throughout Los Angeles one notices an unusual number of small businesses and an extraordinary variety of occupations, due to the fact that much of the population is attracted here by the healthfulness of the climate, and each tries to follow the business he is accustomed to. Perhaps the most interesting of these to the tourist are the Chinese, Japanese, and curio stores. In the last, instead of Egyptian mummies, old suits of mail, Swiss alpenstocks, African war-clubs, and Esquimaux walrus-spears, one finds innumerable curiosities pertaining to the locality, -Navajo blankets, so close woven that water may be carried in them; Mexican sombreros, gaudy in color and ornamented with carved leather and precious metal,for to the Mexicano his sombrero is what the boots are to the Russian, often more costly than all the rest of his apparel. Then, too, there are the tarantulas, trapdoor spider-nests, and rattlesnake-skins; the ornaments and knick-knacks of yucca, redwood, orange, and olive woods; opals, quartz, and bright minerals; Indian weapons, and relics; photographs of scenery, of the missions and of odd natural formations. The photographs of this section are exceptionally good, because of the clear atmosphere. Tourists and travelers make a point of arranging to have their portraits taken here.

Perhaps the most intensely interesting display of this section, however, to those who have the acumen to detect it is the racial object-lesson presented by the people themselves; for here, segregated by the arid regions to the east and by the "Great Divide," by Mexico, with its foreign race and torrid temperature, to the south, the great Pacific to the west, and by the Tehachapi mountain range to the north, Southern California, with its tempered semi-tropic climate and soil of undreamt-of fertility, its peculiar racial conditions, and unusual industries, is working out a racial development all its own. Though all is fully Americanized now, one still meets the Mexican of Moorish mixture with his Spanish patois, his caballero

costume, his adobe dwelling-place, his burro, his tamale, frijoles, and chile con carne, and his childlike Catholicism learned at some one of the old California Missions, still preserved, the picturesque relics of the bygone regime. Following upon our acquirement of territories lately dominated by Spain, and while we are Americanizing them, this section presents in him and his successors an illustration of the inost important racial question facing the American nation to-day. It is especially well, therefore, at this particular time that the National Educational Association's convention should bring to Los Angeles teachers from every section of the land; for here upon this topic these educators cannot help but learn from their surroundings much that is untaught in books and which will be of cumulative value to the nation and limited only by the spread and repetition of their dissemination of it.

Here too, is one of the most populous American Chinatowns" outside of San Francisco, and frequent is the appearance in field, kitchen, laundry, factory, and shop, and on the street at all hours of the day or night, of the yellow-skinned, almond-eyed, pigtailed, rice-eating heathen. Tireless workers all of them, law-abiding and peaceful of disposition, neat of appearance, and quiet of demeanor, but given to gambling, opium-smoking, and if uncorrected, to even worse culinary arts than spreading the cinnamon upon the family breakfast roll by sprinkling it from his mouth. With these appear less frequently the little brown men of Japan, with their national passion for flowers and for despising utterly their pigtailed neighbors.

Nowhere in the United States thrive finer individual specimens of the negro than in Los Angeles, though they are not proportionately numerous here. Generally, they are fairly well-to-do, industrious, polite, and independent.

Certainly a most important racial question which is before us to-day is: What may we ourselves become under the conditions of racial intermingling and unusual climate, and the individual occupations incident thereto and generally untried of the Anglo-Saxon? And in Southern California this question seems to be answered in greater measure than in

any section of the globe; for here th Anglo-Saxon, in a climate without rigo on a soil of tropic fertility, is mingled as t race with aborigine, Oriental, and African and as to nationality with representative of every country in Christendom. Wha the coming type will be, is yet to be finall determined. Probably a peace-loving race studious, polite, fond of amusement, tal and finely formed.

Longevity is very noticeable, there but little baldness, and round shoulders ar not as often seen as elsewhere. Deformit is very uncommon and but two or thre dwarfs are to be seen among a hundre thousand people. Women and childre are particularly well developed and joyous It is a fact that people here of ten to twen ty-five years of age generally look olde than they are, while those of forty an upward, if healthy, generally look young

er.

This is doubtless due to quick devel opment in youth and good preservation 1 age, because of the healthful climate. Mexican died here last year aged a hun dred and eighteen years, and the numbe of people who have passed threescore an ten, and are living upon what Moody call "borrowed time," is remarkable.

"Los Angeles," says the typical Ange leno, "with the building of the Nicaragu Canal, will become the metropolis of th Pacific Coast. It has all its future befor it while that of most Western towns lie largely behind them. In 1898, we had population of 100,000. It has doubled i ten years, and in ten years more it wi double again, so that in 1908 we will hav 200,000." And he banks on this as if were in the Bible, and no argument ca budge him one inch away from it.

"Take railroad trunk-lines," he say as an American measure of communa commercial importance, present or futur and note that in a section comprising two thirds of the Union, where a single trunk line is a boon, and two insure the pros perity of a community, Los Angeles ha beside sundry local lines, three transcont nental railways, and will soon have fou Take the use of modern mechanism a another American criterion of communa status and progress. Electricity is th most modern source of mechanical powe generally accepted as such. In Los Ange

L

ITTLE PETE gave a long dolorous yawn, shook himself out of his bunk, stretched his short, thick body beatifically in a fusillade of cracking sinews,--and his day had begun.

Opposite the cabin-door, across the meadow, the huge granite dome was roseating with dawn. Delicate tints chased up and down in airy course and the formidable, stolid monster seemed to vibrate deliciously to the touch. The air was crisp and cold; a light translucent. vapory veil stretched in graceful, lazy folds in the hollow, dissolving slowly in diamond drops on the long meadow-grass. Low on the western horizon, trembling through the humid air, a big blue star hung like an immense tear.

Pete whistled shrilly, and from the bunch of animals grazing knee-deep in the wet grass, a mule detached herself. She trotted a few steps, then came on in more philosophic fashion, step by step, stopping occasionally to nibble a specially tempting shoot, approaching with an obedience tempered by the proper degree of deliberate independence. Pete greeted her with a caress and a piece of rock-salt, then saddled and rode away.

Little Pete was happy that morning. As he rode through the meadow, then up farther through the pine, rising desolately on the crumbled granite, he hummed martial songs-"La Marseillaise" and "Le Chant du Depart." Once with a smile, he caught himself on the "Ca ira," and a little later nearly fell out of his saddle in a paroxysm of tenderness while on the simple but grand hymn of "Mourir pour la Patrie."

It was the fourteenth of July, and away up from the California Sierras little Pete's heart tugged toward "la patrie "-the fatherland.

And there was another subject of contentment. He remembered his home in Provence, the simple, frugal life, and he mentally recapitulated his life. His old,

peasant father had had ambitions, had destined him for the priesthood.

"I would have given the absolution," muttered little Pete in evident keen enjoyment of the joke.

He had studied, gone to the lycée. Then the death of his mother, the remarrying of his father, and the rebellion of the hardheaded, warm-hearted lad against the stepmother. At sixteen he had run away, stowed away to America, to the land of gold. He allowed his thoughts to rest caressingly for a moment on his old father, so bent by the plow, so withered by the fierce struggle with earth. He felt some remorse, but bah! he, the father, had brought the cold stranger into the household. He was to blame. Still at the next opportunity Pete would write a few lines to the old man, gladden his heart with some news of his son; not too long a letter -that would be a capitulation-but just a few words and-yes, why not?-some little present from that wonderful Califor

nia.

He went on with the little cash-book of his life. Sixteen years old, without a cent he found himself in California. He had hired to a sheepman for board and a dollar a day. In three years he had saved six hundred dollars, and had learned the language. Yes, and he could write it bet ter than many Americans. And his handwriting-ah! that was his pride. Those Americans, they write all alike, with the uniformity of a printing press, but he, he had his own handwriting-he had formed it himself in France,-bold, characteris tic, with an immense "paraffe " to his sig. nature-Pierre Mireaux.

Now he was twenty-two, and he owned two thousand sheep, and he felt a certain pleasant self-contentment, and it was the fourteenth of July, and he hummed the "Marseillaise."

He rode up over a steep, smooth granite knoll and suddenly came up upon another meadow. The place was dark, yet hidder

from the rising sun by the jagged peaks embelting it. A white, fluffy, incoherent mass was huddled at the head of the meadow. At intervals a long shiver traversed the whole, like the heaving of the sea in the hazy morning on the shore. It was his herd of sheep, yet in their morning stupor, but awakening to their formidable and devastating appetite. By a smoldering fire, the herder, stiff, half-frozen with the cold, half-sleepless night, lay wrapped in his thin blanket. Taciturn, as most sheepmen, he answered with a grunt to Pete's cheerful "Bonjour! He rose, and shook his disheveled hair.

Suddenly from the far end of the meadow, two magnificent sheep-dogs came bounding, nearly knocking Little Pete down in a frenzy of greeting. Lean, alert, keeping their eyes on the sheep through all their demonstrations, they bounded off as suddenly, encircling the herd again in indefatigable gallop.

"Allons, rechauffe toi! [Warm up!] and little Pete untied a flask from the horn of his saddle and passed it to his ursine herder. "Tu sais c'est le quatorze Juillet, aujourd'hui-[Thou knowest 't is the fourteenth of July to-day!]"

Fourteenth of July! At these words a change came over the hirsute mute. A smile parted the dark bramble of his beard, giving a glimpse of a formidable cavity, lined with shark-like defenses. Then without a word he picked up his Winchester and shot off the magazine in a frenzy of detonating joy. A long shiver ran through the herd. A confusion of plaintive "ma-a-a-s," and then a furious panic sent them toiling up the granite slope. The dogs jumped in furious and multiplied attack. The herd rotated a dozen times as in vertigo, then cowed, terrorized by bark and bite, huddled back tremblingly to their assigned territory. The herder gave his report, one lamb astray, two taken with the rheumatism, but these would soon be well. The stray? well, he had heard the prolonged howl of the coyotes in the night, and then silence.

He was from Northern France and he prolonged his syllables in a monotonous but pleasant sing-song. Little Pete rolled his r's like a Gatling gun and struck out nis vowels as if beating them on an anvil.

And in the profound and hollow silence of the mountain air, the dialogue floated in fantastic music.

After careful instructions, Little Pete remounted and started back toward his cabin. The inspection of his herd had confirmed his contentment. Two thousand sheep! he would wait till he hadyes,-five thousand. Then he would sell and return to Provence, to the warm and pleasant country where one can say what he thinks, show what he feels, without being ridiculous; where one can laugh and weep and find others to laugh and weep with him out of pure sympathy.

The sun now bathed the meadow with a shower of golden light and Pete's heart gladdened one more degree as he saw before the cabin a column of smoke arising, airily mounting in rings and curls, turning in slow and graceful waltz. smoke meant breakfast, and Pete congratulated himself on the impulse which had prompted him to offer hospitality to Grim.

That

Grim had just finished his culinary task and was standing with his back to the fire, awaiting Pete. He was a long, lamentable consumptive, standing loosely in a pair of immense boots which seemed to cement him to the ground like a pedestal. Wan, thin, hollowed out by disease, he lived only on the tenacious belief that he was getting well.

They sat down to their meal. Little Pete started talking of the fourteenth of July and of the famous French Revolution; Grim more calmly but with equal persistence of the Fourth of July and the American Revolution, matching hero with hero, deed with deed; and finally the breakfast ended with a toast to Washington and Lafayette.

Then the little sheep-herder entered the cabin, rummaged in his chest, religiously brought to light an old, dilapidated edition of Michelet's Histoire de France, and launched himself on the splendid recital of the Revolution. At times he would spring up suddenly, pace up and down nervously, declaiming scraps of famous speeches in a formidable rolling of r's and detonation of vowels, striking up magnificent attitudes, thundering menace, defiance.