AN INVITATION OUT OF DOORS. 



afterward, and they are the most loyal of all Americans because they love 

 their own State and exhibit their devotion to California to a degree not 

 known elsewhere. 



So California invites all the world to share with it in whatever it has 

 been endowed by nature. 



An Invitation Out of Doors 



CHARLES KEELER 



HE song of the open road, the lure of the wild, the cry of out of 

 doors has been the sanest, most hopeful, most reassuring, 

 amid all the notes of this feverish latter day of city herding and 

 scrambling for gold in the crowded market places. Over 

 against the tenement and apartment houses of the metropolis 

 we see the vision of the country home. In lieu of cobblestones 

 and asphalt is the pavement of sward and flowers. Clanging bells and rat- 

 tling wheels yield precedence to the glad bird-voices and the stately rustle 

 of the wind in forest trees. In contrast to the strife of the city is the sedate 

 life on the farm, where a man may be master in his little domain, sowing 

 and reaping, gathering his fruit and making a living from the increase of his 

 flock and herd. 



All men, to be sure, are not adapted to a pastoral life. Many need the 

 stimulus of the crowded city. Some would die of inanition and loneliness 

 if the hurly-burly of the city were no longer about them. But the broad 

 fact remains that economists have come to look with grave concern on the 

 growing tendency of men to crowd into the cities. Back to the soil, back to 

 nature, is the warning cry to-day. 



In few lands is the invitation of the out of doors so alluring as in Cali- 

 fornia. Everywhere in this favored region there is a bigness in the landscape 

 that takes hold of men's imagination. The grandeur of the mountains, 

 the far sweep of purple valleys, the Pacific Ocean, thundering down the long 

 reach of coast, the mighty forest trees, the strange fascination of the desert 

 — what interminable wealth of beauty is to be had here by all who will but 

 walk in the open! And yet we are by no means availing ourselves to the 

 fullest of this bounty. We are not even conserving that which is our most 

 precious heritage — our forests. In our unwisdom we are training hundreds 

 of our finest youths to delve in the ground for precious metal that would 

 last as long as the foundations of the earth, and leaving our forests to the 

 unskilled and unloving care of lumbermen, who hew and burn and devastate 

 to-day, caring nothing for the ruin of to-morrow. There is no more pressing 

 need in California at the present time than a school of forestry at the State 

 University and an awakened public sentiment on the irreparable loss we are 

 sustaining in the wanton destruction of our timber. 



In California there are vast tracts of fertile valley land untenanted. We 

 need people to cultivate the resources of the country. We need a rural popu- 

 lation. But this settling of the wild places does not necessarily involve a 

 ruin of all natural beauty. The modern farmer is a man of more education 

 than his prototype of an earlier generation. He has learned among other 

 lessons that there are things to be gotten out of a rural life other than pigs 

 and potatoes, and that chief among these insubstantial gains comes from 

 an enjoyment of the beauty of nature. 



Compartively little thought has thus far been given to making the farm- 

 house a beautiful building — beautiful in its fitness to the landscape, in its 

 reserve of color and harmony of lines. A building of natural rough stone or 

 of unpainted wood, if made with broad, simple sweep of roof, wide eaves, 

 and windows broken into panes of small size, the whole building setting 

 low upon the ground, cannot fail to be picturesque. In such a farmhouse, 

 adorned with vines and flowers, sheltered by clumps of shade trees and sur- 



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