FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



Its neighborliness — some of the higher summits 

 being not more than five or six miles away — and 

 its almost semicircular sweep make it in a pecu- 

 liarly intimate sense our own. Live here for a 

 year or two, and you will feel it so. It stretches 

 its arms about the city and the beach, and, as it 

 were, holds them in its lap. 



And then, straight out at sea, loom the islands, 

 Anacapa, Santa Cruz, and Santa Rosa, all of 

 which, standing in a line, are but severed parts 

 of another mountain range, under water still ex- 

 cept for these higher summits. Santa Cruz, the 

 nearest and highest of the three and the one 

 directly south of the city, is said to be twenty 

 miles distant, though in a favorable light you 

 might guess it to be less than half as far, and 

 twenty miles long, with a maximum altitude of 

 about twenty-four hundred feet. Scored from end 

 to end with deep, rugged canons, in which shadows 

 nestle, especially when the morning sun strikes 

 along it lengthwise, the reader must be trusted 

 to imagine for himself how much it adds to the 

 charm of our fair Santa Barbara world as one 

 saunters along the edge of the breakers on a 

 clear, sunny day, with the softest of airs moving 

 in from the ocean, and the temperature gradu- 

 ated on purpose for human comfort, such a day as 

 we have month-long successions of in every year. 



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