A CALIFORNIA BEACH 



It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to make 

 some of our knowing Eastern friends believe 

 that any spot in southern California can be com- 

 fortably cool in summer. "No need to talk to 

 us," they say with an air of finality, as if logic 

 were logic and there were an end of it ; " if it is 

 warm there in winter, it must be insufferably hot 

 in summer." 



Well, it is moderately warm here in winter, so 

 warm, at all events, that the gardens, in spite of 

 frequent frosts (the roofs thickly white, it may 

 be, morning after morning for weeks together) — 

 the gardens, I say (and this is one of the Califor- 

 nia mysteries; I wish somebody would explain 

 it), are bright with a profusion of delicate semi- 

 tropical flowers, fuchsias, begonias, poinsettias, 

 and a hundred more, all in the freshest of condi- 

 tion, the whole season long ; and for all that, and 

 though there is no gainsaying that logic is logic, 

 a really hot day in summer is one of the rarest 

 of happenings. Day after day we fortunate Bar- 

 baranos read of deadly heats throughout the 

 East 1 and " Middle West," and day after day 

 and week after week, through June, July, and 



* Five hundred and odd prostrations in a single day was the 

 word a Boston newspaper brought me within a week. I have 

 yet to hear of the first one in Santa Barbara; but, of course, 

 logic is logic. 



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