IT IS now early in May as I write, and the weather is more like the usual California March than in any season I remember. June time will be the "one perfect spring-tide," so late and long were the winter rains. The land was full of wild flowers many weeks ago, but the skies have been too changeable for long expeditions into the hills ; the rains are only now ceasing in light, warm showers and mingled sun and cloud. In February, though the long southern slopes of the foothills that border our valley, were sweet and elastic with wild oats and grass growing ever since the first November rains, yet there was too much cold and dampness to justify picknicking or long explorations for the first flowers of the season. One chose, instead, to climb the vast rock-masses that project from the mountain sides like the old "hill-forts" of forgotten tribes of men, for here in the moist, warm crevices are the earliest flowers of the year, white blooms of wild strawberry, and glistening flames of the California poppies.

When April came this year, it began with sunshine, and soon there were more flowers in bloom in the valleys and on the hills than in any year I remember since the spring that followed the famous "wet winter" of 1861-62. But after a week of sunlight came another rain, and then more sunshine, and gentle spring showers, such as California does not often have, and grasses, clovers and wild flowers that had almost disappeared from our district, were seen once more, as in the pioneer days before a plow had been started in Alameda.

As April closed and may began, the especial charms of this marvelous year of great rains and luxuriant growth were such as to impress even old Californians. "Where have all the new flowers come from ?" asks my neighbor who came here only a few years ago, and is planting a young orchard in an old long-pastured field. I cannot quite understand it myself, this sudden appearance of wild bulbs and annuals in the valley where they have not been seen for at least 20 years. They must have "held on " all this while, in hidden corners that plow and scythe could not reach, under fences where the most nomadic heifer was unable to crop them, or else the seeds must have lain unsprouted through ordinary seasons, to spring to life in this year of extraordinary rains. It is not only that the hill-pastures are rosy with dodecatheons, brown and golden with wild violets, snow white with gillias, blue with the heavenly azure of nemophilas and the darker shades of larkspurs ; but these, and an infinite multitude of others, are down in the orchard-planted valley, not in hosts, to be sure, but in shy and beautiful groups, conscious that only once or twice in a quarter of a century can they again blossom in the lovely valley where of old they covered hundreds of acres.

On the creek-bottom pastures are "cream cups," lupins and eschscholt-zias now, very rich and glowing, over a few acres ; forty years ago, the whole valley, containing a hundred square miles, was white, golden, rose-colored, purple, azure, in mile-wide masses of color at this April-May season.

I remember it thus in my childhood, when one could gather fifty or sixty different species of wild flowers on the old valley-farm; when they were weeds in the wheat fields, and even grew unplanted in the little garden plot where lilacs and roses were set. Alas! we sowed and tended many a loudly-advertised " novelty" that was not half so fair as the collinsias and pentstemons that were natives of the generous soil.

In the rich southern counties the roads begin to be dusty; here in central California they are in perfect condition ; further north they are yet hard to travel, and will be for a month longer. On the lowlands farmers are sowing barley and planting potatoes; on the uplands the barley fields have already headed out, and hay cutting has fairly begun. The rivers of the Coast Range, such streams as the Trinity, the Gualala, Russian, Sonoma, Pa-jaro, San Lorenzo, Salinas, and all the rest clear down to San Diego, are clear as crystal, and yet full-flowing and strong, while on their banks tangle wilder growths of grape vines, clematis and azalea than for 20 years past. The greater and wilder rivers of the Sierras, that flow down from snow height and glacier to the lowland plains, are full to the brim. Such famous rivers as the Merced, Mariposa, Calaveras and Chowchilla, whose very names are musical, sweep past pink-blossomed apple orchards and golden-fruited orange groves, and if one climb upward along their courses, he will soon.

An Old-Fashioned Countryside #1

45* find early spring, and then winter, still clinging to the mountains. Forty miles east of the orange groves of Oroville, the snow still lies deep on the ground, and the grass blades are still under the sod. It will be July on these high, forest-covered ridges before the bloom-season comes, but how wonderful and exquisite a season it is no one can possibly explain to others. There, in the Sierras, above the line of wheat fields, the wild gardens long lost to the valleys will doubtless remain for years to come.

The gardens that men have planted in these coast range valleys are at their best now. I hesitate to attempt to describe the fullness of their bloom, lest the reader refuse to believe it. Near where I write are yucca stems eight feet high, the flower spike occupying half that, and containing so many flowers that no one has yet had the patience to count them. The Banksia roses, white and yellow, climbing to the roof together, and the white La Marques, have just been photographed to keep at least a suggestion of the vast mound of bloom, and the trailing rose-set branches that touch the ground as if drops were falling back from a swiftflowing rose-fountain as large as an ordinary cottage. Orange flowers whiten the trees, where yellow fruits, still ungathered, shine through the leaves. The snowball tree is raining its multitudinous petals on the lawn, and the Japanese quince hedge is still scarlet, though it has been blooming since January. The tulip tree's lovely flowers of delicate golden and translucent greens are breaking out of their spindle-shaped sheaths.

The Japanese pseonies are past their prime, but the Japanese maples are so brilliant that they shine in the midst of the shrubberies like giant tulips from some Saturnian garden, rose-tinted and scarlet, growing among the dark green and pale golds of acacia and lemon tree, and tall feathery sprays of bamboo.

As one walks along the country roads and pathways this perfect spring weather, it is evident that some of one's neighbors are suffering keen and well-deserved regrets. Now is the time when the lazy man who has planted no garden, and has neglected his peas with no excuse, and has failed to sow his peppers and serenely tend his doubtfully fragrant tomatoes, begins to feel the stings of conscience and the premonitory pangs of retribution. It serves him right! Well he knew, months ago, that the rains would cease and the sunshine come, in which pea-blossoms would swell into fair round pods, turnips wax large, beet-leaves grow purple, and the whole garden become a dividend-paying institution. The unhappy, gardenless, dilatory, and envious householder can only go out and take note of these omissions, make horticultural resolutions of scope and dignity for another year, buy his vegetables, and haggle with the basket-laden Chinaman, Happy for him if he has a lawn and flower garden, in which are roses white, creamy, pink, crimson, blooming in all their nameless combinations, until his vegetarian peccadilloes are no more remembered.

The man who comes to California from some more rigorous climate is usually the one who worships most ardently in the temple of Flora, and plants with broader and more liberal plans for the future. The old settlers in this quaint country-side never make any effort to utilize the soil and climate to their fullest extent. Years ago oranges, olives, lemons, palms were planted by a few farmers, and they have grown and thriven greatly. But almost everyone else has planted just what he happened to know best, in New England, or New York, or the west, or the south, and so one finds a staid and settled aspect here that hardly another district in all California possesses. One knows at once, without a question, that these farmers settled down in 49, and have lived here ever since, and that they are contented and prosperous, so that there is no land to sell, no "boomers" laying out town lots in the quiet little villages, no anxiety to have the rest of the world hear of the region. On the whole, this utter unconsciousness of any existence outside this broad, peaceful valley is the strongest characteristic of its people.

It is within thirty miles of San Francisco, and all around it farms are being "subdivided and put on the market," but along these old lanes the ancient pastures are being set in orchard by the pioneers themselves, and they will reap the returns. Perhaps it is a strong infusion of the New England elements that has chiefly developed this refreshingly conservative society, but to whatever cause it may be attributed, it seems likely to long continue to be prosperously old-fashioned and a conspicuous ornament to western America.

Indeed the district has not the smallest ambition to become suburban and full of cottages, summer boarders from the city, and town-lots built on by young clerks and daily train-goers. Everywhere else, where the distance and natural resources will permit, the one delicious hope of the country-side is to be "discovered" by the newspaper man and the real estate speculator. When these come to southern Alameda, the ancient "Vallede San Jose " of the Mission Fathers, they find that everyone beams with, unbroken content, and will not pay five cents for a "boom" that would build a thousand new houses a year. Small farms of from ten to forty acres are becoming the rule now, as the old settlers divide them among their children, and their is today less than a hundred acres of land that can be bought in all the region, and that in small, scattered parcels. This is an unusual story for California, of which the late Professor Henry Norton of the State Normal school once wrote that "no other State in America was so much for sale from end to end and side to side." For that very reason, this is perhaps the better worth putting on record.

Charles Howard Shinn.

Alameda Co., California.