This little nickel will take you to a mountaintop overlooking city and
ocean, where you can sit under the Eucalyptus trees which shed
their bark instead of their leaves, and enjoy the music and the not
overmodest dramas, without extra charge.
The saloons, stores and theatres are open seven days and nights in
the week, and multitudes of all nationalities, clad in their peculiar
costumes, hobnob with each other in the most free and easy manner
imaginable, without waiting for introductions, in this the most
cosmopolitan city on earth.
Sometimes you will see the harbor literally covered with the most
delicious fruits and vegetables, dumped into the water, because the
transportation charges to market would more than eat up the proceeds
of their sale. I visited at San Jose, the large flourishing fruit
orchard of a college classmate who had spent years of hard labor and
the earnings of a lifetime, to bring his trees into bearing; but I
found he had deserted his ranch because he could not make a living
thereon, and had gone to preach for a little church far away, at five
hundred dollars per annum.
I saw at Riverside large crops of oranges frozen upon the trees;
but the real estate sharks never allow these facts to be published,
because they fatten on the profits made by selling lands to the
gullible "tender feet" from the east, who, when they have bought these
farms at enormous prices, find to their utter discouragement, that
they must also buy water for irrigation from monopolists, at ruinous
rates, else the soil is worthless.
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