All the rare flowers which people in "the States" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round.

Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses--I do not know the names of a tenth part of them.

I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow.

And I have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit -- though I thought it grew only in Central America--down on the Isthmus.
In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow.
The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it.

The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed.
I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco.