CHAPTER VI.
PASADENA.
"If there be an Elysium upon earth, It is this, it is this." For my own taste, I prefer Pasadena, the "Crown of the Valley"-- nine miles from Los Angeles, but eight hundred feet higher and with much drier air, at the foot of the Sierra Madre range, in the beauteous San Gabriel Valley.

Yes, Pasadena seems to me as near Eden as can be found by mortal man.
Columbus in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella said, "I believe that if I should pass under the equator in arriving at this higher region of which I speak, I should find there a milder temperature and a diversity in the stars and in the waters....

I am convinced that there is the Terrestrial Paradise." Poor persecuted Columbus! I wish he could have once seen Pasadena, the very spot he dreamed of.

Can I now write calmly, critically, judicially of what I see, enjoy, admire and wonder over?
If I succeed it will be what no one else has done.

I was here last year and gave my impressions then, which are only strengthened by a second visit, so that I will quote my own words, which read like the veriest gush, but are absolutely true, came straight from my heart, and, after all, didn't half tell the story.
I am fascinated and enthralled by your sun-kissed, rose-embowered, semi-tropical summer-land of Hellenic sky and hills of Hymettus, with its paradoxical antitheses: of flowers and flannels; strawberries and sealskin sacks; open fires with open windows; snow-capped mountains and orange blossoms; winter looking down upon summer--a topsy-turvy land, where you dig for your wood and climb for your coal; where water-pipes are laid above ground, with no fear of Jack Frost, and your principal rivers flow bottom side up and invisible most of the time; where the boys climb up hill on burros and slide down hills on wheels; where the trees are green all the year, and you go outdoors in December to get warm; where squirrels live in the ground with owls for chums, while rats build in the trees, and where water runs up hill; where anything unpleasant, from a seismic disturbance to mosquitoes in March, is "exceptional" and surprising.