Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/399

 SOUTHERN COUNTIES 341 Del Mar, 18 miles below Oceanside on the main rail and motor route to San Diego, deserves for the fair breadth of its view and its joyous climate the title, Monterey of the South. Cottages and a Merrie England inn are set on the edge of cliffs 200 feet high. Among the rifts of parti-coloured rocks the Torrey Pine, named for the noted nat- uralist, has its habitation. At only one other place, Santa Rosa Island, 100 miles north, is this puzzling tree to be found. Beyond Del Mar the train climbs through Rose Canyon to Linda Vista, from which unrolls a beautiful prospect of sea, orchards, undulating steppes, and mountains standing behind. Fifteen miles further on, San Diego greets us from her dais above the Harbour of the Sun. San Diego and Its Environs. By chance, a middle-aged furniture-dealer came from San Francisco about fifty years ago to the settlement near the junction of river and bay which was then the town of San Diego. His eyes had not been so dulled by dwelling on bureaux and chairs that he could not perceive the advan- tages of the site which the Bandinis, the Aguirres, the Estudillos and their neighbours ignored the rising plain whose shore line followed the curve of the best harbour within six hundred miles. And