ancestry. The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave, deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or to try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already grown old in the hands of the Spaniards—younger sons of hidalgo and many of them of the best blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers intermarried with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little colony here and there, the old, aristocratic Spanish blood is sunk in that of the conquering race. Then there was an influx of intellectual French people, largely overlooked in the histories of the early days; and this Latin leaven has had its influence.

Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to meet and to know.

Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off from any other population of the country. This sense is almost Latin in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood. The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern California has been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle West and is Eastern in character and feeling.

Almost has the Californian developed a racial physiology. He tends to size, to smooth symmetry of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage; and the beauty of his women is not a myth. The pioneers were all men of good body, they had to be to live and leave descendants. The bones of the weaklings who started for El Dorado in 1849 lie on the plains or in the hill-cemeteries of the mining camps. Heredity began it; climate has carried it on. All things that grow in California tend to become large, plump, luscious. Fruit trees, grown from cuttings of Eastern stock, produce fruit larger and finer, if coarser in flavor, than that of the parent tree. As the fruits grow, so the children grow. A normal, healthy, Californian woman plays out-of-doors from babyhood to old age. The mixed stock has given her that regularity of features which goes with a blend of bloods; the climate has perfected and rounded her figure; out-of-doors exercise from earliest youth has given her a deep bosom; the cosmetic mists have made her complexion soft and brilliant. At the University of California, where the student body is nearly all native, the gymnasium measurements show that the girls are a little more than two inches taller than their sisters of Vassar and Michigan.

The greatest beauty-show on the continent was the Saturday afternoon matinee parade in San Francisco. Women in so-called "society" took no part in this function. It belonged to the middle class, but the "upper classes" have no monopoly of beauty anywhere in the world. It had grown to be independent of the matinees. From two o'clock to half-past five, a solid procession of Dianas, Hebes and Junos passed and repassed along the five blocks between Market and Powell and Sutter and Kearney—the "line" of San Francisco slang. Along the open-front cigar stores, characteristic of the town, gilded youth of the cocktail route gathered in knots to watch them. There was something Latin in the spirit of this ceremony—it resembled church parade in Buenos Ayres. Latin, too, were the gay costumes of the women, who dressed brightly in accord with the city and the climate. This gaiety of costume was the first thing which the Eastern woman noticed—and disapproved. Give her a year, and she, too, would be caught by the infection of daring dress.

In this parade of tall, deep bosomed, gleaming women, one caught the type and longed, sometimes for the sight of a more ethereal beauty—for the suggestion of soul within which belongs to a New England woman on whom a hard soil has bestowed a grudged beauty—for