AUTHOR OF ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM, ETC.
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1893,BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
The typical Forty-niner, in alluring dreams, grips the GoldenFleece.
The fin-de-siècle Argonaut, in Pullman train, flees the Cold andGrip.
En Sol y la Sombra—shade as well as sun.
Yes, as California is. I resolve neither to soar into romance nor dropinto poetry (as even Chicago drummers do here), nor to idealize norquote too many prodigious stories, but to write such a book as I neededto read before leaving my "Abandoned Farm," "Gooseville," Mass. For Ihave discovered that many other travellers are as ignorant as myselfregarding practical information about every-day life here, and manyothers at home may know even less.
So let me say that California has not a tropical, but a semi-tropicalclimate, and you need the same clothing for almost every month that isfound necessary and comfortable in New York or Chicago during thewinter.
Bring fur capes, heavy wraps, simple woolen dresses for morning andoutdoor life; and unless rolling in wealth, pack as little as possibleof everything else, for extra baggage is a curse and will deplete aheavy purse,—that rhymes and has reason too. I know of one man who paid$300 for extra baggage for his party of fifteen from Boston to LosAngeles.
Last year I brought dresses and underwear for every season, and for avague unknown fifth; also my lectures, causing profanity all along theline, and costing enough to provide drawing-room accommodations for theentire trip.
Why did I come? Laryngitis, bronchitis, tonsilitis, had claimed me astheir own. Grip (I will not honor it with a foreign spelling, now it isso thoroughly acclimated and in every home) had clutched me t