At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten minutes while travelers descended and partook of the vilest tasting waters that nature might boast in all California. Shasta spring water is supposed to be mightily beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience with spring waters has been that their benefits have existed in an inverse ratio to their pleasantness of taste. But if Nature had given her benefactions to Shasta a sort of Spartan touch, she has more than compensated for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their setting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. The railroad performs earthly miracles to land a passenger in front of them. It descends a vast number of feet in an incredibly short length of track--the conductor will reduce these to cold statistics--and your idea is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the base of the lowest leg of this hair-pin is the spring, set in a deep glen, the mossy banks of which are constantly adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving waterfall, even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. The whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly different--a bit of Swiss scenery root-dug and brought to the West Coast of the United States.
After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, fascinating canyons to be threaded for many miles besides the twistings of a melancholy river, then--of a sudden--open country, farmers growing green things, ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles plowing them dustier still, little towns, more ranches--everything in California from two to two million acres is a ranch--then a grinding of air-brakes and your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red-covered time-table to locate the station upon it. As for you, you don't care about what station it really may be. It is a station. You are sure of that. There is the familiar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept lawn that abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and the palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense of your mentality.
This is the real California. The mountains have already become accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland, a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants--December, January and February--and calls itself summer the whole year round.