Besides Death Valley, California has another valley—but this is one of the loveliest valleys. It is called the Yosemite. It is a very deep trough, and streams of water fall over the edge into the trough from many high places. One of these falls turns to mist before it reaches the ground and looks like a huge veil of a bride, so it is called Bridal Veil Falls. Half a dozen of these waterfalls in the Yosemite Valley are higher than Niagara, and two of them tumble headlong a quarter of a mile from the top to the bottom of the valley, the highest falls in America—loveliest valley, highest falls; that makes two more ’ests .

California has, beside these ’ests, the sweetest oranges, the sourest lemons, the biggest grape-fruit, so they say, but they didn’t come from California; they went there. There were no oranges and no lemons growing in America at all before white men came to this country. The first white people to settle in California came from the country of Spain on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In Spain oranges and lemons grew, and the people from Spain, called Spaniards, brought over orange and lemon plants and started them growing in California and also in Florida.

The Spaniards built houses like those back in Spain, with white stucco walls and red tile roofs and with the “back yards” in the center of the house. They gave their cities Spanish names—Los Angeles, which means The Angels; and they named many of their cities after saints—San Francisco after St.Francis, Santa Barbara after St. Barbara—for many of the Spaniards were priests, who built mission churches up and down the land.

The City of the Angels is now the largest city on the Pacific coast. Near the City of the Angels is Hollywood, the greatest (another ’est) moving-picture place i. t. w. W. There are 365 days in the year, as you know, but in Hollywood they say the sun shines on 400 days a year—fairy-tale land! At any rate, the weather is fine most of the time for taking moving pictures. This is one reason why it is such a good place for making movies, but another is that there are so many different kinds of natural scenery near-by. If they want to make a picture of a ship scene or shipwreck, there is the ocean. If they want to make a picture of the desert with camels and Arabs, there is the seashore. If they want to make a picture in the hot countries, there are palms and flowers. If they want to make pictures of winter scenes, all they have to do is to go to the mountains near-by and there is snow and ice all the year round.