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The Eden of Motorists

Ideal Tours that the Perfect Highways of the Pacific Coast Offers

Amid Spring Blossoms in the Picturesque Santa Clara Valley

By Helen M. Mann

HAT a wonderful motoring trip I

We passed one orchard where the

Whave had. I called for my friend, blossoms were still on the trees but the

Wilma, in the morning and my mind travels back over the road we took as I record it.

We got in Wilma's car and started on an adventure. Though we did not fall in love, elope, or do any of the ordinary, "adventure" things, still it was an adven

ture.

We hurried from San Francisco and soon got onto the highway and before we knew it, we had come to Stanford University. We did not stop for we had both seen it and we really did not have time. One never seems to have "time" when it is the only thing in the world that they really have.

Soon we came to the blossoms. The peach and cherry were mostly gone and the prune were well on their way, but what we saw of the pear trees were loaded with thick balls of white.

As we neared San Jose, in Santa Clara County about 50 miles from San Francisco, the sun became less bright and the country took on an etherial aspect. We stopped there for dinner, but as it was still light, decided to go on to Saratoga and spend the night there. To think that we might have missed that ride in the gloaming! The trees were so dainty in their half leaf, half blossom garb. The sky beyond was a soft blue white and it made the orchards look like Fairyland.

We passed one with half the blossoms still on the trees and the green leaves just starting and I said: "See the Fairies there," and on this side, turning to a grove of elms, where deep shadows danced between the sunlight; "over here are the Elves and Dwarfs. Can't you just see them?" and Wilma could.

wind and rain had washed many of them onto the brown earth so that it made a carpet of white.

Once, as we came to the most heavenly spot of dainty blossoms with a pearl grey sky behind, all shimmering in the half light of dusk, I said, "That is what poetry means to me, that is music, it is rhythm, color, it is art." On the other side were heavy trees with black bark and few blos

soms.

"That," I said, turning to it, "is most of the free verse of today." I have never seen such a typical example.

At last we came to Saratoga, a quaint little village nestled between the orchards, but it was not yet dark so we decided to drive on to Los Gatos. It was beautiful all the way. We came to a valley of prune trees that stretched on and on, till it met the pale blue sky, the fleecy clouds and mist-covered hills. All about us were blossoms, waves and clouds of fragrant white about us.

The trip back was beautiful but in a more "daylike" way. The blossoms had lost none of their fragrancy however, and once when we came to an orchard thick with white, we stopped for pictures—and I fear, to appropriate a few.

We had lunch put up, and then drove up into the hills. It was so warm and lazy and cumfy there. We lay and looked at the rugged hills with their oak trees, the birds sang cheerily above us, and behind, in the tall grass was a carpet of "blue and gold," though in reality the poppies were very orange and the lupins very purple. We picked great arms-full to take back to the city. Not singly did I pick them, but in bunches, hands-full.

THE EDEN OF MOTORISTS

307

Try as I would, I could not step without gether. Along the roadway, the railway, crushing some. through the valleys and far up into the hills stretched the lovely carpet of blue and gold.

On the way back we passed great fields stretching for miles and miles, solid with either yellow or purple or both. Sometimes it was the purple and mustard, which grows so lavishly out here; but mostly it was the lupin and poppy to

That night I could see nothing but soft white or bright fields of lupins and poppies. It is a wonderful country to be alive in.

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The Motorists' Eden-Amid the Blossoms of Santa Clara

Senatorial Sarcasm

It is Freely Indulged in at The Expense of Herbert Hoover

By Lemuel T. Anderson

UCH eulogy of Herbert Hoover as

Mnon-partisan candidate for Presi

Ident of the United States has appeared in print lately, and has been explained by his political opponents as evidence that his bureau of publicity is highly enterprising and efficient.

Propaganda in any cause invariably leads to counter propaganda. We find the rule exemplified by the printed criticisms of the former Food Administrator's candidacy, which are filtering into newspaper offices on the Pacific Coast, and no doubt those of all the other States.

One of the most personal of those uncomplimentary missives has appeared in the form of extracts from the Congressional Record, containing remarks of United States Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, on Mr. Hoover's disqualifications. Only a small part of the senatorial criticism can be given here as the verbatim report in the Congressional Record covered 16 pages. In part the Missouri Senator said:

If we adopt the League of Nations, he (Herbert Hoover) is the logical candidate for all parties indorsing that unAmerican scheme, to nominate. The League of Nations surrenders the sovereignty of the world to an organization which will be dominated by the British Empire.

If we have a British League of Nations, dominated by British votes, why not nominate Mr. Hoover, who all the years of his adult life has been a denizen and resident of Great Britain; who never yet cast a vote in the United States, unless he has done so since he came here in the capacity of nonofficial food dictator? Possibly for the purpose of qualifying for office, he has since voted.

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Great Britain, or in the British possessions all of that time. In his youth he was taken from America in the employ of a British syndicate which was operating in Australia.

It is said he made $10,000,000 before he was 30 years old. That now is advanced as a reason why he should be elected President of the United States. A get-rich-quick promoter is the kind of man we ought to have for President!

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If that is the supreme qualification, and we Democrats nominate Mr. Hoover, then I say to the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Lodge) that the only thing that can save his party from defeat is to nominate J. Rufus Wallingford (Laughter).

Senator Reed repeated a report that Mr. Hoover had recently purchased two newspapers. His ironical explanation was that Mr. Hoover desired to fight off the designing politicians who are intent on naming him for President.

To what estate has our country come when it can be seriously proposed that a man shall be nominated for President, who probably when he returned to America knew so little about our politics that he described himself as a "Liberal," and who today is so ignorant of public policies that even now he cannot tell whether he is a Democrat, a Republican, a Socialist, or a Populist; he apparently only knows that he wants to be President of the United States, and we are told he has $10,000,000.

To what estate has a country fallen -men out promoting their own candidacies, running for President, with no other qualification than the fact that they made money. About the least qualification in the world for President of the United States is that he has made a lot of money, and furthermore that he made it with phenomenal speed.

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