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HE present writer is not a biased one. That she must proclaim at the outset. She is simply an observer whose unpretentious journeyings as a tourist across and up and down the American continent has made her observing, and she herewith bears testimony. Only that and nothing more.

Visiting frequently the two oceansand at various seasons of the year-one cannot but finally declare in favor of the California coast, assuming, of course, that recreation, physical comfort and quiet enjoyment are the purposes desired.

Florida has its manifest attractions with its magnificent hotels and its somewhat feverish splendor for three months of the winter season; the eastern coast its seasonable delights, but Monterey and Coronado, Pasadena and Santa Barbara, the luxurious Santa Clara valley and the inspiring Yosemite are continuous, perpetual and eternal in their attractiveness. Why not frankly speak of them, and why not proclaim the advantages of our own land instead of turning our eyes always toward Europe.

It has been asserted that the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire. The soul value of America cannot be said to take a high rank, either in our own or in the opinion of the watchful world, and if that assertion is true our fault may indeed be in the fact that as a nation we are so little given to admiring what belongs to us.

To be sure, as regards what is not our own, that is another story. But we are better critics than we are praisers. We take our pleasures rather hard. What we do is looked at in a spirit that searches to criticize rather than to admire. It is not seemly among us to both make the thing and praise it. Generally, more is said of the flaws than of the perfections. And we burn very little incense to the charms and beauties of this land of ours. It may be we haven't time. Innate,

though, is the appreciation of the dignity of nature in our mountains and seas and plains. And if we do not say much redounding to their fame and glory, we at least do not disparage, like that Englishman who, with customary miserable cleverness, called this a "great hulk of a continent that even the moon finds fatiguing to cross." It takes a foreigner to score another's country. Goldsmith, writing of Italy, through which he was traveling, remarked, "The only growth that dwindles here is man."

Most of the beauties of Europe are duplicated here. In our lakes, our rivers, our shores, our mountains. In no country in the world is there the great variety of climate to choose from as in ours. Every season is ours for the going to it; every breeze, every temperature, from the heat of the tropics to the cold of the Arctics; from the dryness of the mountains to the moisture of the sea. At any time of the year we need but to move backward or forward, northward southward to reach what the heart desires, or the body needs. There are the languorous islands of the south, with their shell-strewn beaches, the freezing north lands and the snow tunnels, the cool, shadowed mountains, the soft rivers that "drag their humid train," the deserts and their silence, the oceans and their noise.

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Look eastward and westward-from the rising to the setting sun, from one side of the country to the other, from the extreme of excitement to the extreme of serenity, from the turmoil of one coast to the peace of the other. On one side the ocean itself strikes hard, and in stress and opposition beats against the shore. On the other it bathes the land gently, like a mother humming a lullaby.

California is the dreamy, the beautiful, the land of peace and plenty, that began as most nations have their end, in frenzy, in greed, in violence. Until the phenomenon of '49 it was little known, was but an indefinite part of the great in

definite west, when like the cry of the new-born babe, the thunder shriek of gold startled the world and struck the madness of dissatisfaction into the hearts of the countless thousands. Then began the sorry march of the toilers, the dull rumble of the laden wagon trains crossing the long miles, with Death and Misery and Hope the incessant watchers.

Then the noisy days of labor, of bloodshed, of disappointments, of success, till the great plundering army turned homeward again, and California had emerged into importance, and the calm that follows the battle was upon it. To its rare corner of the earth now flocks a different army, lovers of peace and of beauty, going where the palm and the pepper trees flourish, where white mountains stand sentinel over beautiful green valleys, where flowers riot and seagulls whirl, where the great blue eye of an ocean peers watchfully up, and over the land. It is the most beautiful empire on God's fair earth. It is the home of the lotus eaters; there it is "always afternoon."

I know little of the commercial side of this lovely land, but I know it to be the one spot in America where gentle courtesy invariably prevails, while railway travel is made delightfully easy and comfortable; where women journeying without male escort are treated with the nicest consideration, and where the climatic conditions are more attractive, for the Anglo-Saxon at least, than the Riviera or any part of the Mediterranean coast. It is a land from which one ever regretfully departs. And in San Francisco is centered all the revelry and activity and excitement of the big western state.

It shows the energy of American people that the greater number centers where there is most to be done. Fancy a race of Puritans in California. It took the fierce forests, the cold winds from the sea, the rigors and the efforts of the sterner clime to mold great men. In New England they still bear the rugged. heritage left by a struggling people that was. In the west the crumbling Spanish missions, slowly disappearing in flowers, like babes in the woods, bear silent testimony of another fight, a noble and a brave, made, too, by purposeful men, but decay is marking their labors and soon

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only their legends will remain in the land they loved and redeemed.

When we leave California we do so with a sigh, a hope to return. As the little churches fall back helpless among the flowers, up hurry man's high temples on the other coast, which is his more rightful kingdom, and there the bricks take the place of the trees, and the smoky sky the clear blue one. There the people reign and here the roses.

We rest better in California, but we live better in New York. When the desire to be in the world and of it is upon us, 'tis toward the stirring, feverish east we turn, and then take up the fine chase of life and living with the rest of them, partake of the elegancies of the West End and "assist" at the bright summer show of Atlantic City. If of the elect we spin down to elegant Newport, which among its scores of advantages, in delicious self-satisfaction records, that it is just "sufficiently far from the vices of New York, and the virtues of Boston," to be exquisitely serene and comfortable.

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A resident of Colorado, I am as one who stands upon the mountain heights and looks eagerly upon both beckoning oceans. As a modest cosmopolite I find they are each alluring. From the summit of the Rockies they both appeal and appeal strongly. One is perhaps really home with its inherited affection as well as its garish splendor, its fashions, its frivols, its conventions, its commercial magnificance. The other is quietude, serenity, health, gentleness and future. comforts. Art on the one side, nature on the other, which will outlast?

"And who is king, today?" Greuze, the painter, would ask his daughter each morning during the great revolution in France. Then he would add: "Raphael and Homer will live longer than these temporary kings."

So the writer of all this, who has lounged about the coasts, finally concludes that peace and plenty are more lasting than brilliancy and strife. The gentle Pacific is better for true happiness and pure pleasure than the Atlantic can ever be. It is a decision made without prejudice or favor and its conclusion is not based on sentiment but rather against it, for after all, birth and heredity are powerful factors for final conclusion.

HE formation of the School Exten

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sion Society of San Francisco represents the organization here of a movement for the broadening of school activities and functions, which is already well under way throughout the country. New York, Chicago, Boston and several southern cities and towns, as well as San Francisco, have taken steps in this direction.

The formation of this society in San Francisco, and the initiation of a course of free evening lectures by the society in the Franklin Grammar School, followed closely upon the opening, in the same district, of the children's new playground by the Board of Education.

Those interested in the movement are working to bring about the extension of public school activities into important educational fields which they do not now cover. The practice of closing the school doors and yards at three or four o'clock

every day as well as Saturdays and holidays, and leaving a large and expensive educational plant idle for over one-half of the working hours of the day and evening, is not thought to be good public economy. Nor is it thought the part of wisdom for the municipality and state to neglect to exercise watchful supervision over the lives and growing characters of school children out of school hours and after they leave school.

The school extension movement is a protest against haphazard and limited educational methods on the part of the state, and a positive effort to bring about the adoption, as a part of public school policy, of broader ideas of what the school system might be and do. It is, therefore, a practical movement for wide social betterment on educational lines through the already existing public school system. The wise shaping, extension and strengthening, by natural evolutionary process, of