Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SAN DIEGO COUNTRY That of San Diego (Dee-ay'-go) which lingers most lovingly in my memory is what San Diegans call Old Town — the crumbling adobe precinct seen on the left from the car windows, a mile or two before the train pulls into the smart new station of to-day. Old Town is hopelessly out of date, with a frowsy litttle plaza where Mexican children play in excited Spanish, an ancient cannon or two, a few date palms of Padre Serra's time, and a dozen adobe houses in various stages of dilapidation — all except one, whereof more anon. Yet Old Town, for all its poverty, is rich in one matter that its big American daughter, modern San Diego, around the curve of the hill, is lacking in — that is, history. For here at Old Town in 1769 was planted the first flower of white civilization on the United States' Pacific Coast, watered painfully for years and fertilized with some blood. On the hill at its back stood the first presidio in California,1 and hardby, the first of the Missions of Serra's founding. Of the presidio, all trace is gone, but the site of the Mission is marked still by some indistinct remains and a memorial cross built of remnant tiles and imprisoned within a hideous iron railing, to save the memento (O the pity of it!) from Twentieth Century American vandals. It was Old Town, too, that was the San Diego of Richard Henry Dana, who had some adventures here as narrated in " Two Years Before the Mast," and it was here in Old Town that the marriage of Ramona and Alessandro was staged by Mrs. Jackson in her perennial romance. Principally to this fact, I believe, is due the present interest of the tourist public in Old Town; and the street cars that run thither every fifteen minutes are prominently labeled " Ramona'sMarriage Place." They land you a...