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: ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new " Earthly Paradise," and would fit well into song such as William Morris has sung. It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of the earth. , The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life, during which not a municipal record of ajiy sort or kind was written, — "Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles," "Our Lady the Queen of the Angels ; " and her portrait made a goodly companion flag, unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain. There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully serving Church and King in sight of these fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason. In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shillyshallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the s... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.