あらすじ
"[...]likely, he did not intend to stay; but, having summered and wintered in California, he has become a Californian, and now he is not contented anywhere else. Life on the coast has, for him, something of the joyous irresponsibility of a picnic. The feeling of children released from school remains with the grown people. "A Western man," says Dr. Amos Griswold Warner, "is an Eastern man who has had some additional experiences." The Californian is a man from anywhere in America or Europe, typically from New England, perhaps, who has learned a thing or two he did not know in the East, and perhaps, has forgotten some things it would have been as well to remember. The things he has learned relate chiefly to elbow room, nature at first hand and "the unearned increment." The thing that he is most likely to forget is that the escape from public opinion is not escape from the consequences of wrong action. Of elbow room California offers abundance. In an old civilization men grow like trees in a close-set forest. Individual growth and symmetry give way to the necessity of crowding. Every man spends some large part of his strength in being not himself, but what some dozens of other people expect him to be. There is no room for spreading branches, and the characteristic qualities and fruitage develop only at the top. On the frontier men grow as the California white oak, which, in the[...]".