Between January 20 and April 20, 1892, a little girl named Noel wrote a series of remarkable letters to her cousins back East, describing all of the wonderful things she saw and did while spending the season at Hotel del Coronado in Southern California. Each one contains a lively watercolor by the family’s “Nurse,” a governess who gave Noel and her brother daily instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic. She wrote in a letter dated February 14, 1892: “This is the loveliest, biggest hotel you can imagine. It has ever and ever so many funny little windows and balconies like the big dovecote at Grandma’s. The hotel is white and has red roofs everywhere. The red and the white between the bluest sky and the bluest water is like a beautiful dream in a fairy story.”