San Franciscans, their fruits and their falsehoods—Their neglect of opportunities—A plague of flies—The pig-tail problem—Chinamen less black than they are painted—The seal rocks—The loss of the Eurydice—A jeweller's fairyland—The mystery of gems.
SOMEBODY has poked fun at San Francisco, by calling it the "Venice of the West," and then qualifying the compliment by explaining that the only resemblance between the two cities is in the volume and variety of the disagreeable smells that prevail in them. But the San Franciscans take no notice of this explanation. They accept the comparison in its broadest sense, and positively expect you to see a resemblance between their very wonderful, but very new town, and Venice! Indeed, there is no limit to the San Franciscan's expectations from a stranger.
Now, I was sitting in the hotel one day and overheard a couple of San Franciscans bragging in an off-hand way to a poor wretch who had been brought up, I should guess, in New Mexico, and calmly assuring him that there was no place "in the world" of greater beauty than San Francisco, or of more delicious fruit. I pretended to fall into the same easy credulity myself, and drew them on to making such monstrous assertions as that San Francisco was a revelation of beauty to all travellers, and the perfection of its fruit a never-ceasing delight to them! I then ventured deferentially to inquire what standard of comparison they had for their self-laudation, what other countries they had visited, and what fruits they considered California produced in such perfection. Now, it turned out that these three impostors had never been out of America: in fact, that, except for short visits on business to the Eastern States, they had never been out of California and Nevada! I then assured them that, for myself, I had seen, in America alone, many places far more beautiful, while "in the world" I knew of a hundred with which San Francisco should not venture to compare itself. As for its fruits, there was not in its market, nor in its best shops, a single thing that deserved to be called first-class. From the watery cherries to the woolly apricots, every fruit was as flavourless as it dared to be, while, as a whole, they were so second-rate that they could not have found a sale in the best shops of either Paris or London. The finest fruit, to my mind, was a small but well-flavoured mango, imported from Mexico. Its flavour was almost equal to that of the langra of the Benares district, or the green mango of Burmah; and if the Maldah was grafted on to this Mexican stock, the result would probably be a fruit that would be as highly prized in New York and in England, as it is all over Asia. But very few people in San Francisco ever buy mangoes. "No, sir," I said at last to the barbarian who had been imposed upon; "don't you believe any one who tells you that San Francisco is the most lovely spot on earth, or that its fruits are extraordinary in flavour. San Francisco is a wonderful city; it is the Wonder of the West. But you must not believe all that San Franciscans tell you about it."
It is a great pity that San Franciscans should have this weakness. They have plenty to be proud of, for their city is a marvel. But it has as yet all the disadvantages of newness. Its population, moreover, is as disagreeably unsettled as in the towns of the Levant. All the mud and dirt are still in suspension. I know very well, of course, that improvement is making immense and rapid strides, but to the visitor the act of transition is, of course, invisible, and he only sees the place at a period of apparent repose between the last point of advance and the next. He can imagine anything he pleases—and it is difficult to imagine the full splendour of the future of the Californian capital. But this is not what he actually sees. For myself, then, I found San Francisco as so many other travellers have described it, disorderly, breathless with haste, unkempt. Here and there, where trees have been planted, and there is the grace of flowers and creeping plants, the houses look as if rational people might really live in them. But for the vast majority of the buildings, they seem merely places to lodge in, dak-bungalows or rest-houses, perches for passing swallows, anything you like—except houses to pass one's life in. They are not merely wooden, but they are sham too, with their imposing "fronts" nailed on to the roofs to make them look finer, just as vulgar women paste curly "bangs" on to the fronts of their heads. There is also an inexcusable dearth of ornament. I say inexcusable, because San Francisco might be a perfect paradise of flowers and trees. Even the "weeds" growing on the sand dunes outside the city are flowers that are prized in European gardens. But as it is, Francois Jeannot,—"French gardener, with general enterprise of gardens," as his signboard states,—has evidently very little to do. There is little "enterprise of gardens." Yet what exquisite flowers there are! The crimson salvia grows in strong hedges, and plots are fenced in with geraniums. The fuchsias are sturdy shrubs in which birds might build their nests, and the roses and jessamines and purple clematis of strange, large-blossomed kinds, form natural arbours of enchanting beauty. Lobelias spread out into large cushions of a royal blue, and the canna, wherever sown, sends up shafts of vivid scarlet, orange, and yellow.
If I only knew the names of other plants I could fill a page with descriptions of the wonderful luxuriance of San Franciscan flowers. But all I could say would only emphasize the more clearly the apparent neglect by the San Franciscans of the floral opportunities they possess.
It is curious how enthusiastic California has been in its reception of the eucalyptus globulus, the blue-gum tree of Australia. And I am afraid there has been some job put upon the San Franciscans in this matter. Has anybody, with a little speculation in blue-gums on hand, been telling them that the eucalyptus was a wonderful drainer of marshes and conqueror of fevers? If so, it is a pity they had not heard that that hoax was quite played out in Europe, and the eucalyptus shown to be an impostor. Or were they told of its stately proportions, its rapid growth, its beautiful foliage, and its splendid shade? If so, that hoax will soon expose itself. Given a site where no wind blows, the eucalyptus will grow straight, but offered the smallest provocation it flops off to one side or the other, while its foliage is liable probably beyond that of all other trees to discoloration and raggedness. In Natal it has proved itself very useful as fencing, for neither wood nor stone being procurable, slips and shreds of eucalyptus have soon grown up into permanent hedges. But no one thinks of valuing it anywhere, except in Australia, either for its timber, its appearance, or its medicinal virtues.
In many ways the Queen of the Pacific was a surprise; I had expected to find it "semi-tropical." It is nothing of the kind. Women were wearing furs every afternoon (in June) because of the chill wind that springs up about three o'clock, and men walked about with great-coats over their arms ready for use. The architecture of the city is not so "semi-tropical" as that of suburban New York, while vegetation, instead of being rampant, is conspicuously absent. Three women out of every four wore very thick veils, but why they were so thick I could not discover. In hot countries they do not wear them, nor in "semi-tropical." Perhaps they were vestiges of some recent visitation of dust, which appears to be sometimes as prodigious here as it is in Pietermaritzburg. But they might, very properly, have been an armour against the flies which swarmed in some parts of the town in hideous multitudes. I went into a large restaurant, the "Palace" something it was called, with the intention of eating, but I left without doing so, a palled by the plague of flies. I found Beelzebub very powerful in Washington, and at some of "the eating places" in the South his hosts were intolerable; but San Francisco has streets as completely given over to the fly-fiend as an Alexandrian bazaar.
Before I went to San Francisco, I had an idea that a "Chinese question" was agitating the State of California, that every white man was excited about the expulsion of the heathen, that it was the topic of the day, and that passion ran high between the rival populations. I very soon found that I had been mistaken, and that there is really no "Chinese question" at all in California. At least, the one question now is, how to evade the late bill stopping Chinese immigration; and it was gleefully pointed out to me that though the importation of Celestials by sea was prohibited, there was no provision to prevent them being brought into the State by land; and that the numbers of the arrivals would not probably diminish in the least!
I had intended to "study" the Chinese question. But there is not much study to be done over a ghost. Besides, every Californian manufacturer is agreed on the main points, that Chinese labour is absolutely necessary, that there is not enough of it yet in the State, that more still must be obtained. And where a "problem" is granted on all hands, it is hardly worth while affecting to search for profound social, political, or economical complication in it. There is not much more mystery about it than about the nose on a man's face.
Of course those who organized the clamour have what they call "arguments," but they are hardly such as can command respect. In the first place they allege two apprehensions as to the future: 1. That the Chinese, if unrestricted, will swamp the Americans in the State; and 2. That they will demoralize those Americans. Now the first is, I take it, absurd, and if it is not, then California ought to be ashamed of itself. And as for the second, who can have any sympathy with a State that is unable to enforce its police regulations, or with a community in which parents say they cannot protect the purity of their households? If the Chinaman, as a citizen, disregards sanitary bye-laws why is he not punished, as he would be everywhere else: and if as a domestic servant he misbehaves, why is he not dispensed with, as he would be everywhere else?
Besides these two apprehensions as to the future, they have three objections as to the present. The first is, that the Chinese send their earnings out of the country; the second, that they spend nothing in San Francisco; the third, that they underwork white men. Now the first is foolish, the second and the third, I believe, untrue. As to the Chinese carrying money out of the country—why should they not do so? Will any one say seriously that America, a bullion-producing country, is injured by the Chinese taking their money earnings out of the States, in exchange for that which America cannot produce, namely, labour? Is political economy to go mad simply to suit the sentiment of extra-white labour in California?
As to the Chinese spending nothing in this country, this is hardly borne out by facts, and, in the mouths Of San Franciscans, specially unfortunate. For they have not only raised their prices upon the Chinese, but have actually forbidden them to spend their money in those directions in which they wished to do so. As it is, however, they spend, in exorbitant rents, taxes, customs-dues, and in direct expenditure, a perfectly sufficient share of their earnings, and if permitted to do so, would spend a great deal more. A ludicrous superstition, that the Chinese are economical, underlies many of the misstatements put forward as "arguments" against them. Yet they are not economical. On the contrary, the Chinese and the Japanese are exceptional among Eastern races for their natural extravagance.
It is further alleged that they underwork white men. This statement will hardly bear testing; for the wages of a Chinese workman, in the cigar trade, for instance, are not lower than those of a white man, say, in Philadelphia. They do not, therefore, "underwork" the white man; but they do undoubtedly underwork the white Californian. For the white Californian will not work at Eastern rates. On the contrary, he wishes to know whether you take him for "a — fool" to think that he, in California, is going to accept the same wages that he could have stopped in New York for! Yet why should he not do so? It will hardly be urged that the Californian Irishman is a superior individual to the Eastern American, or that the average San Franciscan workman is any better than the men of his own class on the Atlantic coast? Yet the Californian claims higher wages, and abuses the Chinese for working at rates which white men are elsewhere glad to accept. He says, too, that living is dearer. Facts disprove this. As a matter of fact, living is cheaper in San Francisco than in either Chicago or New York.
How did I spend my time in San Francisco? Well, friends were very kind to me, and I saw everything that a visitor "ought to see." But after my usual fashion I wandered about the streets a good deal alone, and rode up and down in the street-cars, and I had half a mind at first to be disappointed with the city of which r had heard so much. But later in the evening, when the gas was alight and the pavement had its regular habitues, and the pawnbrokers' and bankrupts'-stock stores were all lit up, I saw what a wild, strange city it was. Indeed, I know of no place in the world more full of interesting incidents and stirring types than this noisy, money-spending San Francisco.
One night, of course, I spent several hours in the Chinese quarter, and I cannot tell why, but I took a great fancy to the Celestial, as he is to be seen in San Francisco. Politically, nationally, and commercially, I hate Pekin and all its works. But individually I find the Chinaman, all the world over, a quiet-mannered, cleanly-living, hard-working servant. And in all parts of the world, except California, my estimate of Johnnie is the universal one. In California, however, so the extra-white people say, he is a dangerous, dirty, demoralizing heathen. And there is no doubt of it that, in the Chinese quarter of the city, he is crowded into a space that would be perilous to the health of men accustomed to space and ventilation, but I was told by a Chinaman that he and his people had been prevented by the city authorities from expanding into more commodious lodgings. As for cleanliness, I have travelled too much to forget that this virtue is largely a question of geography, and that, especially in matters of food, the habits of Europeans are considered by half the world so foul as to bring them within the contempt of a hemisphere. As regards personal cleanliness, the Chinese are rather scrupulous.
But I wonder San Francisco does not build a Chinatown, somewhere in the breezy suburbs, and lay a tramway to it for the use of the Chinamen, and then insist upon its sanitary regulations being properly observed. San Francisco would be rather surprised at the result. For the settlements of the Chinese are very neat and cleanly in appearance, and the people are very fond of curious gardening and house-ornamentation. The Chinese themselves would be only too glad to get out of the centre of San Francisco and the quarters into which they are at present compelled to crowd, while their new habitations would very soon be one of the most attractive sights of all the city. As it is, it is picturesque, but it is of necessity dirty—after the fashion of Asiatic dirtiness. Smells that seem intolerable assail the visitor perpetually, but after all they were better than the smell from an eating-house in Kearney Street which we passed soon after, and where creatures of Jewish and Christian persuasions were having fish fried. I am not wishing to apologize for the Chinese. I hate China with a generous Christian vindictiveness, and think it a great pity that dismemberment has not been forced upon that empire long ago as a punishment for her massacres of Catholics, and her treason generally against the commerce and polity of Europe. But I cannot forget that California owes much to the Chinese.
Next to the Chinese, I found the sea-lions the most interesting feature of San Francisco. To reach them, however (if you do not wish to indulge the aboriginal hackman with an opportunity for extortion), you have to undergo a long drive in a series of omnibuses and cars, but the journey through the sand-waste outskirts of the city is thoroughly instructive, for the intervals of desert remind you of the original condition of the country on which much of San Francisco has been built, while the intervals of charming villa residences in oases of gardens, show what capital can do, even with only sea-sand to work upon. We call Ismailia a wonder—but what is Ismailia in comparison with San Francisco! After a while solid sand dunes supervene, beautiful, however, in places with masses of yellow lupins, purple rocket, and fine yellow-flowered thistles, and then the broad sea comes into sight, and so to the Cliff House.
Just below the House, one of the most popular resorts of San Francisco, the "Seal Rocks" stand up out of the water, and it is certainly one of the most interesting glimpses of wild life that the whole world affords to see the herds of "sea-lions" clambering and sprawling about their towers of refuge. For Government has forbidden their being killed, so the huge creatures drag about their bulky slug-shaped bodies in confident security. It would not be very difficult I should think for an amateur to make a sea-lion. There is very little shape about them. But, nevertheless, it is such a treat as few can have enjoyed twice in their lives to see these mighty ones of the deep basking on the sunny rocks, and ponderously sporting in the water.
And looking out to sea, beyond the sea-lions, I saw a spar standing up out of the water. It was the poor Escambia that had sunk there the day before, and there, on the beach to the left of the Cliff House, was the spot where the three survivors of the crew managed to make good their hold in spite of the pitiless surf, and to clamber up out of reach of the waves. And all through the night, with the lights of the Cliff House burning so near them, the men lay there exhausted with their struggle. It was a strange wreck altogether. When she left port, every one who saw her careening over said "she must go down;" every one who passed her said "she must go down;" the pilot left her, saying "she must go down;" the crew came round the captain, saying "she must go down." But the skipper held on his way awhile, and at last he too turned to his mate; "she must go down," he said. Then he tried to head her to port again, but a wave caught her broadside as she was clumsily answering the helm; and while the coastguard, who had been watching her through his glass, turned for a moment to telephone to the city that "she must go down,"—she did. When he put up the glasses to his eyes again, there was no Escambia in sight! She had gone down.
And the sight of that lonely spar, signalling so pathetically the desolate waste of waves the spot of the ship's disaster, brought back to my mind a Sunday in Ventnor, where the people of the town, looking out across to sea, stood to watch the beautiful Eurydice go by in her full pomp of canvas. A bright sun glorified her, and her crew, met for Divine Service, were returning thanks to Heaven for the prosperous voyage they had made. And suddenly over Dunnose there rushed up a dark bank of cloud. A squall, driving a tempest of snow before it, struck the speeding vessel, and in the fierce whirl of the snowdrift the folk on shore lost sight of the Eurydice for some minutes. But as swiftly as it had come, the squall had passed. The sun shone brightly again, but on a troubled sea. And where was the gallant ship, homeward bound, and all her gallant company? She had gone down, all sail set, all hands aboard. And the boats dashed out from the shore to the rescue! But alas! only two survivors out of the three hundred and fifty souls that manned the barque ever set foot on shore again! And the news flashed over England that the Eurydice was "lost." For days and weeks afterwards there stood up out of the water, half-way between Shanklin and Luccombe Chine, one lonely spar, like a gravestone, and those who rowed over the wreck could see, down below them under the clear green waves, the shimmer of the white sails of the sunken war-boat. She was lying on her side, the fore and mizzen top-gallant masts gone, her top-gallant sails hanging, but with her main-mast in its place, and all the other sails set. The squall had struck her full, and she rolled over at once, the sea rising at one rush above the waists of the crew, and her yards lying on the water. Then, righting for an instant, she made an effort to recover herself. But the weight of water that had already poured in between decks drove her under. The sea then leaped with another rush upon her, and in an awful swirl of waves the beautiful ship, with all her crew, went down. The Channel tide closed over the huge coffin, and except for the two men saved, and the corpses which floated ashore, there was nothing to tell of the sudden tragedy.
And then back into the city and amongst its shipping. I have all the Britisher's attraction towards the haunts of the men that "go down to the sea in ships." Indeed, walking about among great wharves and docks, with the shipping of all nations loading and discharging cargo, and men of all nations hard at work about you, is in itself a liberal education.
But it can nowhere be enjoyed in such perfection as in London. There, emphatically, is the world's market; and written large upon the pavement of her gigantic docks is the whole Romance of Trade. A single shed holds the products of all the Continents; and what a book it would be that told us of the strange industries of foreign lands! Who cut that ebony and that iron-wood in the Malayan forests? and how came these palm-nuts here from the banks of the Niger? Mustard from India, and coffee-berries from Ceylon lie together to be crushed under one boot, and here at one step you can tread on the chili-pods of Jamaica and the pea-nuts of America. That rat that ran by was a thing from Morocco; this squashed scorpion, perhaps, began life in Cyprus or in Bermuda. Queer little stowaways of insect life are here in abundance, the parasites of Egyptian lentils or of Indian corn. The mosquito natives of Bengal swamps are brought here, it may be, in teakwood from some drift on the Burman coast. All the world's produce is in convention together. Here stands a great pyramid of horned skulls, the owners of which once rampaged on Brazilian pampas, or the prairies of the Platte River, and hard by them lie piled a multitude of hides that might have fitted the owners of those skulls, had it not been that they once clothed the bodies of cattle that grazed out their lives in Australia. Juxtaposition of packages here means nothing. It does not argue any previous affinities. This ship happens to be discharging Norwegian pine, in which the capercailzies have roosted, and for want of space the logs are being piled on to sacks of ginger from the West Indies. Next them there happens to-day to be cutch from India; to-morrow there may be gamboge from Siam, or palm oil from the Gold Coast. These men here are trundling in great casks of Spanish wine that have been to the Orient for their health; but an hour ago they were wheeling away chests of Assam tea, and in another hour may be busy with logwood from the Honduras forests. One of them is all white on the shoulders with sacks of American wheat flour, but his hands are stained all the same with Bengal turmeric, and he is munching as he goes a cardamum from the Coromandel coast. What a book it would make—this World's Work!
And then back through this city of prodigious bustle, through fine streets with masses of solid buildings that stand upon a site which, a few years ago, was barren sea-sand, and some of it, too, actually sea-beach swept by the waves!
The frequency of diamonds in the windows is a point certain to catch the stranger's eye, but his interest somewhat diminishes when he finds that they are only "California diamonds." They are exquisite stones, however, and, to my thinking, more beautiful than coloured gems, ruby, sapphire, or amethyst, that are more costly in price. But the real diamond can, nevertheless, be seen in perfection in San Francisco. Go to Andrews' "Diamond Palace," and take a glimpse of a jeweller's fairyland. The beautiful gems fairly fill the place with light, while the owner's artistic originality has devised many novel methods of showing off his favourite gem to best advantage. The roof and walls, for instance, are frescoed with female figures adorned on neck and arm, finger, ear, and waist, with triumphs of the lapidary's art.
There is something very fascinating to the fancy in gems, for the one secret that Nature still jealously guards from man is the composition of those exquisite crystals which we call "precious stones." We can imitate, and do imitate, some of them with astonishing exactness, but after all is done there still remains something lacking in the artificial stone. Wise men may elaborate a prosaic chemistry, producing crystals which they declare to be the fac-similes of Nature's delightful gems; but the world will not accept the ruddy residue of a crucible full of oxides as rubies, or the shining fragments of calcined bisulphides as emeralds. No crucible yet constructed can hold a native sapphire, and all the alchemy of man directed to this point has failed to extort from carbon the secret of its diamond—the little crystal that earth with all her chemistry has made so few of, since first heat and water, Nature's gem-smiths, joined their forces to produce the glittering stones. They placed under requisition every kingdom of created things, and in a laboratory in mid-earth set in joint motion all the powers that move the volcano and the earthquake, that re-fashion the world's form and substance, that govern all the stately procession of natural phenomena. Yet with all this Titanic labour, this monstrous co-operation of forces, Nature formed only here and there a diamond, and here and there a ruby. Masses of quartz, crystals of every exquisite tint, amethystine and blue, as beautiful, perhaps, in delicacy of hue as the gems themselves, were sown among the rocks and scattered along the sands, but only to tell us how near Nature came to making her jewels common, and how—just when the one last touch was needed—she withheld her hand, so that man should confess that the supreme triumphs of her art were indeed "precious"!
Gigantic America—Of the treatment of strangers—The wild-life world—Railway Companies' food-frauds—California Felix—Prairie-dog history—The exasperation of wealth—Blessed with good oil—The meek lettuce and judicious onion—Salads and Salads—The perils of promiscuous grazing.
I HAD looked forward to my journey from San Francisco to St. Louis with great anticipations, and, though I had no leisure to "stop off" on the tour, I was not disappointed. Six continuous days and nights of railway travelling carried me through such prodigious widths of land, that the mere fact of traversing so much space had fascinations. And the variations of scene are very striking—the corn and grape lands of Southern California, that gradually waste away into a hideous cactus desert, and then sink into a furnace-valley, several hundred feet below the level of the sea; the wild pastures of Texas, that seem endless, until they end in swamped woodlands; the terrific wildernesses of Arkansas, that gradually soften down into the beautiful fertility of Missouri. It was a delightful journey, and taught me in one week's panorama more than a British Museum full of books could have done.
Visitors to America do not often make the journey. They are beguiled off by way of Santa Fe and Kansas City. I confess that I should myself have been very glad to have visited Santa Fe, and some day or other I intend to pitch my tent for a while in San Antonio. But if I had to give advice to a traveller, I would say:—
"Take the Southern Pacific to El Paso, and the Texan Pacific on to St. Louis, and you will get such an idea of the spaciousness of America as no other trip can give you." You will see prodigious tracts of country that are still in aboriginal savagery and you will travel through whole nations of hybrid people—Mexicans and mulattoes, graduated commixtures of Red Indian, Spaniard, and Negro—that some day or another must assume a very considerable political importance in the Union.
Nothing would do Americans more good than a tour through Upper India. Nothing could do European visitors to America more good than the journey from San Francisco to St. Louis by the Southern-and-Texas route. The Gangetic Valley, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, are all experiences that would ameliorate, improve, and impress the American. The Arizona cactus-plains, the Texan flower-prairies, the Arkansas swamps, give the traveller from Europe a more truthful estimate of America, as a whole, by their vastness, their untamed barbarism, their contrast with the civilized and domesticated States, than years of travel on the beaten tracks from city to city.
And here just a word or two to those American gentlemen to whom it falls to amuse or edify the sight-seeing foreigner. Do not be disappointed if he shows little enthusiasm for your factories, and mills, and populous streets. Remember that these are just what he is trying to escape from. The chances are, that he would much rather see a prairie-dog city, than the Omaha smelting-works; an Indian lodge than Pittsburg; one wild bison than all the cattle of Chicago; a rattlesnake at home than all the legislature of New York in Albany assembled. He prefers canyons to streets, mountain streams to canals; and when he crosses the river, it is the river more than the bridge that interests him. Of course it is well for him to stay in your gigantic hotels, go down into your gigantic silver-mines, travel on your gigantic river-steamers, and be introduced to your gigantic millionaires. These are all American, and it is good for him, and seemly, that he should add them to his personal experiences. So too, he should eat terrapin and planked shad, clam-chowder, canvas-back ducks, and soft-shelled crabs. For these are also American. But the odds are he may go mad and bite thee fatally, if thou wakest him up at un-Christian hours to go and see a woollen factory, simply because thou art proud of it—or settest him down to breakfast before perpetual beefsteak, merely because he is familiar with that food. The intelligent traveller, being at Rome, wishes to be as much a Roman as possible. He would be as aboriginal as the aborigines. And it is a mistake to go on thrusting things upon him solely on the ground that he is already weary of them. As I write, I remember many hours of bitter anguish which I have endured—I who am familiar with Swansea, who have stayed in Liverpool, who live in London—in loitering round smelting works and factories, and places of business, trying to seem interested, and pretending to store my memory with statistics. Sometimes it would be almost on my tongue to say, "And now, sir, having shown off your possessions in order to gratify your own pride in them, suppose you show me something for my gratification." I never did, of course, but I groaned in the spirit, at my precious hours being wasted, and at the hospitality which so easily forgot itself in ostentatious display. I have perhaps said more than I meant to have done. But all I mean is this, that when a sojourner is at your mercy, throw him unreservedly upon his own resources for such time as you are busy, and deny yourself unreservedly for his amusement when you are at leisure. But do not spoil all his day, and half your own, by trying to work your usual business habits into his holiday, and take advantage of his foreign helplessness to show him what an important person (when at home) you are yourself. Do not, for instance, take him after breakfast to your office, and there settling to your work with your clerks, ask him to "amuse himself" with the morning papers—for three hours; and then, after a hurried luncheon at your usual restaurant, take him back to the office for a few minutes—another hour; and then, having carefully impressed upon him that you are taking a half-holiday solely upon his account, and in spite of all the overwhelming business that pours in upon you, do not take him for a drive in the Mall—in order to show off your new horses to your own acquaintances; and after calling at a few shops (during which time your friend stays in the trap and holds the reins), do not, oh do not, take him back to your house to a solitary dinner "quite in the English style." No, sir; this is not the way to entertain the wayfarer in such a land of wonders as this; and you ought not therefore to feel surprise when your guest, wearied of your mistaken hospitality, and wearied of your perpetual suggestions of your own self-sacrifice on his behalf, suddenly determines not to be a burden upon you any longer, and escapes the same evening to the most distant hotel in the town. Nor when you read this ought you to feel angry. You did him a great wrong in wasting a whole day out of his miserable three, and exasperated him by telling his friends afterwards what a "good time" he had with you. These few words are his retaliation—not written either in the vindictive spirit of reprisal, but as advice to you for the future and in the interests, of strangers who may follow him within your gates.
From San Francisco to Lathrop, back on the route we came by, to Oakland, and over the brown waters of the arrogant Sacramento—swelling out as if it would imitate the ocean, and treating the Pacific as if it were merely "a neighbor,"—and out into thousands and thousands of acres of corn, stubble, and mown hay-fields, the desolation worked by the reaper-armies of peace-time with their fragrant plunder lying in heaps all ready for the carts; and the camp-followers—the squirrels, and the rats, and the finches—all busy gleaning in the emptied fields, with owls sitting watchful on the fences, and vigilant buzzards sailing overhead. What an odd life this is, of the squirrels and the buzzards, the mice, and the owls! They used to watch each other in these fields, just in the very same way, ages before the white men came. The colonization of the Continent means to the squirrels and mice merely a change in their food, to the hawks and the owls merely a slight change in the flavour of the squirrels and mice! So, too, when the Mississippi suddenly swelled up in flood the other day, and overflowed three States, it lengthened conveniently the usual water-ways of the frogs, and gave the turtles a more comfortable amplitude of marsh. Hundreds of negroes narrowly escaped drowning, it is true; but what an awful destruction there was of smaller animal life! Scores of hamlets were doubtless destroyed, but what myriads of insect homes were ruined! It does one good, I think, sometimes to remember the real aborigines of our earth, the worlds that had their laws before ours, those conservative antiquities with a civilization that was perfect before man was created, and which neither the catastrophes of nature nor the triumphs of science have power to abrogate.
Oak trees dot the rolling hills, and now and again we come to houses with gardens and groves of eucalyptus, but for hours we travel through one continuous corn-field, a veritable Prairie Of Wheat, astounding in extent and in significance. And then we come upon the backwaters of the San Joacquin, and the flooded levels of meadow, with their beautiful oak groves, and herds of cattle and horses grazing on the lush grass that grows between the beds of green tuilla reeds. It is a lovely reach of country this, and some of the water views are perfectly enchanting. But why should the company carefully board up its bridges so that travellers shall not enjoy the scenes up and down the rivers which they cross? It seems to me a pity to do so, seeing that it is really quite unnecessary. As it was, we saw just enough of beauty to make us regret the boards. Then, after the flooded lands, we enter the vast corn-fields again, and so arrive at Lathrop.
Here we dined, and well, the service also being excellent, for half a dollar. Could not the Union Pacific take a lesson from the Southern Pacific, and instead of giving travellers offal at a dollar a head at Green River and other eating-houses, give them good food of the Lathrop kind for fifty cents? As I have said before, the wretched eating-houses on the Union Pacific are maintained, confessedly, for the benefit of the eating-houses, and the encouragement of local colonization; but it is surely unfair on the "transient" to make him contribute, by hunger, on the indigestion, and ill-temper, to the perpetration of an imposition. On the Southern and the Texas Pacific there are first-rate eating-places, some at fifty cents, some at seventy-five, and, as we approach an older civilization, others at a dollar. But no one can grudge a dollar for a good meal in a comfortable room with civil attendance; while on the Union Pacific there is much to make the passenger dissatisfied, besides the nature of the food, for it is often served by ill-mannered waiters in cheerless rooms. Avery little industry, or still less enterprise, might make other eating-places like Humboldt.
It was at Lathrop that some Californians of a very rough type wished to invade our sleeping-car. They wanted to know the "racket," didn't "care if they had to pay fifty dollars," had "taken a fancy" to it, &c., &c.; but the conductor, with considerable tact, managed to persuade them to abandon their design of travelling like gentlemen, and so they got into another car, where they played cards for drinks, fired revolvers out of the window at squirrels between the deals, and got up a quarrel over it at the end of every hand.
California Felix! Aye, happy indeed in its natural resources. For we are again whirling along through prairies of corn-land, a monotony of fertility that becomes almost as serious as the grassy levels of the Platte, the sage-brush of Utah, or the gravelled sands of Nevada. And so to Modesta, a queer, wide-streeted, gum-treed place, not the least like "America," but a something between Madeira and Port Elizabeth. It has not 2000 people in it altogether, yet walking across the dusty square is a lady in the modes of Paris, and a man in a stove-pipe hat! Another stretch of farm-lands brings us to Merced, and the county of that name, a miracle of fertility even among such perpetual marvels of richness. If I were to say what the average of grain per acre is, English farmers might go mad, but if the printer will put it into some very small type I will whisper it to you that the men of Merced grumble at seventy bushels per acre. I should like to own Merced, I confess. I am a person of moderate desires. A little contents me. And it is only a mere scrap, after all, of this bewildering California. On the counter at the hotel at Merced are fir-cones from the Big Trees and fossil fragments and wondrous minerals from Yosemite, and odds and ends of Spanish ornaments. The whole place has a Spanish air about it. This used to be the staging-point for travellers to the Valley of Wonders, but times have changed, and with them the Stage-route, so Merced is left on one side by the tourist stream. Leaving it ourselves, we traverse patches of wild sunflower, and then find ourselves out on wide levels of uncultivated land, waiting for the San Joacquin (pronounced, by the way, Sanwa-keen) canal, to bring irrigation to them. How the Mormons would envy the Californians if they were their neighbours, and the contrast is indeed pathetic, between the alkaline wastes of Utah and the fat glebes of Merced!
At present, however, a nation of little owls possesses the uncultivated acres, and ground squirrels hold the land from them on fief, paying, no doubt, in their vassalage a feudal tribute of their plump, well-nourished bodies. To right and left lies spread out an immense prairie-dog settlement, deserted now, however; and beyond it, on either side, a belt of pretty timbered land stretches to the coast range, which we see far away on the right, and to the foot-hills—the "Sewaliks" of the Sierra Nevada,—which rise up, capped and streaked with snow, on the left.
Wise men read history for us backwards from the records left by ruins. Why not do the same here with this vast City of the Prairie-Dogs that continues to right and left of us, miles after miles? Once upon a time, then, there was a powerful nation of prairie-dogs in this place, and they became, in process of years, debauched by luxury, and weakened by pride. So they placed the government in the hands of the owls, whom they invited to come and live with them, and gave over the protection of the country to the rattlesnakes, whom they maintained as janissaries. But the owls and the rattlesnakes, finding all the power in their own hands, and seeing that the prairie-dogs had grown idle and fat and careless, conspired together to overthrow their masters. Now there lived near them, but in subjection to the prairie-dogs, a race of ground-squirrels, a hard-working, thick-skinned, bushy-tailed folk; and the owls and the rattlesnakes made overtures to the ground squirrels, and one morning, when the prairie-dogs were out feeding and gambolling in the meadows, the conspirators rushed to arms, and while the rattlesnakes and the ground-squirrels, their accomplices, seized possession of the vacated city, the owls attacked the prairie-dogs with their beaks and wings. And the end of it was disaster, utter and terrible; and the prairie-dogs fled across the plains into the woodland for shelter, but did not stay there, but passed on, in one desolating exodus, to the foot-hills beyond the woodland. And then the owls and the rattlesnakes and the ground-squirrels divided the deserted city among them. And to this day the ground-squirrels pay a tribute of their young to the owls and the rattlesnakes, as the price of possession and of their protection. But they are always afraid that the prairie-dogs may come back again some day (as the Mormons are going back to Jackson County, Missouri), to claim their old homesteads; and so, whenever the ground-squirrels go out to feed and gambol in the meadows, the rattlesnakes remain at the bottom of the holes, and the owls sit on sentry duty at the top. Isn't that as good as any other conjectural history?
And then Madera, with its great canal all rafted over with floating timber, and more indications, in the eating-house, of the neighbourhood of the Big Trees and Yosemite. For this is the point of departure now in vogue, the distance being only seventy miles, and the roads good. But of the trip to Clark's, and thence on to "Yohamite" and to Fresno Grove—hereafter. Meanwhile, grateful for the good meal at Madera, we are again smoking the meditative pipe, and looking out upon Owl-land, with the birds all duly perched at their posts, and their bushy-tailed companions enjoying life immensely in family parties among the short grass. Herds of cattle are seen here and there, and wonderful their condition, too; and thus, through flat pastures all pimpled over with old, fallen-in, "dog-houses," we reach Fresno. This monotony of fertility is beginning to exasperate me. It is a trait of my personal character, this objection to monotonous prosperity. I like to see streaks of lean. Thus I begin to think of Vanderbilts as of men who have done me an injury; and unless Jay Gould recovers his ground with me, by conferring a share upon me, I shall feel called upon to take personal exception to his great wealth. And now comes Fresno, a welcome stretch of land that requires irrigation to be fruitful, a land that only gives her favours to earnest wooers, and does not, like the rest of California, smile on every vagabond admirer. Where the ground is not cultivated, it forms fine parade-ground for the owls, and rare pleasaunces for the squirrels. But what a nymph this same water is! Look at this patch of greensward all set in a bezel of bright foliage and bright with wild flowers! In mythology there is a goddess under whose feet the earth breaks into blossoms and leaves. I forget her name. But it should have been Hydore. And now, as the evening gathers round, we see the outlines of the Sierras, away on the left, blurring into twilight tints of blue and grey—and then to bed.
California is blest in the olive. It grows to perfection, and the result is that the California is no stranger to the priceless luxury of good oil, and can enjoy, at little cost, the delights of a good salad. How often, in rural England, with acres of salad material growing fresh and crisp all round me, have groaned at the impossibility of a salad, by reason of the atrocious character of the local grocer's oil! But in California all the oil is good, and the vegetable ingredients of the fascinating bowl are superb. But in America there is a fatal determination towards mayonnaise, and every common waiter considers himself capable of mixing one. So that even in California your hopes are sometimes blighted, and your good humour turned to gall, by fools rushing in where even angels should have to pass an examination before admission. A simpler salad, however, is better than any mayonnaise, and once the proportions are mastered, a child may be entrusted with the mixture.
The lettuce, by long familiarity, has come to be considered the true basis of all salad, and in its generous expanse of faintly flavoured leaf, so cool and juicy and crisp when brought in fresh from the garden, it has certainly some claims to the proud position. But a multitude of salads can be made without any lettuce at all, and it is doubtful whether either Greece or Rome used it as an ingredient of the bowl in which the austere endive and pungent onion always found a place. Now-a-days however, lettuce is a deserving favourite, It has no sympathies or antipathies, and no flavour strong enough to arouse enthusiasm or aversion. It is not aggressive or self-assertive, but, like those amiable people with whom no one ever quarrels, is always ready to be of service, no matter what company may be thrust upon it, or what treatment it has to undergo. Opinions of its own it has none, so it easily adopts those of others, and takes upon itself—and so distributes over the whole—any properties of taste or smell that may be communicated to it by its neighbours. An onion might be rubbed with lettuce for an indefinite period and betray no alteration in its original nature, but the lettuce if only touched with onion becomes at once a modified onion itself, and no ablution will remove from it the suspicion of the contact. The gentle leaf is therefore often ill-used; but, after all, even this, the meekest of vegetables, will turn upon the oppressor, and if not eaten young and fresh, or if slaughtered with a steel blade, will convert the salad that should have been short and sharp in the mouth into a basin of limp rags, that cling together in sodden lumps, and when swallowed conduce to melancholy and repentance. The antithesis of the lettuce is the onion. Both are equally essential to the perfect salad, but for most opposite reasons. The lettuce must be there to give substance to the whole, to retain the oil and salt and vinegar, to borrow fragrance and to look green and crisp. It underlies everything else, and acts as conductor to all, like consciousness in the human mind. It is the bulk of the salad so far as appearances go, and yet it alone could be turned out without affecting the flavour of the dish. It is only the canvas upon which the artist paints.
How different is the onion! It adds nothing to the amount, and contributes nothing to the sight, yet it permeates the whole; not, however, as an actual presence, but rather as a reflection, a shadow, or a suspicion. Like the sunset-red, it tinges everything it falls upon, and everywhere reveals new beauties. It is the master-mind in the mixed assembly, allowing each voice to be heard, but guiding the many utterances to one symmetrical result. It keeps a strong restraint upon itself, helping out, with a judicious hint only, those who need it, and never interfering with neighbours that can assert their own individuality. I speak, of course, of the onion as it appears in the civilized salad, and not the outrageous vegetable that the Prophet condemned and Italy cannot do without. Some pretend to have a prejudice against the onion, but as an American humourist—Dudley Warner—says, "There is rather a cowardice in regard to it. I doubt not all men and women love the onion, but few confess it."
In simplicity lies perfection. The endive and beetroot, fresh bean, and potato, radish and mustard and cress, asparagus and celery, cabbage-hearts and parsley, tomato and cucumber, green peppers and capers, and all the other ingredients that in this salad or in that find a place are, no doubt, well enough in their way; but the greatest men of modern times have agreed in saying that, given three vegetables and a master-mind, a perfect salad may be the result. But for the making there requires to be present a miser to dole out the vinegar, a spendthrift to sluice on the oil, a sage to apportion the salt, and a maniac to stir. The household that can produce these four, and has at command a firm, stout-hearted lettuce, three delicate spring onions, and a handful of cress, need ask help from none and envy none; for in the consumption of the salad thus ambrosially resulting, all earth's cares may be for the while forgotten, and the consumer snap his fingers at the stocks, whether they go up or down. There is no need to go beyond these frugal ingredients. In Europe it is true men range hazardously far afield for their green meat. They tell us, for instance, of the fearful joy to be snatched from nettle-tops, but it is not many who care thus to rob the hairy caterpillar of his natural food; nor in eating the hawthorn buds, where the sparrows have been before us, is there such prospect of satisfaction as to make us hurry to the hedges. The dandelion, too, we are told, is a wholesome herb, and so is wild sorrel; but who among us can find the time to go wandering about the country grazing with the cattle, and playing Nebuchadnezzar among the green stuff? In the Orient the native is never at a loss for salad, for he grabs the weeds at a venture, and devours them complacently, relying upon fate to work them all up to a good end; and the Chinaman, so long as he can only boil it first, turns everything that grows into a vegetable for the table.
But it would not be safe to send a public of higher organization into the highways and ditches; for a rabid longing for vegetable food, unballasted by botanical ledge, might conduce to the consumption Of many unwholesome plants, with their concomitant insect evils. Dreadful stories are told of the results arising from the careless eating of unwashed watercress; and in country places the horrors that are said to attend the swallowing of certain herbs without a previous removal of the things that inhabit them are sufficient to deter the most ravenously inclined from taking a miscellaneous meal off the roadside, and from promiscuous grazing in hedge-rows.
The Carlyle of vegetables—The moral in blight—Bee-farms—The city Of Angels—Of squashes—Curious Vegetation—The incompatibility of camels and Americans—Are rabbits "seals"?—All wilderness and no weather—An "infinite torment of flies."
THE cactus is the Carlyle of vegetation. Here, in Southern California, it assumes many of its most uncouth and affected attitudes, puts on all its prickles and its angles, and its blossoms of rare splendour. Those who are better informed than myself assure me that the cactus is a vegetable. I take their word for it. Indeed, the cactus itself may have said so to them. There is nothing a cactus might not do. But it surely stands among plants somewhere where bats do among animals, and the apteryx among birds. Look for instance at this tract of cactus which we cross before Caliente. There are chair-legs and footstools, pokers, brooms, and telegraph-poles; but can you honestly call them plants?
But stay a moment. Can you not call them plants? Look! See those superb blossoms of crimson upon that footstool of thorns, those golden stars upon the telegraph-pole yonder, those beautiful flowers of rosy pink upon that besom-head. Yes, they are plants, and worthy of all admiration, for they have the genius of a true originality, and the sudden splendour of the flowers they put forth are made all the more admirable by the surprise of them and the eccentricity. And with them grows the yucca, that wonderful plant that sends up from its rosette of bayonets—they call it the "Spanish bayonet" in the West—a green shaft, six feet high, and all hung with white waxen bells. I got out of the train at one of its stoppages, and cut a couple of heads of this wonderland plant, and found the blossoms on each numbered between 400 and 406. And there was a certain moral discipline in it too. For we found these exquisite flower-hung shafts were smothered in "blight," those detestable, green, sticky aphides, that sometimes make rose-buds so dreadful, and are the enemy of all hothouses. Looking out at the yuccas as we passed, those splendid coronals of waxen blossoms—pure enough for cathedral chancels—it seemed as if they were things of a perfect and unsullied beauty. My arrival with them was hailed with cries of admiration, and for the first moment enthusiasm was supreme. But the next, alas for impure beauty! the swarms of clinging parasites were detected. Hands that had been stretched out to hold such things of grace, shrank from even touching them, known to be polluted, and so, at last, with honours that were more than half condescension, the yucca-spikes were put out on the platform, to be admired from a distance. Passing through the cactus land we saw numbers of tiny rabbits—the "cotton tails," as distinguished from the "mule-ears" or jack-rabbits—dodging about the stems and grass; but in about an hour the grotesque vegetable began to sober down into a botanical conglomerate that defies analysis, and gives the little rabbits a denser covert. The general result of this change in the botany was as Asiatic, as Indian as it could be, but why, it were difficult to say, unless it was the prevalence of the baboon-like "muskeet," and the beautiful but murderous dhatura—the "thorn-apple" of Europe. Yet there was sage-brush enough to make Asia impossible, while the variations of the botany were too sudden for any generalizations of character. And so on, past an oil-mill on the left—petroleum bubbling out of the hillock—and a great farm "Newhall's," on the right; past Andrews and up the hill to the San Fernando tunnel, 7000 feet in length, and then down the hill again into San Fernando. Has any one ever "stopped off" at San Fernando and spent any time with the monks at their picturesque old mission, smothered in orangeries, and dozed away the summer hours amongst them, watching the peaches ripen and the bees gathering honey, and opening bottles of mellow California wine to help along the intervals between drowsy mass and merry meal-times? I think when my sins weigh too heavily on me to let me live among men, I will retire to San Fernando, to the bee-keeping, orange-growing fathers, ask them to receive my bones, and start a beehive and an orange-tree of my own. It does not seem to me, looking forward to it, a very arduous life, and I might then, at last, overtake that seldom-captured will-o'-the-wisp, fleet-footed Leisure.
The bees, by the way, are kept on a "ranch," whole herds and herds of bees, all hived together in long rows of hives, hundreds to the acre. They fly afield to feed themselves, and come home with their honey to make the monks rich. I am not sure that these fathers have done all they might for the country they settled in, and yet who is not grateful to the brethren for the picturesqueness of comparative antiquity? Their very idleness is a charm, and their quiet, comfortable life, half in cloisters, half in orange groves, is a delight and a refreshment in modern America.
But the loveliness of their country, and the wonder of its possibilities! Can any one be surprised that we are approaching the city of Los Angeles? A bright river comes tumbling along under cliffs all hung with flowering creepers, and between banks that are beautiful with ferns and flowers, and the land widens out into cornfield and meadow; and away to right and left, lying under the hills and overflowing into all the valleys, are the vineyards, and orchards, and orangeries that make the City of Angels worthy of a king's envy and a people's pride. As yet, of course, it is the day of small things, as compared with what will be when water is everywhere; but even now Los Angeles is a place for the artist to stay in and the tourist to visit. There is a great deal to remind you of the East, in this valley of dark-skinned men, and in the "bazaars," with their long ropes of chilis dangling on the door-posts, the fruit piled up in baskets on the mules, the brown bare-legged children under hats with wide ragged brims, there are all the familiar features of Southern Europe, hot, strong-smelling, and picturesque. But Los Angeles shares with the rest of California the disadvantage under which all climates of great forcing power and rudimentary science must lie, for its fruits, though exquisite to look upon, often prodigious in size, and always incredible in quantity, fail, as a rule, dismally in flavour. The figs are very large, both green and black, but they seem to have ripened in a perpetual rainstorm; the oranges look perfection, and are as bad as any I have had in America; the peaches are splendid in their appearance, for their coarse barbaric skins are painted with deep yellow and red, but they ought not to be called "peaches" at all. They would taste just as well by any other name, and the traveller who knows the peaches of Europe, or the peaches of Persia, would not then be disappointed.
So away from Los Angeles, with its groups of idle, brown-faced men, in their flap brimmed Mexican hats, leaning against the posts smoking thin cigars, and its groups of listless, dark-eyed women, with bright kerchiefs round their heads or necks, sitting on the doorsteps; away through valleys of corn, broken up by orangeries and vineyards, where the river flows through a tangle of willow and elder and muskeet; past the San Gabriel Mission, overtaken, poor idle old fragment of the past, by the railroad civilization of the present, and already isolated in its sleepiness and antiquity from the busier, younger world about it; on through a scene of perpetual fertility, orange groves and lemon, fields of vegetables and corn, with pomegranates all aglow with scarlet flowers, and eucalyptus-trees in their ragged foliage of blue and brown.
The squash grows here to a monstrous size. "I have seen them, sir," said a passenger, "weighing as much as yourself." The impertinence of it! Think of a squash venturing to turn the scale against me. Perhaps it will pretend that it has as good a seat on a horse? Or will it play me a single-wicket match at cricket? I should not have minded so much if it had been a water-melon, "simlin," or some other refined variety of or even a the family. But that a squash, the 'poor relation' of the pumpkin, should—. But enough. Let us be generous, even to squashes.
Some one ought to write the psychology of the squash. There is a very large human family of the same name and character. If you ask what the bulky, tasteless thing is good for, people always say, "Oh, for a pie!" Now that is the only form in which I have tasted it. And I can say, from personal experience, therefore, that it is not good for that. It never hurts anybody, or speaks ill of any one—an inoffensive, tedious, stupid person, too commonplace to be either liked or disliked. Economical parents say squashes are "very good for children," especially in pies. They may be. But they are not conducive to the formation of character.
Some one, too, ought to visit these old Franciscan missions in Southern California—some one who could write about them, and sketch them. They are very delightful; the more delightful, perhaps, because they are in the United States, in the same continent as "live" towns, as Chicago, and Omaha, and Leadville, and Tombstone. Scattered about among the rolling grassland are hollows filled with orchards, in which old settlements and new are fairly embowered, while the missions themselves are singularly picturesque; and San Gabriel's Church, they say, has a pretty peal of bells, which the monks carried overland from Mexico in the old Spaniard days, and which still chime for vespers as sweetly as ever. What a wonder it must have been to the wandering Indians to hear that most beautiful of all melodies, the chime of bells, ascending with the evening mists from under the feet of the hills! No wonder they had campanile legends, these poor poets of the river and prairie, and still speak of Valleys of Enchantment whence music may be heard at nightfall!
Past Savanna and Monte, with its swine droves, and its settlement of men who live on "hog and hominy," past Puente, and Spadra, and Pomona, into Colton, where we dine, and well, for half a dollar, enjoying for dessert a chat with a very pretty girl. She tells us of the beauties of San Bernardino, and I could easily credit even more than she says. For San Bernardino was settled by Mormons some fifty years ago, and has all the charms of Salt Lake City, with those of natural fertility and a profusion of natural vegetation added. But I can say nothing of San Bernardino, for the train does not enter it. And then, reinforced by another engine—a dumpy engine-of-all-work sort of "help"—clambers up the San Gorgonio pass. All along the road I notice a yellow thread-like epiphyte, or air-plant, tangling itself round the muskeet-trees, and killing them. They call it the "mistletoe" here but it is the same curious plant that strangles the orange trees in Indian gardens, and the jujubes in the jungles, that cobwebs the aloe hedges, and hangs its pretty little white bells of flower all over the undergrowth. On the bare, sandy ground a wild gourd, with yellow flowers and sharp-pointed spear-head leaves, throws out long strands, that creep flat upon the ground with a curious snake-like appearance. Clumps of wild oleander find a frugal subsistence, and here and there an elder or a walnut manages to thrive. But the profuse fertility of California is fast disappearing. And so to Gorgonio, at the top of the pass; and then we begin to go down, down, down, till we are not surprised to hear that we are far below the level of the sea. The cactus has once more reasserted itself, and to right and left are "forests" of this grotesque candelabra-like vegetable, with stiff arms, covered apparently with some woolly sort of fluff. The soil beneath them is a desperate-looking desert-sand, and here and there are bare levels of white glistening sterility. But water works such wonders that there is no saying what may happen. At present, however, it is pure, unadulterated desert—wilderness enough to delight a camel, were it not for the quantity of stones which strew the waste, and which would make it an abomination to that fastidious beast. Camels were once imported into the country, but the experiment failed—and no wonder. Imagine the modern American trying to drive a camel! The Mexican might do it, but I doubt if any other race in all America could be found with sufficient contempt for time, sufficient patience in idleness, sufficient camelishness in fact, to "personally conduct" a camel train. There is a tradition, by the way, that somewhere in Arizona, wild camels, the descendants of the discarded brutes, are to be met with to this day, enjoying a life without occupations.
At present the most formidable animal in possession of these cactus plains is the rabbit. But such a licence of ears as the creature has taken! It must be developing them as weapons of offence: the future "horned rabbit." They call these long-eared animals "mules," and deny that you can make a rabbit-pie of them. This seems to me hardly fair on the rabbit. But in England the small rodent suffers under even more pointed injustice.
A certain railway porter, it is said, was once sorely puzzled by a tortoise which the owner wished to send by train. The official was nonplussed by the inquiry as to which head of the tariff the creature should be considered to fall under; but, at last, deciding that it was neither "a dog" nor "a parrot" (the broad zoological classification in use on British railways) pronounced the tortoise to be "an insect," and therefore not liable to charge. This profound decision was prefaced by a brief enumeration of the animals which the railway company call "dogs." "Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so is guinea-pigs," said the porter, "but squirrels in cages is parrots!"
But please note particularly the porter's confusion of identity with regard to the rabbit. This excellent rodent is emphatically called "a dog." But the rabbit knows much better than to mistake itself for a dog. It might as well think itself a poacher.
Meanwhile, other attempts have been made to confuse it as to its own individuality; and if the rabbit eventually gives itself up as a hopeless conundrum, it is not more than might be expected. Its fur is now called "seal-skin" in the cheap goods market; the fluke has attacked it as if it were a sheep; while in recent English elections, when the Ground Game Bill was to the front, it was a very important factor. All the same, everybody goes on shooting it just as if it were a mere rabbit. This, I would contend, is hardly fair; for if its skin is really sealskin, the rabbit must, of necessity, be a seal, and, as such, ought to be harpooned from a boat, and not shot at with double-barrelled guns. It is absurd to talk of going out "sealing" in gaiters, with a terrier, for the pursuit of the seal is a marine operation, and concerned with ships and icebergs and whaling line. A sportsman, therefore, who goes out in quest of this valuable pelt should, in common regard for the proprieties, affect Arctic apparel; and, instead of ranging with his gun, should station himself with a harpoon over the "seal's" blow-hole, and, when it comes up to breathe, take his chance of striking it, not forgetting to have some water handy to pour over the line while it is being rapidly paid out, as otherwise it is very liable to catch fire from friction. By this means the rabbit would arrive at some intelligible conception of itself, and be spared much of the discomfort which must now arise from doubts as to its personality. Nothing, indeed, is so precious to sentient things as a conviction of their own "identity" and their "individuality," and I need only refer those who have any doubt about it to the whole range of moral philosophy to assure themselves of this fact. If we were not certain who we were two days running, much of the pleasure of life would be lost to us.
We entered the arid tract somewhere near the station of the Seven Palms. They can be seen growing far away on the left under the "foot-hills." About half way through we find ourselves at the station of Two Palms, but they are in tubs. Of course there may be others, and no doubt are. But all you can see from the cars is a limited wilderness. Yet on those mountains there, on the right—one is 12,000 feet—there is splendid pine timber; and on the other side of them, incredible as it seems, are glorious pastures, where the cattle are wading knee-deep in grass! For us, however, the hideous wilderness continues. The hours pass in a monotony of glaring sand, ugly rock fragments, and occasional bristly cactus. And then begins a low chapparal of "camel-thorn" or "muskeet," and as evening closes in we find ourselves at the Colorado River and at Yuma, where the sun shines from a cloudless sky three hundred and ten days in the year.
And the weather? I have not mentioned it as we travelled along, for I wished to emphasize it by bringing it in at the end of the chapter. Well, the weather. There was none to speak of, unless you can call a fierce dry over-heat, averaging 96 in the shade, weather. And this is all that we have had for the last twelve hours or so; heat enough to blister even a lizard, or frizzle a salamander. A hot wind, like the "100" of the Indian plains, blew across the desperate sands, getting scorched itself as it went, and spitefully passing on its heat to us. It was as hot as Cawnpore in June; nearly as hot as Aden. And then the change at Yuma! We had suddenly stepped from Egypt in August into Lower Bengal in September—from a villainous dry heat into afar more villainous damp one. The thermometer, though the sun had set, was at and, added to all, was such a plague of mosquitoes as would have subdued even Pharaoh into docility. The instant—literally, the instant—that we stepped from our cars our necks, hands, and faces were attacked, and on the platform everybody, even the half-breed Indians loafing outside the dining-room, were hard at work with both hands defending themselves from the small miscreants. The effect would have been ludicrous enough to any armour-plated onlooker, but it was no laughing matter. We were too busy slapping ourselves in two places at once to think of even smiling at others similarly engaged; and the last I remember of detestable Yuma was the man who sells photographs on the platform, whirling his hands with experienced skill round his head and packing up his wares by snatches in between his whirls.