et customary to put them in twenty-five pound boxes,
but, no doubt, as more experience is gained, farmers will contrive other
parcels. Chinese do all the work in raisin-making, and are paid one dollar
a day, they supplying themselves with food. There is no rain during the
raisin-making season, and, consequently, the whole outdoor work may be
done securely as well as cheaply.

Enormous quantities of fruit are now put up in tin cans in this State;
and you will be surprised, perhaps--as I was the other day--to hear of an
orchard of peach and apricot trees, which bears this year (1873) its first
full crop, and for one hundred acres of which the owners have received ten
thousand dollars cash, gold, selling the fruit on the trees, without risk
of ripening or trouble of picking.

Yet peaches and apricots are not the most profitable fruits in this State,
for the cherry--the most delicious cherries in the world grow here--is
worth even more; and I suspect that the few farmers who have orchards
of plums, and carefully dry the fruit, make as much money as the cherry
owners. There has sprung up a very lively demand for California dried
plums. They bring from twenty to twenty-two cents per pound at wholesale
in San Francisco, and even as high as thirty cents for the best quality;
and I am told that last season a considerable quantity was shipped
Eastward and sold at a handsome profit in New York.

The plum bears heavily and constantly north of Sacramento, and does not
suffer from the curculio, and the dried fruit is delicious and wholesome.

Some day the farmers who are now experimenting with figs will, I do not
doubt, produce also a marketable dried fig in large quantities. At San
Francisco, in October, 1873, I found in the shops delicious dried figs,
but not in great quantities, nor so thoroughly dried as to bear shipment
to a distance. The tree nourishes in almost all parts of the State.
Usually it bears two and often three crops a year, and it grows into a
noble and stately tree.

I am told that when Smyrna figs sell for twenty to thirty cents per pound,
California figs bring but from five to ten cents. The tree comes into full
bearing, where its location is favorable, in its third or fourth year; and
ought to yield then about sixty pounds of dried figs. I suspect the cost
of labor will control the drying of figs, for they must be picked by hand.
If they fall to the ground they are easily bruised, and the bruised part
turns