ife
meets the monotony of death, Southern California becomes a land of
contrasts; and the contrasts themselves become monotonous.

General Trednoke's ranch was very near the borders of these two mighty
forces. An hour's easy ride would carry him to a region as barren
and apparently as irreclaimable as that through which Childe Roland
journeyed in quest of the Dark Tower; lying, too, in a temperature so
fiery that it coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped the beating
of the heart. Underfoot were fine dust, and whitened bones; the air
was prismatic and magical, ever conjuring up phantom pictures, whose
characteristic was that they were at the farthest remove from any
possible reality. The azure sky descended and became a lake; the
pulsations of the atmosphere translated themselves into the rhythmic
lapse of waves; spikes of sage-brush and blades of cactus became sylvan
glades, and hamlets cheerful with inhabitants. Only, all was silent; and
as you drew near, the scene trembled, altered, and was gone!

Hideous black lizards and horned toads crawl and hop amid this
desolation; and the deadly little sidewinder rattlesnake lies basking in
the blaze of sunshine, which it distils into venom. Sometimes the level
plain is broken up into savage ridges and awful canons, along whose arid
bottoms no water streams. As you stagger through their chaotic bottoms,
you see vast boulders poised overhead, tottering to a fall; a shiver
of earthquake, a breath of hurricane, and they come crashing and
splintering in destruction down. Along the sides of these acclivities
extend long, level lines and furrows, marks of where the ocean flowed
ages ago. But sometimes the hills are but accumulations of desert dust,
which shift slowly from place to place under the action of the wind,
melting away here to be re-erected yonder; mounding themselves, perhaps,
above a living and struggling human being, to move forward, anon,
leaving where he was a little heap of withered bones. A fearful place is
this broad abyss, where once murmured the waters of a prehistoric sea.
Let us return to the cool and fragrant security of the general's ranch.

At right angles to the main body of the house extend two wings,
thus forming three sides of a square, the interior of which is the
court-yard. Here the business of the establishment is conducted. It is
the liveliest spot on the premises; though it is liveliness of a very
indolent sort. The veranda built around th