Hunter
Cats! I am coming to them just the way Mr. Connor did,--by degrees. I
want you to know about the place he lived in, and how he used to amuse
himself, before he decided to build his house; and then I must tell you
about the house, and then about the children that came to live with him
in it, and then about the Chinamen that came to do his work, and about
his orange-trees, and the gophers that gnawed the bark off them, and the
rabbits that burrowed under his vines. Oh! it will be a good many pages
yet before I can possibly get to the time when the Hunter Cats come in.
But I will tell it as fast as I can, for I dislike long stories myself.

The village of San Gabriel is in a beautiful broad valley, running east
and west. The north wall of the valley is made by a range of mountains,
called the Sierra Madre; that is Spanish and means "Mother Mountains."
They are grand mountains; their tops are almost solid stone, all sharp
and jagged, with more peaks and ridges, crowded in together, than you
could possibly count. At the bottom, they reach out into the valley by
long slopes, which in the olden time were covered thick with trees and
shrubs; but now, the greater part of these have been cut down and
cleared off, and the ground planted full of orange-trees and grapevines.
If you want to see how it looks to have solid miles upon miles of orange
orchards and vineyards together, you must go to this San Gabriel Valley.
There is no other such place in the world.

As Mr. Connor rode about, day after day, and looked at these orchards
and vineyards, he began to think he should like to have some too. So he
went up and down along the base of the mountains, looking for a good
place. At last he found one. It was strange nobody had picked it out
before. One reason was that it was so wild, and lay so high up, that it
would be a world of trouble, and cost a deal of money, to make a road up
to it and to clear the ground. But Mr. Connor did not care for that. It
was a sort of ridge of the mountains, and it was all grown over thick
with what is called in California "chapparal." That is not the name of
any one particular shrub or tree; it means a mixture of every sort and
kind. You all know what mixed candy is! Well, "chapparal" is mixed
bushes and shrubs; mixed thick too! From a little way off, it looks as
smooth as moss; it is so tangled, and the bushes have such strong and
tough stems, you can't possibly get through it, unless you cut a p