fornia--the pioneers of pioneers. The passing
stranger, however, is always welcomed and supplied with the best the
home affords, and around the fireside, while he smokes his pipe,
very little encouragement is required to bring forth the story of the
farmer's life--hunting, mining, fighting, in the early Indian times,
etc. Only the few who are married hope to return to California to
educate their children, and the ease with which money is made renders
the fulfillment of these hopes comparatively sure.

After dwelling thus long on the farms of this dry wonderland, my
readers may be led to fancy them of more importance as compared with the
unbroken fields of Nature than they really are. Making your way along
any of the wide gray valleys that stretch from north to south, seldom
will your eye be interrupted by a single mark of cultivation. The smooth
lake-like ground sweeps on indefinitely, growing more and more dim in
the glowing sunshine, while a mountain range from eight to ten thousand
feet high bounds the view on either hand. No singing water, no green
sod, no moist nook to rest in--mountain and valley alike naked and
shadowless in the sun-glare; and though, perhaps, traveling a well-worn
road to a gold or silver mine, and supplied with repeated instructions,
you can scarce hope to find any human habitation from day to day, so
vast and impressive is the hot, dusty, alkaline wildness.

But after riding some thirty or forty miles, and while the sun may
be sinking behind the mountains, you come suddenly upon signs of
cultivation. Clumps of willows indicate water, and water indicates
a farm. Approaching more nearly, you discover what may be a patch of
barley spread out unevenly along the bottom of a flood bed, broken
perhaps, and rendered less distinct by boulder piles and the fringing
willows of a stream. Speedily you can confidently say that the grain
patch is surely such; its ragged bounds become clear; a sand-roofed
cabin comes to view littered with sun-cracked implements and with an
outer girdle of potato, cabbage, and alfalfa patches.

The immense expanse of mountain-girt valleys, on the edges of which
these hidden ranches lie, make even the largest fields seem comic
in size. The smallest, however, are by no means insignificant in a
pecuniary view. On the east side of the Toyabe Range I discovered
a jolly Irishman who informed me that his income from fifty acres,
reinforced by a sheep range on the adjacent hills, wa