hey are shorn near the line of the
railroad, so that there is no costly transportation of the wool. Mutton
sheep, too, are driven to the railroad to be sent to market, and for
stock, therefore, this otherwise out-of-the-way region is very convenient.

Riding through the foot-hills near Rocklin--where I had been visiting
a well-kept sheep-farm--I saw a curious and unexpected sight. There are
still a few wretched Digger Indians in this part of California; and what I
saw was a party of these engaged in catching grasshoppers, which they boil
and eat. They dig a number of funnel-shaped holes, wide at the top, and
eighteen inches deep, on a cleared space, and then, with rags and brush,
drive the grasshoppers toward these holes, forming for that purpose a
wide circle. It is slow work, but they seem to delight in it; and their
excitement was great as they neared the circle of holes and the insects
began to hop and fall into them. At last there was a close and rapid
rally, and half a dozen bushels of grasshoppers were driven into the
holes; whereupon hats, aprons, bags, and rags were stuffed in to prevent
the multitudes from dispersing; and then began the work of picking them
out by handfuls, crushing them roughly in the hand to keep them quiet,
and crowding them into the bags in which they were to be carried to their
rancheria.

"Sweet--all same pudding," cried an old woman to me, as I stood looking
on. It is not a good year for grasshoppers this year; nothing like the
year of which an inhabitant of Roseville spoke to me later in the day,
when he said, "they ate up every bit of his garden-truck, and then sat on
the fence and asked him for a chew of tobacco."

The sheep ranges of the northern interior counties are less broken up than
in the coast counties farther south; and it is better and more profitable,
in my judgment, to pay five dollars per acre for grazing lands in the
Sacramento Valley than two dollars and a half for grazing lands farther
south and among the mountains. The grazier in the northern counties has
two advantages over his southern competitor: first, in the ability to buy
low-lying lands on the river, where he can graze from three to six or even
ten sheep to the acre during the summer months, and where he may plant
large tracts in alfalfa; and, secondly, in a safe refuge against drought
in the mountain meadows of the Sierras, and in the little valleys and
fertile hill-slopes of the Coast Range, where there is