d
picturesque marshes, past San Rafael resting warmly among her hills, over
the divide and up the Petaluma Valley, and on to the grassy feet of
Sonoma Mountain and home. We covered fifty-five miles that day. Not so
bad, eh, for Prince the Rogue, the paint-removing Outlaw, the
thin-shanked thoroughbred, and the rabbit-jumper? And they came in cool
and dry, ready for their mangers and the straw.

Oh, we didn't stop. We considered we were just starting, and that was
many weeks ago. We have kept on going over six counties which are
comfortably large, even for California, and we are still going. We have
twisted and tabled, criss-crossed our tracks, made fascinating and
lengthy dives into the interior valleys in the hearts of Napa and Lake
Counties, travelled the coast for hundreds of miles on end, and are now
in Eureka, on Humboldt Bay, which was discovered by accident by the gold-
seekers, who were trying to find their way to and from the Trinity
diggings. Even here, the white man's history preceded them, for dim
tradition says that the Russians once anchored here and hunted sea-otter
before the first Yankee trader rounded the Horn, or the first Rocky
Mountain trapper thirsted across the "Great American Desert" and trickled
down the snowy Sierras to the sun-kissed land. No; we are not resting
our horses here on Humboldt Bay. We are writing this article, gorging on
abalones and mussels, digging clams, and catching record-breaking sea-
trout and rock-cod in the intervals in which we are not sailing, motor-
boating, and swimming in the most temperately equable climate we have
ever experienced.

These comfortably large counties! They are veritable empires. Take
Humboldt, for instance. It is three times as large as Rhode Island, one
and a half times as large as Delaware, almost as large as Connecticut,
and half as large as Massachusetts. The pioneer has done his work in
this north of the bay region, the foundations are laid, and all is ready
for the inevitable inrush of population and adequate development of
resources which so far have been no more than skimmed, and casually and
carelessly skimmed at that. This region of the six counties alone will
some day support a population of millions. In the meanwhile, O you home-
seekers, you wealth-seekers, and, above all, you climate-seekers, now is
the time to get in on the ground floor.

Robert Ingersoll once said that the genial climate of California would in
a fair