terious and venerable race, a bit of foreign country. By
what precise means this was accomplished it would be difficult to say.
It is a fact well known to all Californians that a Chinaman can with no
more extensive properties than a few pieces of red paper, a partition, a
dingy curtain, and a varnished duck transform utterly an American
tenement into a Chinese pagoda.

Thence we passed through a wicket and came to the abode of hogs. They
dotted the landscape into the far distance, rooting about to find what
they could; they lay in wallows; they heaped themselves along fences;
they snorted and splashed in sundry shallow pools; a good half mile of
maternal hogs occupied a row of kennels from which the various progeny
issued forth between the bars. I cannot say I am much interested in
hogs, but even I could dimly comprehend the Captain's attitude of
swollen pride. They were clean, and black, and more nearly approximated
the absurd hog advertisements than I had believed possible. You know the
kind I mean; an almost exact rectangle on four short legs.

In the middle distance stood a long, narrow, thatched roof supported on
poles. Beneath this, the Captain told me, were the beehives. They proved
later to be in charge of a mild-eyed religious fanatic who believed the
world to be flat.

We took a cursory glance at a barn filled to the brim with prunes; and
the gushing, beautiful artesian well; at the men's quarters; the
blacksmith shop, and all the rest. So we rounded the circle and came to
the most important single feature of the ranch--the quarters for the
horses.

A very long, deep shed, open on all sides, contained a double row of
mangers facing each other, and divided into stalls. Here stood and were
fed the working horses. By that I mean not only the mule and horse
teams, but also the utility driving teams and the saddle horses used by
the cowboys. Between each two stalls was a heavy pillar supporting the
roof, and well supplied with facilities for hanging up the harness and
equipments. As is usual in California, the sides and ends were open to
the air; and the floor was simply the earth well bedded.

But over against this shed stood a big barn of the Eastern type. Here
were the private equipments.

The Captain is a horseman. He breeds polo ponies after a formula of his
own; and so successfully that many of them cross the Atlantic. On the
ranch are always several hundred head of beautiful animals; and of
these the