meaning to try for nothing but small game. At San Pedro, the port for
Los Angeles (Puebla de los Angeles, the "Town of the Angels"), we
landed, and after a few days' camping by some lagoons near the sea,
where we shot more duck than could easily be disposed of, we made our
way to that little old Spanish settlement, where we hired a horse and
buggy to take us inland.

Our first stopping-place was at a sheep-ranche, about fifty miles from
Los Angeles, a very beautiful property, well grassed and watered, and
consisting chiefly of great plains through which flowed a crystal-clear
river, and surrounded on very side by the most picturesque of hills,
1,000 to 1,500 feet in height.

The ranche was owned by a Scotsman, and his "weather-board" house was
new and comfortable, but we found ourselves at the mercy of the most
conservative of Chinese cooks, whom no blandishments could induce to
give us at our meals any of the duck or snipe we shot, but who stuck
with unwearying persistency to boiled pork and beans. And on boiled pork
and beans he rang the changes, morning, noon, and night; that is to say,
sometimes it was hot, and sometimes it was cold, but it was ever boiled
pork and beans. At its best it is not a diet to dream about (though I
found that a good deal of dreaming could be done _upon_ it), and as we
fancied, after a few days, that any attraction which it might originally
have possessed had quite faded and died, we resolved to push on
elsewhere.

The following night we reached a little place at the foot of the higher
mountains called Temescal, a very diminutive place, consisting, indeed,
of but one small house. The surroundings, however, were very beautiful,
and the presence of a hot sulphur-spring, bubbling up in the scrub not
one hundred yards from the house, and making a most inviting natural
bath, coupled with the favourable reports of game of all kinds to be
got, induced us to stop. And life was very pleasant there in the crisp
dry air, for the quail shooting was good, the scenery and weather
perfect, everything fresh and green and newly washed by a two days'
rain, the food well cooked, and, nightly, after our day's shooting, we
rolled into the sulphur-spring and luxuriated in the hot water.

But Halley's soul began to pine for higher things, for bigger game than
quail and duck. "Look here," he said to me one day, "this is all very
well, you know, but why shouldn't we go after the deer amongst the
hills? We've go