tle town of Los Angeles, where one finds Spanish
adobes and Yankee shingles meeting and overlapping in very curious
antagonism. I believe there are some fifteen thousand people here, and
some of their buildings are rather fine, but the gardens and the sky
interested me more. A palm is seen here and there poising its royal
crown in the rich light, and the banana, with its magnificent ribbon
leaves, producing a marked tropical effect--not semi-tropical, as they
are so fond of saying here, while speaking of their fruits. Nothing
I have noticed strikes me as semi, save the brusque little bits
of civilization with which the wilderness is checkered. These are
semi-barbarous or less; everything else in the region has a most
exuberant pronounced wholeness. The city held me but a short time, for
the San Gabriel Mountains were in sight, advertising themselves grandly
along the northern sky, and I was eager to make my way into their midst.

At Pasadena I had the rare good fortune to meet my old friend Doctor
Congar, with whom I had studied chemistry and mathematics fifteen years
ago. He exalted San Gabriel above all other inhabitable valleys, old and
new, on the face of the globe. "I have rambled," said he, "ever since
we left college, tasting innumerable climates, and trying the advantages
offered by nearly every new State and Territory. Here I have made my
home, and here I shall stay while I live. The geographical position is
exactly right, soil and climate perfect, and everything that heart can
wish comes to our efforts--flowers, fruits, milk and honey, and plenty
of money. And there," he continued, pointing just beyond his own
precious possessions, "is a block of land that is for sale; buy it and
be my neighbor; plant five acres with orange trees, and by the time your
last mountain is climbed their fruit will be your fortune." He then led
my down the valley, through the few famous old groves in full bearing,
and on the estate of Mr. Wilson showed me a ten-acre grove eighteen
years old, the last year's crop from which was sold for twenty thousand
dollars. "There," said he, with triumphant enthusiasm, "what do you
think of that? Two thousand dollars per acre per annum for land worth
only one hundred dollars."

The number of orange trees planted to the acre is usually from
forty-nine to sixty-nine; they then stand from twenty-five to thirty
feet apart each way, and, thus planted, thrive and continue fruitful to
a comparatively g