uld do well to prospect the resources of this aristocratic little
colony.

If we look now at these southern valleys in general, it will appear at
once that with all their advantages they lie beyond the reach of poor
settlers, not only on account of the high price of irrigable land--one
hundred dollars per acre and upwards--but because of the scarcity of
labor. A settler with three or four thousand dollars would be penniless
after paying for twenty acres of orange land and building ever so plain
a house, while many years would go by ere his trees yielded an income
adequate to the maintenance of his family.

Nor is there anything sufficiently reviving in the fine climate to form
a reliable inducement for very sick people. Most of this class, from
all I can learn, come here only to die, and surely it is better to die
comfortably at home, avoiding the thousand discomforts of travel, at a
time when they are so heard to bear. It is indeed pitiful to see so many
invalids, already on the verge of the grave, making a painful way
to quack climates, hoping to change age to youth, and the darkening
twilight of their day to morning. No such health-fountain has been
found, and this climate, fine as it is, seems, like most others, to be
adapted for well people only. From all I could find out regarding its
influence upon patients suffering from pulmonary difficulties, it is
seldom beneficial to any great extent in advanced cases. The cold sea
winds are less fatal to this class of sufferers than the corresponding
winds further north, but, notwithstanding they are tempered on their
passage inland over warm, dry ground, they are still more or less
injurious.

The summer climate of the fir and pine woods of the Sierra Nevada would,
I think, be found infinitely more reviving; but because these woods
have not been advertised like patent medicines, few seem to think of the
spicy, vivifying influences that pervade their fountain freshness and
beauty.

XI. The San Gabriel Mountains [13]

After saying so much for human culture in my last, perhaps I may now be
allowed a word for wildness--the wildness of this southland, pure and
untamable as the sea.

In the mountains of San Gabriel, overlooking the lowland vines and fruit
groves, Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage. Not even in
the Sierra have I ever made the acquaintance of mountains more rigidly
inaccessible. The slopes are exceptionally steep and insecure to the
fo