erable portions of
the regions best known for fruit are watered by irrigating ditches and
pipes supplied by ample reservoirs in the mountains. From natural
rainfall and the sea moisture the mesas and hills, which look arid
before ploughing, produce large crops of grain when cultivated after the
annual rains, without artificial watering.

Southern California has been slowly understood even by its occupants,
who have wearied the world with boasting of its productiveness.
Originally it was a vast cattle and sheep ranch. It was supposed that
the land was worthless except for grazing. Held in princely ranches of
twenty, fifty, one hundred thousand acres, in some cases areas larger
than German principalities, tens of thousands of cattle roamed along the
watercourses and over the mesas, vast flocks of sheep cropped close the
grass and trod the soil into hard-pan. The owners exchanged cattle and
sheep for corn, grain, and garden vegetables; they had no faith that
they could grow cereals, and it was too much trouble to procure water
for a garden or a fruit orchard. It was the firm belief that most of the
rolling mesa land was unfit for cultivation, and that neither forest nor
fruit trees would grow without irrigation. Between Los Angeles and
Redondo Beach is a ranch of 35,000 acres. Seventeen years ago it was
owned by a Scotchman, who used the whole of it as a sheep ranch. In
selling it to the present owner he warned him not to waste time by
attempting to farm it; he himself raised no fruit or vegetables, planted
no trees, and bought all his corn, wheat, and barley. The purchaser,
however, began to experiment. He planted trees and set out orchards
which grew, and in a couple of years he wrote to the former owner that
he had 8000 acres in fine wheat. To say it in a word, there is scarcely
an acre of the tract which is not highly productive in barley, wheat,
corn, potatoes, while considerable parts of it are especially adapted to
the English walnut and to the citrus fruits.

[Illustration: SCENES IN MONTECITO AND LOS ANGELES.]

On this route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could
be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed
and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We
passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an
acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre;
and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has s