ed to praise Uncle Jap's fruit or his
wife's sweet pickles, he was not pressed to "call again." The old
fellow was inordinately proud of his colts, his Poland-China pigs, his
"graded" bull, his fountain in the garden.

"Nice place you have, Mr. Panel," a stranger might say.

"Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes. Uster be nothin' but sun an' bushes
onst. It's nice, yas, and it's paid for."

"What a good-looking mare!"

"Yas; she's paid for, too."

Everything on the ranch, animal, vegetable, and mineral, was "paid
for." Uncle Jap was the last man to hurt anybody's feelings, but the
"paid for" rankled on occasion, for some of his visitors stood
perilously near the edge of bankruptcy, and, as a rule, had not paid
for either the land they occupied, or the cattle they branded, or the
clothes they wore. To understand this story you must grasp the fact
that Uncle Jap lived with credit and not on it.

His wife, also of New England parentage, had a righteous horror of
debt bred in her bone. Uncle Jap adored her. If he set an extravagant
value upon his other possessions, what price above rubies did he place
upon the meek, silent, angular woman, who had been his partner,
companion, and friend for more than a quarter of a century. Sun and
wind had burnt her face, also, to the exact tint of her husband's. Her
name was Lily.

"And, doggone it, she looks like a lily," Uncle Jap would say, in
moments of expansion. "Tall an' slim, yas, an' with a little droop of
her head. I'd ought ter be grateful to God fer givin' me sech a flower
outer heaven--an' I am, I am. Look at her now! What a mover!"

Uncle Jap's Lily chasing a hen certainly exhibited an activity
surprising in one of her years. By a hairbreadth she missed
perfection. Uncle Jap had been known to hint, nothing more, that he
would have liked a dozen or so of babies. The hint took concrete form
in: "I think a heap o' young things, colts, kittens, puppies--an' the
like." Then he would sigh.

We came to California in the eighties, and in '93, if my memory serves
me, Uncle Jap discovered bituminous rock in a corner of his ranch. He
became very excited over this find, and used to carry samples of ore
in his pocket which he showed to the neighbours.

"There's petroleum whar that ore is--_sure_. An' ef I could
strike it, boys, why, why I'd jest hang my Lily with di'monds from her
head to her feet, I would."

This, mind you, was before the discovery of the now famous oil fields.
Ev