Howers, mingle their perfume with that of the peerless madroño, which here is indeed "a thing of beauty and a joy forever."
The powder-mills are located in a secluded glen among the hills, and a neat, thrifty little hamlet has grown up around them. "No admittance" is posted on every door of the thirty or more broad-eaved, yellow-painted, Swiss-farmhouse-styled buildings of the Powder Company. Accidents will happen here as elsewhere; and when one does happen the people loitering in the vicinity at the moment are rendered, as a general thing, forever unpresentable in fashion-able society. This thought reconciles us to the prohibition, and we ride away.
A few years since, the "oil fever" broke out with violence all over California. In Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Counties, where the fields of asphaltum or "brea" cover wide districts, and at the surface a refractory kind of oil exudes and runs off in small quantities in many localities, wells were bored Heaven knows how deep, through almost every conceivable substance,—natural putty, cement, corn dodger, cobble-stones, old cheese, chalk, ice cream, molasses, soft soap, hard soap, and soapstone,—but never a smell of oil came to the surface, though a vein of burning-gas, sufficient in volume to light the city of Los Angeles had it been saved and utilized, was cut into. Here in quiet Santa Cruz they bored everything, from a lime-rock to a sand-bank, in search of oil, and never struck it, despite the predictions of professional geologists, oil-wizards, and rock-sharps generally. All along the banks of the
