and thus secures fine crops all the year round. He sometimes gets as high as a dollar per pound for strawberries at Christmas and New Year's, and he estimates that the crop yields him, on an average, twenty cents per pound in coin the year round. He has no family, and wants to sell out and go to Santa Barbara, where he has relatives. He thinks his farm, with improvements, is worth forty dollars per acre. The potato and onion-fields he rents to a party of Portuguese. There is a family of Mexicans upon the upper end of his ranche, but most of his neighbors are Germans, though the population of the town is about equally divided between native Californians, Americans and Europeans. His sole companion is a Chinaman, who carries on the strawberry culture and does the housework, and is, as he told me, worth any other two men, though he gets but two thirds the' wages. He could not say much for the society of the neighborhood, nor can I.
Spanish Town contains little to attract a stranger. Turning southward here, the road runs through a rich, sloping plain, between the ocean and the mountains, and for eight on ten miles passes through one continued grain-field. The country was parceled out at first in great ranches of many thousand acres, each held under Spanish or Mexican grants. These have been sold to Americans, and cut up to some extent into smaller portions, but the farms are still immense, and far too large for the most profitable cultivation. Barley and oats, principally the latter, are cultivated. The crop was cut months ago, but owing to the lack of "steamers," as the inhabitants
