is the way the thing is done. The largest beet in this soil may attain a weight of fifty or sixty pounds the first year; I do not think any grow larger. One is selected, carefully dug up, so as not to injure the root, in the fall, and housed during the rainy season. Then it is replanted in the spring, and instead of going to seed, as it would if left in the ground all winter, continues growing, and in the fall it is again dug up and housed, having probably attained a weight of eighty or ninety pounds. Next year it grows perhaps to one hundred or one hundred and ten pounds—the largest on record weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds, and was raised in Santa Cruz county—but now it is "played out," in California parlance, and will not grow another year. How they manage to raise lettuce seven feet in circumference, and cucumbers five feet two inches long-and eight inches in circumference, such as are often on exhibition in the California Market, San Francisco, I do not know—but they do it.
The soil here is wonderfully rich, and often, as I have seen myself, from ten to twenty feet in depth, of a black loam, like that of the western prairies.
The road winds along the bold shore of the Pacific for miles—now passing over steep divides, and again descending to the bottom of precipitous cañons. At times the view of the ocean, for a long distance up and down the coast, is unobstructed, and from one height I counted not less than fifteen whales spouting at intervals as they sported in the calm blue waters, or sought their accustomed food
