SMALL AND GREAT. ^95'
things, returned to their homes, only to find their des- tiny in village labor, their fathers at first seeming in their eyes old-fashioned, fossilized, non-progressive men of la vieille roche.
The stories told by returned Californians were to their hearers fabulous ; and they were, indeed, too often as little worthy of literal belief as the wonders Rabelais narrated concerning his hero — how seventeen thousand cows and more scarcely supplied the babe with milk ; how the mare on which he rode was as large as six elephants; how he cut lettuce as big as walnut trees, used for his hair a comb nine hundred feet long, and for a toothpick an elephant's tusk,
