should be made to Eastern standards. The outpouring of untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained for the money than an equal expenditure would have procured here. The Menlo Park district is inferior to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others, in the neighborhood of New York.
The builders have struck out a kind of style of their own, perhaps in too great haste to wait for imported ideas. The houses are chiefly of wood. Flood, of Flood & O'Brien, and "Consolidated Virginia" when the great bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size, on an estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There was a terrace, with a fine bronze fountain. The main steps were of polished marble with bronze sphinxes, and bronze dragons studded the ornate stables the whole glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the noise of a brass band.
There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling the tone of rural life at the East. Such a one is that of ex-Governor Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here is a breeding farm for horses, one of the most complete of the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks, which, at the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make a small city by themselves. It is inhabited by a population of nearly five hundred animals, who return hither from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks, and have two hundred persons employed in their domestic service. The spacious stables are uniformly floored and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the freshest straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable drawing-room.
Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred
