Rebozo, scarf.
Serape, blanket.
Lariat, rawhide rope.
Hacienda, estate.
While we are rattling along there is so little to see until we reach the ocean, that we may as well be recalling a few more facts worth knowing. At Riverside I learned that the leaf of the orange tree was larger when it first came out than later. It grows smaller as it matures. And most people say that the fig tree has no blossom, the fruit coming right out of the branch. But there is a blossom, and you have to cut the fruit open to find it. Just split a young fig in two and notice the perfect blossom in the centre.
They say it takes two Eastern men to believe a Californian, but it only takes one Eastern woman to tell true stories which do seem almost too big for belief. One man got lost in a mustard field, and he was on horseback too.
I saw at San Diego a tomato vine only eight months old, which was nineteen feet high and twenty-five feet wide, and loaded full of fruit in January. A man picking the tomatoes on a stepladder added to the effect. And a Gold of Ophir rose-bush at Pasadena which had 200,000 blossoms. This is vouched for by its owner, a retired missionary, who cannot be doubted. There are truly true pumpkins that weigh 256 pounds and are seven feet in circumference; cucumbers seven feet long; seven beets weighed 500 pounds; three bites to a strawberry; and the eucalyptus shoots often grow twenty feet the first year, carrying with them in their rapid ascension the stakes to which they were tied. All this is true. But here are two stories which may be doubtful, just to show what anecdotes are current in California. "A man was on top of a California pumpkin chopping off a piece with an axe, when it dropped in. He pulled up his ladder and put it down on the inside to look for it. While groping about he met a man, who exclaimed, 'Hello! What are you doing here?' 'Looking for my axe.' 'Gosh! you might as well give that up. I lost my horse and cart in here three days ago, and haven't found 'em yet!'"
"A farmer raised one thousand bushels of popcorn and stored it in a barn. The barn caught fire, and the corn began to pop and filled a ten-acre field. An old mare in a neighboring pasture had defective eyesight, saw the corn, thought it was snow, and lay down and froze to death."
As to serious farming, and how it pays in this part of the State, I have clipped several paragraphs from the papers, and will give three as samples of the whole. I desire also to communicate the cheerful news that there are no potato bugs to make life seem too hard to bear.
"RAISED ON TWENTY ACRES.