[CHRONICLES OF AN ANGLO-CALIFORNIAN RANCH.]
By MARGARET INNES.
CHAPTER I.
It has been suggested that the experiences of some English people in search of and on a ranch in California might be of interest to others, especially, perhaps, to those who are looking about more or less anxiously to find some promising opening for the future of their boys, and who, seeing the Old World so crowded, and realising the difficulty of finding a possible niche at home, may desire to try an altogether new life in the New World.
Many fathers and mothers, also like ourselves, would fain discover, if possible, some way of keeping their boys beside them; some business which they can work together, and in which they may find a satisfactory livelihood for all. Of course, I am speaking of those who have no well-established family business or firm; for them many difficulties and anxious questions are solved.
These were the reasons, together with the delicate health of our two boys, and my own long-standing lung trouble, which, after much thought and study, led us to pack up all our worldly goods, label them "Settlers' effects," and start off on the weary long journey of 6,000 miles, to the land of sunshine, on the Pacific coast. Having some acquaintances living at a little summer holiday place on the coast, and within some seventeen miles of the busy and enterprising town of Los Angeles, we decided to go there, and, if convenient, make it our headquarters while looking about and getting all possible information on the important subject of ranching.
We arrived about the end of October, when the heat of summer was over; for even on the coast, the glare of full summer is trying to people coming from northern latitudes.
But we found the climate most exquisite all the winter. The sunshine was perfectly glorious; the colours, the distances and the sunsets were like fairyland. Indeed, they were quite an excitement to us, and we would often come to a sudden standstill in our evening walks to watch the splendid transformation scene, saying how exaggerated everyone would think our descriptions, if we tried to put them all down exactly, on paper. It is true Holman Hunt had such colours in his pictures of Palestine, but it needs a genius to make such impossible colours accepted as realities.
The little town is built near the edge of the bluffs, and it was delightful to sit under the eucalyptus trees and look out at the sea, so wonderfully blue, with its broad white fringe all round the bay, where the big rollers broke on the yellow sands, and rushed away up the level shore.
The happiness too of all the living creatures seemed quite infectious. We saw flocks of dainty wee sea-ducks, tumbling and swimming about in the sea, just where the huge rollers broke, vying with each other in the show of bravery, going under with the huge crest of a wave and bobbing up again, so rapidly, and with a jaunty toss of the head. Enormous golden brown butterflies came floating down the soft air and hung over the white surf.