San and Santa, the masculine and feminine form of saint.
As the men who laid out a part of New York evidently travelled with a classical dictionary, and named the towns from that, as Rome, Syracuse, Palmyra, Utica, so the devout Spanish explorer named the places where he halted by the name of the saint whose name was on the church calendar for that day. And we have San Diego (St. James), San Juan (St. John), San Luis, San Jose, San Pedro, Santa Inez, Santa Maria, Santa Clara, and, best of all, Santa Barbara, to which town we are now going.
The Mexican dialect furnishes words which are now permanently incorporated in our common speech; as:
Adobe, sun-dried brick.
Canon, gorge.
Tules, rush or water-weed. (Bret Harte’s
Bonanza, originally
Fandango, dance of the people.
Corral, a place to collect stock. (A farmer of the West never says cow-pen, or barnyard, or farmyard, but corral.)
Cascarones, egg-shells filled with finely cut gold or silver paper, or perfumes, broken on head of young man, in friendly banter or challenge to a dance.
Burro, small kind of donkey.
Broncho, wild, untamed animal.
Sombrero, hat.
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.
“How much land do I need in California? is a question often asked. The answer is readily made: as much as you can profitably and economically work. A gentleman has made the following exhibit in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce: ‘Raised on twenty acres of ground, 2500 boxes of oranges, 1500 boxes of lemons, 37,000 pounds of grapes, 2000 pounds of pears, 35,000 pounds of apples, 15,000 pounds of berries, black and red, 1000 pounds of English walnuts. Besides nectarines, apricots, plums, three crops of potatoes, 500 pounds of crab-apples, and one acre of alfalfa kept for cows, and flowers of different varieties. These oranges are worth on the trees $3500, the lemons $3000, the grapes $370, pears $30, apples $75, berries $30, walnuts $80. The total will be $7085, and all the products not counted. That surely is more than the crops of a half section in Kansas or Illinois will sell for.’ Every one may not do as well, but they can approach it, and if they do, twenty acres is quite enough.”
“PROFITS OF BERRY CULTURE.
“Speaking of the profits of growing strawberries in Southern California, the Covina
“PROFIT IN ALMONDS.
“M. Treat, an authority on almond culture, has contributed the following to the Woodland
