light-house; and finally land at Mendocino City.

Before the stage sets you down at Mendocino, or "Big River," you will have
noticed that the coast-line is broken at frequent intervals by the mouths
of small streams, and at the available points at the mouths of these
streams saw-mills are placed. This continues up the coast, wherever a
river-mouth offers the slightest shelter to vessels loading; for the
redwood forests line the coast up to and beyond Humboldt Bay.

When you leave the coast for the interior, you ride through mile after
mile of redwood forest. Unlike the firs of Oregon and Puget Sound, this
tree does not occupy the whole land. It rears its tall head from a jungle
of laurel, madrone, oak, and other trees; and I doubt if so many as fifty
large redwoods often stand upon a single acre. I was told that an average
tree would turn out about fifteen thousand feet of lumber, and thus even
thirty such trees to the acre would yield nearly half a million feet.

The topography of California, like its climate, has decided features.
As there are but two seasons, so there are apt to be sharply-drawn
differences in natural features, and you descend from what appears to you
an interminable mass of mountains suddenly into a plain, and pass from
deep forests shading the mountain road at once into a prairie valley,
which nature made ready to the farmer's hands, taking care even to
beautify it for him with stately and umbrageous oaks. There are a number
of such valleys on the way which I took from the coast at Mendocino City
to the Nome Cult Indian Reservation, in Round Valley. The principal of
these, Little Lake, Potter, and Eden valleys, contain from five to twelve
thousand acres; but there are a number of smaller vales, little gems, big
enough for one or two farmers, fertile and easily cultivated.