canned fruits and vegetables; and except here and there a brilliant poppy,
which stubborn Dame Nature had inserted among his wheat, wife and children
had not a flower to grace mantle or table. I confess that it pleased me
to hear this farmer complain of hard times, because, as he said, the
speculators in San Francisco made more money from his wheat than he did.
If the speculators in San Francisco teach the farmers in California to
grow something besides wheat, they will deserve well of the State.

The upper waters of the Sacramento run through mountain passes, and
between banks so steep that for miles at a time the river is inaccessible,
except by difficult and often dangerous descents; and an old miner told me
that when this part of the river, between where Redding now lies and its
source, near Mount Shasta, was first "prospected" for gold, the miners or
explorers had to build boats and descend by water, trying for gold by the
way, because they could not get down by land. In those days, he said, if a
company of miners could not make twenty dollars a day each, the "prospect"
was too poor to detain them; and they made but a short stay at most points
on the Upper Sacramento.

The country was then full of Indians; and it was very strange, indeed, to
hear this miner--a thoroughly kind-hearted man he was, and now the father
of a family of children--tell with the utmost unconcern, and as a matter
of course, how they used to shoot down these Indians, who waylaid them at
favoring spots on the river, and tried to pick them off with arrows.

I remember hearing a little boy ask a famous general once how many men he
had killed in the course of his wars, and being disappointed when he heard
that the general, so far as he know, had never killed any body. I suppose
a soldier in battle but rarely knows that he has actually shot a man. But
one of these old Indian fighters sits down after dinner, over a pipe, and