When he was within two miles of the house, he struck off from the
highway into a narrow path that he recollected led by a short-cut
through the hills, and saved nearly a third of the distance. It was
more than a year since he had trod this path, and as he found it
growing fainter and fainter, and more and more overgrown with
the wild mustard, he said to himself, "I think no one can have
passed through here this year."

As he proceeded he found the mustard thicker and thicker. The
wild mustard in Southern California is like that spoken of in the
New Testament, in the branches of which the birds of the air may
rest. Coming up out of the earth, so slender a stem that dozens can
find starting-point in an inch, it darts up, a slender straight shoot,
five, ten, twenty feet, with hundreds of fine feathery branches
locking and interlocking with all the other hundreds around it, till
it is an inextricable network like lace. Then it bursts into yellow
bloom still finer, more feathery and lacelike. The stems are so
infinitesimally small, and of so dark a green, that at a short
distance they do not show, and the cloud of blossom seems
floating in the air; at times it looks like golden dust. With a clear
blue sky behind it, as it is often seen, it looks like a golden
snow-storm. The plant is a tyrant and a nuisance,-- the terror of the
farmer; it takes riotous possession of a whole field in a season;
once in, never out; for one plant this year, a million the next; but it
is impossible to wish that the land were freed from it. Its gold is as
distinct a value to the eye as the nugget gold is in the pocket.

Father Salvierderra soon found himself in a veritable thicket of
these delicate branches, high above his head, and so interlaced that
he could make headway only by slowly and patiently disentangling