Now, some of these things were true, and some were not, and some will
never happen again; for the towns and cities no longer conduct
themselves like headstrong young tomboys out on a lark, but have
grown into ancient and decorous settlements some twenty-five or
thirty years old.

Perhaps California isn't really so interesting since she began to
learn manners; but she is a land of wonders still, with her sublime
mountains and valleys; her precious metals; her vineyards and
orchards of lemons and oranges, figs, limes, and nuts; her mammoth
vegetables, each big enough for a newspaper story; her celebrated
trees, on the stumps of which dancing-parties are given; her
vultures; her grizzly bears; and her people, drawn from every nook
and corner of the map--pink, yellow, blue, red, and green countries.
And though the story of California is not written, in all its
romantic details, in the school-books of to-day, it is a part of the
poetry of our late American history, full of strange and thrilling
scenes, glowing with interest and dramatic fire.

I know a little girl who crossed the plains in that great ungeneraled
army of fifteen or twenty thousand people that made the long and
weary journey to the land of gold in 1849. She tells her children
now of the strange, long days and months in the ox-team, passing
through the heat and dust of alkali deserts, fording rivers, and
toiling over steep mountains. She tells them how at night she often
used to lie awake, curled up in her grey blanket, and hear the men
talking together of the gold treasures they were to dig from the
ground--treasures, it seemed to her childish mind, more precious than
those of which she read in The Arabian Nights. And from a little