thought it nothing unusual to use them as playthings. They were abundant
in most of the houses; my mother and her friends used them as soap
dishes in, the bedrooms.

"In the spare rooms was always a little pile of money covered by a
napkin, from which the visitor was expected to help himself if he
needed. We would have considered it disgraceful to count the guest
money."

"Our parents were very strict with us," said another Californian, "much
more so than is the custom to-day. Sometimes while the parents,
brothers, and sisters were eating their meal, a child who was naughty
had for punishment to kneel in one corner of the dining room before a
high stool, on which was an earthen plate, a tin cup, and a wooden
spoon. It was worse than a flogging, a thousand times. As soon as the
father went out, the mother and sisters hastened to the sorrowful one
and comforted him with the best things from the table."

The clothes were not laundered each week, but were saved up often for
several weeks or even a month or two, and then came a wash-day frolic.
Imagine wash day looked forward to as a delightful event! So it was,
however, to many California children. Senorita Vallejo, in the Century
Magazine (Vol. 41), thus describes one of these excursions:--

"It made us children happy to be waked before sunrise to prepare for the
'wash-day expedition.' The night before, the Indians had soaped the
clumsy carreta's great wheels. Lunch was placed in baskets, and the
gentle oxen were yoked to the pole. We climbed in under the green cloth
of an old Mexican flag which was used as an awning, and the white-haired
Indian driver plodded beside with his long oxgoad. The great piles of