duty executed their trust. If years have been employed for the erection of these buildings, it is because they are to remain for the centuries, and they are as massive and as durable as the rock of which they seem but a part. In the equipment, the scientific knowledge and mechanical ingenuity of the world were called into requisition, and this is the grand result. Nor are the appointments of this piace, perfect and ample as they are, better adapted to its purposes than are the natural surroundings. Elsewhere, observatories are erected amid the busy marts of trade, and among the haunts of men. Here, the rugged mountain forbids all other companionship, and sterility and solitude keep sentinel watch at the portals of this temple of science. It is fitting that this be so, for what, to the watcher of the skies, are the aspirations of life, the ambitions of men? What to him are the boundaries of nations, or the measures of time? The field of his explorations is illimitable space, the unit of his line the vast orbit of the earth. The centuries of Egypt, hoary with age, are scarce seconds on his dial. The Pharaohs are to him but men of yesterday. He gauges the nebulous mist that enwraps Orion, that veils Andromeda, and proclaims the natal day of systems yet to be. He notes the changing hues and waning light of blazing stars, and declares, when rayless and dark, with retinues of dead worlds, they shall journey on in the awful stillness of eternal night. Well may he who deals with these, the problems of the skies, dwell alone and apart from other men.

In the central pier, which is to support the great telescope, is the tomb of James Lick. Lonely in his life, alone in his resting place; this seems, indeed, his fit mausoleum, and the visitor reads, though it be unwritten, as his epitaph, the inscription in England's great cathedral on the tomb of its architect: "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice."

The return trip is much more agreeable than the ascent. As the carriage sweeps down the mountain road, with its many

curves, the landscape again unfolds, with scenes and shades that come and go like the figures of a kaleidescope; and in three short hours the traveler is again in San José, with recollections of the mountain road, the marvelous prospect, the lofty mountains and the lonely tomb that can never be effaced.

The manufactures of San José, though as yet in their infancy, give promise of future importance. There are four fruit canneries, employing in the fruit season many hundred hands, mostly women and children; an extensive woolen mill, a silk factory, foundries, machine shops, planing mills, wineries, and other kindred industries. These are steadily enlarging and increasing, and give every indication of permanence and prosperity.

Much of the happiness of a community depends upon the social habits of its people. In San José, social gatherings and festivities, picnics and excursions, are more frequent than in most Eastern communities. The weather permits, and the disposition of the people encourages, them; and those relaxations which in most places are the privilege of the few, are here the practice of the many. In the summer, many families resort to the hills, or to the shores of Monterey Bay. Here in cottages, readily hired, in tents, or booths, they remain for weeks, relieved of much of the formality, as well as the drudgery, of ordinary domestic life. Others, more adventurous, make up expeditions to the Sierras, Yosemite, or even Shasta. They take their own teams, and in capacious wagons store the bedding and supplies required for a month. or more of nomadic life. Of the weather they take no heed, for that is assured. Wherever night overtakes them they camp, and remain or move on as inclination or fancy may prompt. From the farmhouses they replenish their larder and procure feed for their teams. And they return after weeks of this gypsy life, with bronzed cheeks, to resume, with renewed vigor, the duties of life, to live over their past wanderings, and to plan new expeditions for the future.

Among the advantages of San José, not the least is the facility with which places of importance or interest can be reached from it— San Francisco in two hours; Santa Cruz, a delightful watering-place on the Bay of Monterey, in an hour and a half; Del Monte, Monterey, and Pacific Grove in two hours and a half. With all these places the connection by rail is such that a person may reach them from San José after the business hours of one day, and be back before the resumption of business on the following day.

I have thus presented in general terms what I deem some of the principal advantages of this locality. To the interested reader, the question of expense is often of importance, and considerations of comfort, however apparent, must be subordinated to those of cost. The inquiries thus suggested I shall anticipate and endeavor to answer. This, it must be borne in mind, is not a newly settled State. Over a century ago, and while the region west of the Alleghanies was a trackless wilderness, there were here organized communities and flourishing settlements. To these settlers, as part of the policy of Spain and Mexico, had been granted, in tracts of leagues, the most desirable lands of the country. Since the acquisition of this territory by the Americans, successive immigrations have searched every nook for homes, and have appropriated all that has been thought available for settlement. The new comer can scarcely hope that anything. very desirable has been overlooked by these explorers, and must expect to acquire by purchase from private owners. These are the approximate rates at which he will find lands held :-the willow lands at from $400 to $1,000 per acre, according to improvement; the adobe lands at from $75 to $125 per acre, the loamy and gravelly lands at from $50 to $100; hill land adapted to fruit at from $10 to $40, and grazing lands at from $5 to $10. Business lots in the city of San José, as elsewhere, vary according to location. Land within a mile of the center

of the town, and suitable for manufactories, may be obtained at from $500 to $1,000 per acre. The unit of measurement by which the town is laid out is the Mexican vara; and a fifty vara lot, one hundred and thirty-seven feet and nine inches square, is the usual dimension for subdivision. A fifty vara lot is regarded as ample

for

ordinary residence purposes, while a half or a third is very frequently employed. The price of a fifty vara lot in a location desirable for residences is about $2,000; its subdivisions in the same ratio. Well built, two-story houses, of from eight to ten rooms, cost from four to six thousand dollars; cottages, which are now very much used, with from five to seven rooms, from fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars. Comparison of price lists. shows that the cost of food and household supplies is about the same as at the East. Meats and vegetables are cheaper; fruits of every description much cheaper. As to the latter, it may be added that their quality and price induces their very extensive use, and further, that the market season is here greatly prolonged. In localities to the north, the seasons are much earlier than in this valley, and reversing the usual course of the seasons, the zone of maturing fruits moves southward, and the markets of San Jose are supplied from the north a month or more in advance of the product of this valley.

In this paper I have endeavored to represent to the visitor the surroundings he will here find; to the settler the conditions with which he will have to deal. I shall make no attempt to forecast even the near future; it is proclaiming itself. The tramp of a coming host is upon every hand; the tide of a human sea, impelled by forces that permit no ebb. It comes, and between the desert and the sea it finds the promised land— Egypt in its fertility; Sicily in its fruits and flowers; Italy in its beauty; America in its freedom, its enterprise, and its energy. D. Belden.

XXXI.

Ramirez Ashley's heart bounded, his brain throbbed dizzily. Here was no obscure assassin, who, once escaping him, would perhaps be lost forever.

The name was on every lip, with those of Juarez, Ortega, Degollado, Miramon, and a score of popular chieftains, who, of one party or another, or of independent factions, attracted to themselves a host of followers, more by their own personal magnetism than for the sake of any principles they represented. In that time of anarchy any head that rose above the common herd led enthusiastic multitudes, who followed a nod and applauded to the echo one deed of daring. But Ramirez held his prestige by no such recent and uncertain tenure; throughout the long years of revolution he had been a central figure in the bloody drama. Even his recent defeat at El Toro and his subsequent disappearance had added but a fresh glamor of mystery to his adventurous career, without detracting from the almost superstitious awe with which he was regarded. He would reappear when and where least expected. Ashley Ward had smiled covertly at the strange and daring escapades attributed to this man. He had become in his mind a figure of romance; and here in the broad day he had risen before him, the self-denounced murderer of John Ashley, and as suddenly as he had come, so had he escaped him.

Thinking no more of the cross, which had fallen upon the ground, hiding beneath it the name that had been so long preserved for so strange a purpose, Ashley Ward turned from the sunken graves, and striding across the mounds, scarred and broken by the sacrilegious tread of the horses' feet, he stood for a moment upon the broken wall, scanning the country in his excitement for some

VOL. IX.-No. 37.

sign of the desperate men, who, but a few moments before, had urged their restive steeds up the steep path and disappeared. over the crest of the hill. He saw his own recreant steed galloping towards the hacienda walls, keeping the high-road, on past the hacienda de beneficio and the long stretch of open country beyond, and plunging and rearing at the fatal mesquite tree. The superstitious vaqueros had instinctively imbued their animals with the same irrational terrors in which they had themselves been trained. No sight of ghost or smell of blood lingered there to rouse memory or vengeance. Their waiting place had been that long-forgotten grave upon the desolate hillside.

Ashley leaped from the wall, and rapidly began the descent. The sun was still high in the heavens, for the scene we have recorded had passed in a brief quarter of an hour. As he walked on, gradually falling into a more natural pace, the whole matter took definite form and coherence in his mind. That which had been so unexpected, so unnatural, seemed to be the event to which his whole journey to Mexico, all his wanderings, his strange and wearisome experiences, had inevitably and naturally tended. And then arose a point beyond. His work at Tres Hermanos was ended; the primal cause of his being there was forgotten. The definite thought in his mind was to reach the hacienda, provide himself anew with horse, guide, and arms, and follow on the path which Ramirez had chosen and upon which he would sooner or later re-appear, decoyed by the rich booty that Doña Isabel had entrusted to the weak and faithless Ruiz. Could he reach and warn her in time?

His scarce healed wound was throbbing painfully, the way was long, the heat in

tense; yet he pressed on resolutely, though at last he staggered as he went.

He sat down to rest awhile among the dry rushes of the spent water course, under a straggling cottonwood tree, the few poor leaves of which scarcely sufficed to shade him from the fierce rays of the sun. A fever heat was in his veins; wild theories and speculations passed through his brain-some of them, perhaps, not far from being keys to the mystery of that tragedy which that day for the first time had become to his mind other than a vague and gloomy fantasy. Now, like the murderer, it was real, absorbing, appalling.

He rose and again passed on. After the ascent to the long, rude wall of the hacienda de beneficio, he skirted it slowly, thinking as he went how changed the aspect of the place must be since John Ashley had ridden forth to his death. He had written proudly, almost vauntingly, of the prosperity his management had inaugurated, of the crowds of laden animals that passed in and out of the wide gates, of the men who led their slow, laborious lives among those primitive mills and wide floors of trodden ores.

He glanced at the great square mass of wall and towers of Tres Hermanos, glistening in the distance. To his weary eye it looked far away; yet doubtless it had been but the ride of a few eager minutes to the lover, as he went at midnight to cast a glance at the walls that circled his mistress, or to rein his horse beneath her window that he might win a word or glance from her who whispered from above. These, Ashley had heard, were lover's ways in Mexico; he did not know that no maiden of Tres Hermanos ever occupied one of the few apartments whose windows opened towards the outer air. Yet as he debated the matter with himself, it became more and more probable to him that John Ashley had, upon the fatal night, been actually within the walls of the hacienda, and been stealthily followed thence by his treacherous rival-for what,

he thought, even to a Spaniard, could justify so foul a murder but the falseness of his mistress, the triumph of a hated rival? Pedro's taciturnity and gloom he construed as proofs of his complicity in the crime. Even then Ramirez had been a chieftain of renown, and Pedro in his youth had been a soldier, a free rider, of whom strange tales were told. Was it not probable that he had opened the gates at a comrade's bidding-or more likely still, had bidden him wait beneath the tree where the favored lover was wont to mount his horse, and so take him unawares? Ashley remembered that such, it had been said, had been the manner of his cousin's taking off. He had been slain with the swiftness and sureness of a secret and unhesitating avenger.

He railed at the mocking chances that had combined to suffer Ramirez to escape him in the unpremeditated struggle in which they had clinched with a deadly enmity. In such a struggle he could have found himself the victor without remorse or could have died without regret; but it was not in his nature to follow a man for blood. Yet neither could he shut his ears to that cry for vengeance, for justice, which seemed ringing through the sultry stillness, the more importunate as the possibilities of their attainment shaped themselves in his mind.

That this must be a personal matter between himself and Ramirez was clear. At any time it would probably have been useless for an alien to have denounced so popular and influential a man as the proud and daring revolutionario. Το attempt his arrest for a murder committed years before, and probably in rivalry for a lady's favor, would be but to throw a new mystery about him, and add a fresh legend of romance to those which already made him rather a character of ideal chivalry than of mere vulgar every-day lawlessness and semi-barbarity. Though he was now under a temporary cloud, one threat of attack from law would make him again a popular