356 Transactions of the 



"GET A PIECE OF LAND." 



The following article, with the above heading, which is floating about 

 "without an author, contains solid advice, and we reproduce it, hoping it 

 will prove a word in season to some of our readers: 



Almost twenty-one years ago, when making preparations to leave for 

 California, a land that seemed as far away as Timbuctoo or Samarcand, 

 "we met, for a moment only, an old friend, a planter. " What is the 

 word?" says he. "I am going to California," we replied. " Well, I 

 have but one piece of advice to give you — get a piece of land;" and, 

 shaking hands and looking us in the face, he repeated, "Get a piece of 

 land — good-by." We have not seen or heard of him since. But a thou- 

 sand times since then we have remembered his parting injunction, "Get 

 a piece of land," expressing, as it did, the whole science which has made 

 the fortune of so many of our people, as well as of the millionaires of the 

 East; a science which lies at the hearth of so many happy homes, which 

 makes and keeps the best portion of u State's inhabitants honest, pros- 

 perous, and independent. When, alter years had passed, and the soil 

 and climate of California had been proved about the best in the world 

 for the production of our cereals, and our earlier ideas that the country 

 was fit only for miners in the mountains and coyotes in the valleys, had 

 been exploded by the facts of agriculture; when we saw that intelligent 

 men had got possession of the best lands, and farmers were becoming 

 rich, often would come up in mind the injunction of our planter friend, 

 "Get a piece of land," and no one could abuse our want of forethought 

 more than we did. 



Seventeen years ago a friend advised us to go and secure some lots 

 along the line of Mission street, which had then just been opened as a 

 plank road by Colonel Wilson — and, by the way, he was the man that 

 advised us. lie had a somewhat appreciative sense of what the future 

 would produce. We had gold enough to have purchased half a dozen 

 hundred-vara lots. We went out one hot day, waded for hours over the 

 sandhills from Second street to Yerba JBuena Cemetery, and came back 

 hot. sweaty, dust}', thirsty, tired, and disgusted, and with such a total 

 incapacity to imagine that such a desolate region could, within a few 

 years, become a busy mart for business, and homes for tens of thousands 

 of people, and filled with such contempt for the whole region, that we 

 would not have given five dollars an acre for a quarter section of it. A 

 few years later, traveling through the well built up streets of that once 

 despised section, like the voice of a ghost from the past, almost like 

 the grating accusation of remorse, came along the wires of memory, our 

 planter friend's injunction, " Get a piece of land." 



Many of us may go into the country, a few miles from this city, and 

 see farms in splendid condition, in their season waving with crops of 

 heav}*-headed grain, fine herds of fat cattle chewing their cuds while 

 standing up to their knees in clover and rich grasses, delicious butter 



