306 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



and equipment. This forty acres (30 in vines) 

 was sold for $9,000. Some of the neighbors did 

 better than this and some not so well I judge 

 that this was a fair average. 



Farming in California comes the nearest to 

 gambling of anything I have yet tried and even 

 at that it is better than gold mining. Professor 



B asked a California ranchman if raising 



cherries was profitable. " Well," replied the 

 rancher, " I made one crop which paid me the full 

 value of the orchard and I have never kept any 

 accounts since." And yet while travelling through 

 this same district I have observed that most of the 

 cherry trees had the " die-back " and were scarcely 

 better than soil-robbers. There are a few re- 

 stricted areas where cherries do well and when 

 they do well, they do very, very well ; but when the 

 district is not adapted to them they do nothing at 

 all. What is true of cherries is measurably true 

 of most other fruits, especially of apples. This 

 again illustrates the extreme variableness of the 

 soils in this country. 



The Santa Clara Valley, agriculturally speak- 

 ing, is about fifty miles long and ten miles wide, 

 and is the home of the prune. Prunes are sold by 

 an established standard, eighty to the pound being 



