IN CALIFORNIA 110 



nia," gives as a common name of this magnificent 

 yucca "Our Lord's Candle," which it well deserves 

 no doubt an English version of some stately Span- 

 ish appellation, La Vela del Senor, perhaps. 



In these chaparral-covered slopes of the foothills, 

 at the mouth of some flowery canon, where a spring 

 collects its limpid waters in a lily-haunted dell, one 

 comes now and then upon a bee-rancher, his shack 

 set close to a little city of white box-hives. A de- 

 cade or two ago, there were many such, though now- 

 adays the encroachment of millionaires who are 

 awakening to the worth of such view-commanding 

 sites for their white-walled villas, is making the land 

 too valuable for these old-fashioned apiarists. An 

 idyllic, Virgilian sort of life it seems to have been 

 the bee-rancher's quite suitable for this Land of 

 the Afternoon, with a vast outlook over orchard 

 and vineyard and grain lands to the sinking sun 

 gilding the lazy waters of the Pacific. He had his 

 cow in the chaparral, and there was his gun on a 

 pair of pegs over his fireplace to shoot rabbits now 

 and then or perhaps a deer, and there was a little 

 patch of garden, when the spring had irrigation 

 water to spare. He had few wants, and what he 

 could not raise or shoot, he bought with cash ob- 

 tained by a trip to town with a few cans of white- 

 sage honey from his hives, or a load of greasewood 



