252 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



Americans and British, Italians and Portuguese, 

 Spanish-Californians and Japanese eighteen or 

 twenty thousand of them in 1914, according to local 

 count, which probably got them all. It is really a 

 multitudinous sort of picnic, with country sports 

 and a merry-go-round, a procession of floats decked 

 out with blossoms and pretty girls, and speech-mak- 

 ing from a platform under a massive live oak. The 

 unique thing about it is that to get there you must 

 ride through a veritable sea of snowy blossoms, and 

 there is no way home except by the same white way. 

 After the blossom, the fruit; and in the waning 

 year comes the harvesting of the crop, which gives 

 another sort of picturesqueness to the Valley in 

 late summer and the early autumn. It is a pretty 

 picture the crowds of pickers in the peach and 

 apricot trees, the hauling of the fruit in boxes piled 

 high on ranch wagons to the open airy sheds where 

 women and girls sit at long tables to halve and pit 

 it, and lay it in shallow trays that are spread on 

 the ground for the sun to do the rest ; and every year 

 many a city girl gets in this way a couple of weeks 

 of wholesome outdoor living and a little extra 

 money. The prunes, however, may not be picked 

 from the tree, but from the ground, as it is a fruit 

 that, to ensure a maximum of sweetness, must be 

 allowed to stay on the limb until Nature gives the 



