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SMALL AND  GREAT. ^95'

things, returned  to  their  homes,  only  to  find  their  des- tiny in village  labor,  their  fathers  at  first  seeming  in their  eyes  old-fashioned,  fossilized,  non-progressive men of  la  vieille  roche.

The stories  told  by  returned  Californians  were  to their  hearers  fabulous ;  and  they  were,  indeed,  too  often as little  worthy  of  literal  belief  as  the  wonders  Rabelais narrated concerning  his  hero — how  seventeen  thousand cows and  more  scarcely  supplied  the  babe  with  milk ; how the  mare  on  which  he  rode  was  as  large  as  six elephants; how  he  cut  lettuce  as  big  as  walnut  trees, used for  his  hair  a  comb  nine  hundred  feet  long,  and for a  toothpick  an  elephant's  tusk,