Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/370

 350 selves chiefly into trotting-matches. I was told that the combined display of the two counties was poorer this year than either was in the habit of making alone.

There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by young women, and those who took premiums were girls of but fourteen and sixteen. Another popular feature of these county fairs was "firemen's tournaments," in which different companies held contests of speed, equipped with all their paraphernalia.

There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and little or no fruit. The two-hundred-pound squash, the twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five feet in length and a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did not much regret their absence. I have a lurking suspicion that there is a standard of the vegetable as of the human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure from it than those of the other. The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not simply of abnormal size, but fine quality—excepting the apple, which requires extremes of heat and cold, and remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested to need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair than the daily display of fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco market? The regular season for any and all of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast at corresponding latitudes.

I traversed the much-eulogized "Alameda," an avenue of willows and poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799 by Spanish friars. These founded a mission among the Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the avenue extends. There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the mission, with its adobe walls, five feet "thick, and flat