Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/405

 Rh ently he returns, dragging by the necks an immense pair of wild-geese, almost beyond his strength to pull. The tawny color of the fields, and the great formal stacks of straw piled up in them, recall some aspects of the central table-land of Mexico. Many or spacious buildings are not necessary in the mild, dry climate of California. The prosperous ranches have, in consequence, a somewhat thin, unfurnished appearance compared with Eastern farms.

The most prominent object at each station is a long, low warehouse of the company, for the accommodation of grain. Like the station buildings generally it is painted Indian red, in "metallic" paint. The station of Merced is one of the two principal points of departure for the Yosemite Valley, Madera the other. At Merced an immense wooden hotel, for travellers bound to the Valley, overshadows the rest of the town. It rises beside the track, and the town is scattered back on the plain.

At Madera appears the end of a V-shaped wooden aqueduct, or flume, for rafting down lumber from the mountains fifty miles away to a planing-mill. Some of the hands also occasionally come down the flume in temporary boats. As the speed is prodigious these voyages abound in excitement and peril. The structure, supported on trestles, according to the formation of the ground, stretches away in interminable perspective to the mountains, which are rose-pink and purple at sunset. The scene is suggestive of the Roman Campagna, with this slight, essentially American work as a parody of the broken aqueducts and temples of the classic ancients. The lumber flume, however, is a bold and costly enterprise, though we be prone to smile at it.

By degrees we draw away from the wheat ranches, more and more on the uncultivated plain. The town