was a dry weed, without leaves and of a reddish color, which grew in patches all over this plain.  These weed patches were the hiding places of the jackrabbits.  The game was exciting and stirred one’s sporting blood.  I found a great difference in the speed of jackrabbits—­as much in fact as in the speed of blooded horses.  Occasionally I would get up one that would actually run away from the dogs, which were a fast pair.  I followed the sport so persistently, and paid so little attention to fences when they interfered with my going, that I got the appellation in the neighborhood of “that d Ñ d Graves boy.”

When we got up a hare, away we went after the dogs, just as fast as our horses would carry us.  The sport was hard on horseflesh, so much so that my father finally forbade me running any of our horses after the hounds.  There lived in our neighborhood a man who owned, and who had put upon the track some of the fastest horses in the State.  At this time he had retired and raised horses for the fun of it.  He also had some good hounds.  He enjoyed the sport as much as I did.  Having plenty of good horses, he furnished me with as many as I needed.  We spent many days in trying to determine which of us had the best dogs.  Incidentally, we wrecked some promising thoroughbreds.  The question of the superiority of our dogs was never settled.  We always left the door open for one more race.

Our place was the haven of all the boys of my acquaintance.  When I was attending school at Marysville some boy came home with me nearly every Friday night.  We would work at whatever was being done on the place Saturday forenoon, but the afternoon was ours.  With the old gun we took to the pasture, hunted for game, for birds’ nests and even turtles’ nests.  The mud turtle, common to all California waters, laid an astounding number of very hard shelled, oblong, white eggs, considerably larger than a pigeon’s egg.  They deposited them in the sand on the shores of the slough, covering them up, leaving them for the sun to hatch.  They always left some tell-tale marks by which we discovered the nest.  Often we got several hundred eggs in an afternoon.  They were very rich, and of good flavor.

There were many coons and a few wildcats in the pasture woods.  With the aid of a dog we had great sport with them.  Hard pressed, they would take to the trees, from which we would shoot them.  On one occasion we found four little spitfire, baby lynx, which we carried home and later traded to the proprietor of a menagerie.  We got some money and two pair of fan-tail pigeons in exchange for them.  When quite small they were the most vicious, untamable little varmints imaginable, and as long as we had them our hands were badly scratched by them.