All our Northern fruits thriftily in the Sacramento Valley, and also the almond, of which thousands of trees have been planted, and a few considerable orchards are already in bearing.  The cherry and the plum do remarkably well, the latter fruit having as yet no curculio or blight; and the canning and drying of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and pears are already, as I shall show in detail farther on, a considerable as well as very profitable business.  Dried plums, in particular, sell at a price which makes the orchards of this fruit very valuable.  Excellent raisins have also been made, and they sell in the open market of San Francisco for a price very little less than that of the best Malaga raisins.  The climate, with its long dry summer, is very favorable to the drying and curing of every fruit:  no expensive houses, no ovens or other machinery, are needed.  The day is not distant when the great Sacramento plain will be a vast orchard, and the now unoccupied foot-hills will furnish a large part of the raisins consumed in the United States.  For the present the population is scant, and cattle, horses, and especially sheep, roam over hundreds of thousands of acres of soil which needs only industrious farmers to make it bloom into a garden.

[Illustration:  TRAINING A VINE.]

The farmer in this State is a person of uncommon resources and ingenuity.  I think he uses his brains more than our Eastern farmers.  I do not mean to say that he lives better, for he does not.  His house is often shabby, even though he be a man of wealth, and his table is not unfrequently without milk; he buys his butter with his canned vegetables in San Francisco, and bread and mutton are the chief part of his living, both being universally good here.  But in managing his land he displays great enterprise, and has learned how to fit his efforts to the climate and soil.

The gathering of the wheat crop goes on in all the valley lands with headers, and you will find on all the farms in the Sacramento Valley the best labor-saving machinery employed, and human labor, which is always the most costly, put to its best and most profitable uses.  They talk here of steam-plows and steam-wagons for common roads, and I have no doubt the steam-plow will be first practically and generally used, so far as the United States are concerned, in these Californian valleys, where I have seen furrows two miles long, and ten eight-horse teams following each other with gang-plows.

Withal, they are somewhat ruthless in their pursuit of a wheat crop.  You may see a farmer who plows hundreds of acres, but he will have his wheat growing up to the edge of his veranda.  If he keeps a vegetable garden, he has performed a heroic act of self-denial; and as for flowers, they must grow among the wheat or nowhere.