“Have you any meat?” “No.”  “Any flour or grain?” “No.”  “Any chickens?” “No.”  “Any eggs?” “No.”  “What do you live on?” “Nada” (nothing).  The utter indifference of this boy, and the tone of his answer “Nada,” attracted the attention of Colonel Mason, who had been listening to our conversation, and who knew enough of Spanish to catch the meaning, and he exclaimed with some feeling, “So we get nada for our breakfast.”  I felt mortified, for I had held out the prospect of a splendid breakfast of meat and tortillas with rice, chickens, eggs, etc., at the ranch of my friend Josh Antonio, as a justification for taking the Governor, a man of sixty years of age, more than twenty miles at a full canter for his breakfast.  But there was no help for it, and we accordingly went a short distance to a pond, where we unpacked our mules and made a slim breakfast; on some scraps of hard bread and a bone of pork that remained in our alforjas.  This was no uncommon thing in those days, when many a ranchero with his eleven leagues of land, his hundreds of horses and thousands of cattle, would receive us with all the grandiloquence of a Spanish lord, and confess that he had nothing in his house to eat except the carcass of a beef hung up, from which the stranger might cut and cook, without money or price, what he needed.  That night we slept on Salinas Plain, and the next morning reached Monterey.  All the missions and houses at that period were alive with fleas, which the natives looked on as pleasant titillators, but they so tortured me that I always gave them a wide berth, and slept on a saddle-blanket, with the saddle for a pillow and the serape, or blanket, for a cover.  We never feared rain except in winter.  As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced, the reports came faster and faster from the gold-mines at Sutter’s saw-mill.  Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and spread throughout the land.  Everybody was talking of “Gold! gold!” until it assumed the character of a fever.  Some of our soldiers began to desert; citizens were fitting out trains of wagons and packmules to go to the mines.  We heard of men earning fifty, five hundred, and thousands of dollars per day, and for a time it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold.  Some of this gold began to come to Yerba Buena in trade, and to disturb the value of merchandise, particularly of mules, horses, tin pans, and articles used in mining:  I of course could not escape the infection, and at last convinced Colonel Mason that it was our duty to go up and see with our own eyes, that we might report the truth to our Government.  As yet we had no regular mail to any part of the United States, but mails had come to us at long intervals, around Cape Horn, and one or two overland.  I well remember the first overland mail.  It was brought by Kit Carson in saddle-bags from Taos in New Mexico.  We heard of his arrival at Los Angeles, and waited patiently for his arrival