In leaving the town we turned by mistake to the right instead of to the left, and found ourselves traveling toward a Grand Canyon on a miniature scale. We were driving over lonely country where the water had worn the hills into fantastic shapes and where the whole country was a series of terraces. Sometimes small tablelands stood up boldly before us, sometimes cone-shaped pieces of plateau, like small volcanoes, appeared in long rows beyond us. Beautiful purple mists and shadows hung over these carvings of nature as the sun began to decline. The country grew lonelier and wilder, and we decided that we must retrace our journey and find out where we were. As we came near to Bakersfield again we saw the camp of an engineer who was making some borings for oil. He told us that we had taken the wrong turn and directed us on our way, past the tall derricks and northeast to Tulare. So we turned our backs on the browns, yellows, and slate colors, the pinks and the lavenders of the lonely tableland country and struck north along a very fair road. We drove for twenty miles through rather level, brown, desert country, coming then into a grain country. All along there were pump houses on the ranches, connected with the electric current by heavy wires which ran from the main lines along the road to the little houses in the fields. I liked to think that the magic current streamed down those side wires from the main river of electricity, worked the pumps and brought up the water that made the whole country the fertile, grain-growing region it evidently was. We ate supper at the McFarland Hotel some twenty-five miles from Bakersfield. Our Wisconsin hostess who talked with us while her Japanese cook prepared our supper told us that three years ago there were only a few people living in tents in this region. Now the wells are down and there is a prosperous little town, the water being found only thirty feet below the surface. We came on through more fields of ripe wheat and green alfalfa. We saw one settler's tent pitched in the midst of a beautiful almond orchard, with great stacks of alfalfa near by. His wellhouse was near, and some day in the golden future he will undoubtedly build his dwelling.