George Bancroft Griffith. ON THE SAN JOAQUIN. It was in the latter part of the month of March that we started out from Fresno for a day’s outing on the San Joaquin river, hunting for hawk and owl eggs. The day was bright and warm, and we keenly enjoyed the ride of nine miles across the plains. Out past the old, deserted Holland Colony, where stumps of vines showed that the settlers had once made an honest attempt to win their daily bread out of the hard pan. The last half of the way lay across the hog-wallow country, that peculiar effect which has puzzled many scientists, but which all attribute to the action of water in long past ages. The rolling motion of rising over and descending these mounds was like the riding of a small boat over the waves of the sea. Here and there a burrow in the top of one of the mounds, the domicile of the frisky ground-squirrel or the billy owl, gave the landscape the appearance of a dish of mush cooking, with the air bubbles swelling up, and some bursting, leaving the little holes. On across canals, past a wheat country, and then the virginal hog-wallow lands that no plowshare has ever touched, covered with a short green growth which gives nourishment to bands of sheep, dirty, and with numerous lambkins, guarded by a few sagacious shepherd dogs and lonely, and equally dirty, bearded Mexican herders. The mounds grow higher and the hollows deeper until we wonder if they stretch on forever and if we are lost among them, when all at once we come out right on the top of a high bluff overlooking the San Joaquin. The unexpectedness is quite startling. One could not possibly have suspected a moment before that we were within miles of a great river bed more than a mile wide, with steep bluffs more than 300 feet high on either side and a swift river sweeping down its channel in the center, but here we were right on the edge of it. We can look down almost perpendicularly and see, three or four hundred feet below us, great green meadows stretching to the north and south and to the trees and thickets that edge the river. The river from this distance and height seems but a thread in its once vast bed. What a sight—what a power it must have been when once it filled all this vast bed, which often is more than a mile across from bluff to bluff. On the further side a few trees grow right on the edge of the water, and then the bluff rises abruptly even higher than on our side. Buzzards and hawks are sweeping around us in the air, and dark spots in the tops of far-off trees betoken the presence of the objects of our search, the nests of the hawks. We begin the descent, which at first seems extremely hazardous, and even on further trial sufficiently steep to make walking down more of a pleasure than riding, as we find. The road or path winds around and around, as necessarily it must unless one would go head-first to the bottom.