After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the orchardist began. Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide, willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity. The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them, to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the valley's immensity! Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall, when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.