Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are three great tracts, each with its soil and character. On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold fields in which I spent my first week in California. Next comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly, where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the Contra Costa Range and the sea is a winterless strip, possessing for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the world. The story goes that Californian boys, when asked if they believe in a future state, reply: “Guess so; California.” [Illustration: EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.--P. 228.] Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second Liverpool or New York is an all-absorbing question to those who live on the Pacific shores, and one not without an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best harbors on the coast of a country which exports enormously of breadstuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbor south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the center of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, population will increase, manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles take the place of that of raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if, as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future of San Francisco, as the meeting point of the railways, and center of the import of manufactured goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder question. That it will be the converging point of the Pacific railroads, both of Chicago and St. Louis, there can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from China and Japan will pass through it seems as clear; it is the extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal terms with water carriage; but assuming that, in the long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the overland route across Russia, and not that through the United States, that will convey the