I have not made a single friend in California, and you may be sure I strode home last evening from the post office feeling rich indeed. As soon as I hear of your finding a home, I shall begin a plan of visiting you. I have frequently seen favorable reports upon the silk-culture in California. The climate of Los Angeles is said to be as well tempered for the peculiar requirements of the business as any in the world. I think that you have brought your boys to the right field for planting. I doubt if in all the world man’s comforts and necessities can be more easily and abundantly supplied than in California. I have often wished the Doctor near me in my rambles among the rocks. Pure science is a most unmarketable commodity in California. Conspicuous, energetic, unmixed materialism rules supreme in all classes. Prof. Whitney, as you are aware, was accused of heresy while conducting the State survey, because in his reports he devoted some space to fossils and other equally dead and un-Californian objects instead of columns of discovered and measured mines. I am engaged at present in the very important and patriarchal business of sheep. I am a gentle shepherd. The gray box in which I reside is distant about seven miles northwest from Hopeton, two miles north of Snellings. The Merced pours past me on the south from the Yosemite; smooth, domey hills and the tree fringe of the Tuolumne bound me on the north; the lordly Sierras join sky and plain on the east; and the far coast mountains on the west. My mutton family of eighteen hundred range over about ten square miles, and I have abundant opportunities for reading and botanizing. I shall be here for about two weeks, then I shall be engaged in shearing sheep between the Tuolumne and Stanislaus from the San Joaquin to the Sierra foothills for about two months. I will be in California until next November, when I mean to start for South America. I received your Castleton letter and wrote you in November. I suppose you left Vermont before my letter had time to reach you. You must prepare for your Yosemite baptism in June. Here is a sweet little flower that I have just found among the rocks of the brook that waters Twenty-Hill Hollow. Its anthers are curiously united in pairs and form stars upon its breast. The calyx seems to have been judged too plain and green to accompany the splendid corolla, and so is left behind among the leaves. I first met this plant among the Sierra Nevadas. There are five or six species. For beauty and simplicity they might be allowed to dwell within sight of Calypso. There are about twenty plants in flower in the gardens of my daily walks. The first was born in January. I give them more attention than I give the dirty mongrel creatures of my flock, that are about half made by God and half by man. I have not yet discovered the poetical part of a shepherd’s duties.