of them I rode down without mishap. The next day after I left the valley, just before dark, while riding over a smooth, level strip of road, the felloe on the little wheel broke. The butt end of an eight-penny nail was sticking through the tire just at the point of fracture, but whether that was the cause of the breakage or not I cannot say. But this I did know, the machine was apparently useless,--forty-five miles from any railroad, and how many miles from a blacksmith's shop I had not an idea. But with the use of a piece of hoop iron and some wire that I brought all the way from Indiana, where the old rubber tire had made the only previous trouble with the machine, I bound up the felloe and it carried me thirty miles, till the next noon, when a blacksmith riveted a piece on, and made the wheel strong again. The one hundred and sixty-two miles from the Yosemite back to Sacramento were made in three days. On the way I dropped the machine and ran a quarter of a mile across a wheat field to see a header and thresher at work. It was drawn by eighteen mules, working six abreast, and cut a swarth nearly if not quite ten feet wide. The tops of the wheat as they fell were carried up on a cloth roller into the threshing part of the machine which worked as the machine was drawn along. Four or five men rode upon the machine, doing various work, but the result of the whole was, the wheat was cut, threshed, run into bags, and the bags tied up and thrown off, as the whole establishment went along on two immense wheels. Any farmer can judge of the great number of acres of wheat such a machine will harvest in a day. Irrigation is carried on quite extensively here, but the source of a great part of the water supply is ordinary or bored wells. Some farms have twenty-five or thirty wells, and at each well is a wind-mill. The wind blows almost invariably from the west, every afternoon, and the number of revolving wind-mills seen over the level plains of the Sacramento Valley is astonishing. They are as thick as the chimneys in a city, and when they are all in motion, hundreds of them in all directions, the sight is quite novel to an Easterner. An ordinary good supply of water is had at a depth of less than twenty feet, but let the well be carried down fifty or sixty feet and a source of water is found that is inexhaustible, the size of the bore or the quantity pumped up not having the slightest effect upon the clearness or the supply of the water.