My new home was very congenial, not the least of its attractions being the family associations at meal-time. The opportunities for obtaining a variety of food were not as good perhaps as they are to-day, and yet some delicacies were more in evidence. Among these I might mention wild game and chickens. Turkeys, of all poultry, were the scarcest and most-prized. All in all, our ordinary fare has not changed so much except in the use of mutton, certain vegetables, ice and a few dainties. There was no extravagance in the furnishing of pioneer homes. Few people coming to Los Angeles expected to locate permanently; they usually planned to accumulate a small competency and then return to their native heaths. In consequence, little attention was paid to quality or styles, and it is hard to convey a comprehensive idea of the prevailing lack of ordinary comforts. For many years the inner walls of adobes were whitewashed--a method of mural finish not the most agreeable, since the coating so easily "came off;" and only in the later periods of frame houses, did we have kalsomined and hard-finished wall surfaces. Just when papered and tinted walls came in, I do not remember; but they were long delayed. Furniture was plain and none too plentiful; and glassware and tableware were of an inferior grade. Certain vegetables were abundant, truck-gardening having been introduced here in the early fifties by Andrew Briswalter, an Alsatian by birth and an original character. He first operated on San Pedro Street, where he rented a tract of land and peddled his vegetables in a wheelbarrow, charging big prices. So quickly did he prosper that he was soon able to buy a piece of land, as well as a horse and wagon. When he died, in the eighties, he bequeathed a large estate, consisting of City and County acreage and lots, in the disposition of which he unrighteously cut off his only niece. Playa del Rey was later built on some of this land. Acres of fruit trees, fronting on Main, in the neighborhood of the present Ninth and Tenth streets, and extending far in an easterly direction, formed another part of his holding. It was on this land that Briswalter lived until his last illness. He bought this tract from O. W. Childs, it having originally belonged to H. C. Cardwell, a son-in-law of William Wolfskill--the same Cardwell who introduced here, on January 7th, 1856, the heretofore unknown seedling strawberries.