This animal, if need be, will live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,--travel all day long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him fall,--and, if you let him, will take you through _chaparrals_, and up and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts, supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and fifty dollars. It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started, but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted to the rider's form as an old "_incroyable's_" pair of pantaloons. There is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,--thus affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded. The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances. Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, _Californice_, the _cinch_, is a broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.