The breaking-in is a very simple affair: while the animal is down the eyes are bandaged, and a powerful Spanish bit placed in the mouth. This accomplished, he is allowed to get up, and the saddle is firmly ‘synched.’ The saddles commonly used in California differ very little from those used in Mexico. The stirrups are cut out from a block of wood, allowing only the point of the toe to be inserted; they are set far back, and oblige the rider to stand rather than sit in the saddle. One girth only is used, styled a ‘synch,’ made of horsehair, and extremly wide; no buckles or stitching is used, but all is fastened with strips of raw hide. Everything being complete, the rider fixes himself firmly in the saddle, and leaning forward jerks off the blind; it is now an open question who is to have the best of it. If the man succeeds in sitting on the mustang until he can spur him into a gallop, his wildness is soon taken out of him, and one or two more lessons complete the breaking. Joe by this time had made his appearance with the mustangs. Mounting, away we went at a raking gallop! I know no exercise half as exhilarating and exciting as the ‘lope,’ a kind of long canter, the travelling pace of a mustang; there is no jarring or jolting. All one has to do is to sit firmly in the saddle; the horse, obeying the slightest turn of the wrist or check of the rein, swings along for hours at a stretch, without any show of weariness. Having crossed the Sacramento in a ‘scow,’ a kind of rough ferry-boat, our road lay over broad plains and through scattered belts of timber. The grass was completely burnt up, and the series of gravelly arroyos, in and out of which we continually plunged and scrambled, marked clearly the course of the winter streams. The air felt hot and sultry, but fragrant with the perfume of the mountain cudweed. Not a cloud was visible in the lurid sky, and the distant mountains, thinly dotted with timber, seemed softened and subdued as seen through the blue haze. We entered a valley leading through a pile of volcanic hills that one could easily have imagined had been once the habitat of civilised man. The wooded glades had all the appearance of lawns and parks planted with exquisite taste; the trees, in nothing resembling the wild growth of the forest, were grouped in every variety of graceful outline. On either side the hills were covered with wild oat as thick as it could grow; its golden-yellow tints, contrasting with the dark glossy-green of the cypress, the oak, and the manzanita, had an indescribably charming effect. As we advanced the valley gradually narrowed, until it became a mere _cañon_ (the Spanish for funnel), shut in by vast masses of rock that looked like heaps of slag and cinder—bare, black, and treeless. A small stream of bitter, dark, intensely salt water trickled slowly through the gorge.