near future become one of the most attractive and prosperous in the State. The Rotterdam Colony is bounded on one side by the now famous and often described Crocker and Huffman reservoir. Those who believe that a reservoir in the foothills is not the proper thing should come and take a look at this one, and be convinced that it is. The location is a most favorable one, being ninety feet above the town of Merced, and elevated sufficiently to irrigate the whole of the level surrounding district, containing two hundred and sixty thousand acres. The water covers now about six hundred and forty acres which were formerly a real and natural valley, across the mouth of which the dam checking the water was thrown. The average depth of water is about thirty feet, while in some places it is fifty odd feet deep. The statistics of this reservoir and dam have been given often enough, but more or less correctly. The dam checking the water is four thousand feet long, two hundred and seventy-five feet wide at the base, twenty feet on the top and sixty feet high in the center. It took four hundred mules and two hundred and fifty men two years to build it. The reservoir and canal tapping Merced river cost together two million dollars to build, and the work was constructed in such a substantial and scientifically correct manner, that it will be likely to last for ages. There is no other irrigation system in the State that is as well planned and carried out. This can and must be said to the honor of the constructors. The canal which taps the river is twenty-seven miles long, from sixty to seventy feet wide on the bottom, one hundred feet on the top, and has fall enough to carry four thousand cubic feet of water per second. We have already remarked that the country between the dam and the city of Merced is a magnificent and level body of land, all eminently suited for irrigation. From the water tower in the reservoir, we overlook all this land, now in its spring dress a very beautiful sight indeed. The vast sheet of water, like a placid lake, in which the Sierra Nevada reflects its snowy peaks, the prairie extending far and wide, divided between luxuriant grainfields and unbroken lands now covered with their spring carpet of flowers in the colors of the rainbow,--yellow, white, blue, violet, red and shades of each, and dotted over with the new settlers’ homes, freshly built and freshly painted,--what more lovely view could we wish, a sight of beauty and of plenty. As we drive back to town, we are more than at first impressed with the lay of the land. The surface is level and without hills or knolls, but is cut through by many natural channels or creeks from fifteen to twenty feet deep, insuring a natural drainage, invaluable in a country where irrigation is required.