But we have hardly time to observe this cultivated spot before we are out again among the rolling hills. The engine pants heavily, and we are constantly ascending. The same low hills everywhere,--no settlers, no gardens, no plantations of any kind. The soil is brown adobe mixed with gravel and small boulders; in fact there is nothing to see and admire. For twenty miles there are two or three small stations, but there were no station houses to be seen nor any settlements around. The railroad is apparently made to tap a better country in the interior. But even in this uninhabited country the boom started to penetrate in earnest. Large signs announcing the sale of town lots, wide streets once plowed up across each other at right angles, square blocks which are plowed around or otherwise mapped out, here and there a white post with a number and a name, and we have a good idea of a town where the lots sold for $250 apiece or more. All at once the engine whistles, the area widens and we see in front of us a large, flat valley, apparently almost circular, from four to five miles across, bounded by lower and higher hills, behind which a few higher peaks look down gray and solemn. This is El Cajon. We step out on the platform of the station, and the view is fine. The valley lies below us, the bottom is apparently flat, but in reality slightly undulating and somewhat sloping towards the center. Rows of vines begin at the station, and from here vineyards stretch in all directions for miles and miles, sometimes in large blocks of regular shape, then again in irregular patches among otherwise cultivated lands half way up on the lower hills. Dotted all over the valley are farmhouses in all styles, elegant and tasty or plain and simple, enough only to keep out the rain and the sun. Around every such cluster of buildings there is a little plantation of eucalyptus and cypress, and a few ornamental plants. Here and there at long intervals is seen a row of gums, black and somber, as if they were on duty as shields from wind and fog. We are soon in the bus on the way to town. The roads are straight and well kept, bordered with young eucalyptus and cypress, and with vineyards on both sides with the rows of vines remarkably distinct; we can follow each one of them distinctly for several miles over the undulating ground until they end on the steeper slopes of the hills, or run into the little cañons bordering the valley. El Cajon has no pretentions to being a town; it is an unassuming and quiet little village, whose inhabitants, when they speak of “town,” always mean San Diego, twenty miles away. El Cajon has a dozen houses, all told, one of each kind of the most necessary stores and shops, but Wells, Fargo & Co. have not yet discovered this quiet place. Nevertheless, it has two hotels, one small and unassuming, which runs a bus to the station, and where everybody seems to meet; the other, large and pretentious, both as to bay-windows and name,--Corona del