Day after day we rehearsed my performance and went over my lessons, until my master said I was “sure perfect.” That made me feel good. Then one day I heard master tell Chili to go and see that his orders were carried out about the car, and I learned then that the car was ordered that was to take me to San Francisco, and that the workmen were busy at work upon it, padding it and making it comfortable for me as well as Chili. When everything was ready and lots of hay and grain put in the car, Chili took me aboard, and that night we started. Over the plains of Illinois and Iowa, into Nebraska and Wyoming, through Utah and Nevada we rode. What a lot of different country I saw from any I had ever seen before. When we reached the mountains I thought they were wonderful, and how I enjoyed the ride, as we raced down from Summit to Cheyenne. At Reno we began the climb over the Sierras and Chili said we were in California. I had heard it was a land of sunshine and flowers and birds and fruit, but we were in a region of rocks and mountains, precipices and canyons, snow and ice, and while there were plenty of beautiful trees I couldn’t see a single flower. When Chili brought, from one of the streams, several times a day, a bucket of water for me to drink, it was colder than any well-water I had ever been given in my life. My! how it made my teeth ache. But it was so sweet and tasted so good, as if the winds of God had blown over it for months, bringing freshness and sweetness and filling it full of their deliciousness. As soon as we reached the summit we began to go down, down, down, to lower levels, and long before we left the snow I could smell the sweet growing timothy and clover and alfalfa, and even the blossoms on the fruit-trees, and when we reached Auburn and Newcastle and lots of other towns up there, we were in the real California I had always pictured. Larks and thrushes, linnets and mocking-birds, song-sparrows and warblers were there by the thousands, singing such songs as I had never heard, and flowers! There were flowers of a thousand kinds, all new to me, pushing their way up through the green grass; and as for the fruit-trees, although it was early in February, there were thousands of them already in bloom and as sweet and fragrant and beautiful as a Garden of Eden. It was the fourteenth of February, 1915, when we reached San Francisco. There Chili took me to a comfortable livery barn, where I remained until March 17. This was owing to the fact that the theater my master was having built for our performances, was not completed until that time. At the rear of it was a fine barn and stable for my use, where Chili could also sleep.