Many of these about San Antonio are owned, in fact, by Englishmen, although a record of the failures of the English colonists of good family and of well-known youths from New York would make a book, and a very sad one. There was a whole colony of English families and unattached younger sons at Boerne, just outside of San Antonio, a few years ago; but they preferred cutting to leg to cutting out cattle, and used the ponies to chase polo balls, and their money soon went, and they followed. Some went to England as prodigal sons, some to driving hacks and dealing faro, and others into the army. A few succeeded, and are still at Boerne, notably a cousin of Thomas Hughes, who founded the ill-fated English colony of Rugby, in Tennessee. Of the New York men who came on to San Antonio, the two Jacob boys are more frequently and more heartily spoken of by the Texans than almost any other Eastern men who have been there. They did not, as the others so often do, hire a foreman, and spend their days in the San Antonio Club, but rode the ranch themselves, and could cut out and brand and rope with any of those born on a range. Their ranch, the Santa Marta, still flourishes, although they have become absentee landlords, and have given up chasing wild steers in Texas in favor of the foxes at Rockaway. A ranch which marks the exception in the rule of failures of our English cousins is that of Alfred Giles in Kendal and Kerr counties. It covers about thirteen thousand acres, and a very fine breed of polled Angus cattle are bred on it. Indeed, the tendency all over Texas at present is to cultivate certain well-known breeds, and not, as formerly, to be content with the famous long-horned steer and the Texan pony. Mr. Giles’s ranch, the Hillingdon, looks in the summer, when the imported Scotch cattle are grazing over it, like a bit out of the Lake country. Walnut, cherry, ash, and oak grow on this ranch, and the maidenhair-fern is everywhere, and the flowers are boundless in profusion and variety.