In the county clerk's office are kept the record-books for the county, and also the maps of the various townships, received from the chief office at Oregon City. In the record-books are copied all deeds affecting the title to land in the county. The chief effect of thus recording deeds is to give such public notice of the object of the deed that no man subsequently dealing with a fraudulent vender can he treated as an innocent purchaser without notice, to the injury of the real purchaser. All deeds affecting land have to be executed in the presence of two witnesses, and acknowledged before a county clerk or a notary public. The interest of a wife in her husband's property is carefully guarded; and, in order to give proper title, the wife has to join in conveying land to a purchaser. In addition to the various judicial officers above described, there are the not-to-be-omitted justices of the peace. Their functions are extensive: among others, they can perform marriages, and at short notice, too. I have heard of one justice, known for his expeditious ways, before whose house a runaway couple halted on their wagon. The man shouted for the justice, who appeared. "Say, judge, can you marry us right away?" "I guess so, my son." "Well, then, let's have it." Whereupon the justice mounted the wagon-wheel, and there stood with his foot on the hub. "What's your name?" "Jehoshaphat Smith." "Well, then, wilt thou have this woman, so help you ----?" "Yes." "My fee's a dollar; drive on." The justice in the city tries for assaults and drunkenness, and administers for the latter seven days in the calaboose--a hole of a place in a back alley--detention there no trifle, especially if, like a tipsy little friend of mine, he finds, on awaking with his customary headache, that his room-mate is a big countryman, very drunk, who has the reputation of "smashing everything up" when he has got what some here call "his dibs." CHAPTER XIII. Land laws--Homesteads and preëmption--How to choose and obtain Government land--University land--School land--Swamp land--Railroad and wagon-road grants--Lieu lands--Acreages owned by the various companies. To make this book useful, I must run the risk of making it tedious by some account of the land system relating to the preëmption and homestead laws applicable to the public lands of the State. It is true that, long since, the prairie-lands of the Willamette Valley have all been taken up and are in private ownership. But there are very large tracts indeed of public lands in the hilly and wooded portions of Western Oregon still open; there is also an abundance of open land in the fine valleys of Eastern and Southern Oregon available. There are still upward of thirty million acres unsurveyed out of the sixty million nine hundred thousand which the State contains.