his low-roofed jaical, and the musical Spanish name which he gave to the valley.
On again. One of those curious bue-and-brown birds, with peaked cap and tail as disproportionately long as that of a peacock, called here a "Road Runner," and in Mexico "El Correro del Camino"—the courier of the road,—which never flies if it can avoid it, but runs with a speed which distances the fleetest horse, darted along in the road ahead of us. I galloped after it, vainly trying to get within shooting distance, until, tired of the sport, it jumped over the side of the mountain and disappeared in the bushes of the canon below. The road is cut most of the way out of the solid rock, and you look down from time to time almost perpendicularly into cañons hundreds and hundreds of feet. It is a succession, on a modified scale, of Cape Horn and the scenery on the South Fork of the American River in the Sierra Nevada, on the Central Pacific Railroad route, and at the same time on a scale quite large enough to try to the utmost the nerves of timid travelers.
The flying mists, which had been scudding in broken clouds over the sierra, lifted and rolled away as I crossed the summit and began to descend towards Spanish Town. The Pillaritos Creek murmured hundreds of feet below, the narrow canon, near the mouth of which, half hidden in shade-trees, is the hamlet of Spanish Town. Beyond rolls the deep-blue waters of the broad Pacific, and Half-Moon Bay lies a few miles to the northward. I pass a wayside house where the yard is
