the open beds beyond Los Angeles. These were the same brea pits in which in recent years the remarkable discoveries of pre-historic animal bones have been made. In the days when my father and uncles first came to California there were many dangerous wild animals still at large, but fortunately the mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers, hyenas and milder camels were all safely put away in brea storage.
When the summer sun was hot on the roofs the asphalt grew so soft that we could dig it out with sticks and shape it with our fingers. Such depredations undoubtedly contributed to the unsatisfactoriness of the overhead shelter, but even without our intervention the alternate shrinking and expansion of the substance made the roof more or less like a sieve in winter. Uncle Jotham soon tired of rain inside the house in winter, no matter how much he prayed for it outside, so that very soon after he moved into the adobe he added a good old-fashioned Yankee roof to the main portion of the house. The roofs on the wings did not come until after I had learned the joy of the flat ones. Here we used to go at sunset to wait for the homecoming of the fathers, for whose returning buggies we could watch from this vantage ground. We also could see the whole sunset sky, and the lovely pink lights on far, faint Baldy.
The outside of the house, as was the custom with adobes, was kept trim with frequent coats of whitewash; the doors, window frames and slender balusters of the upper veranda railing were a soft green, like the tones on old copper. In the lower story the win
