that if a woman is occupied with a young family, and of a reasonably contented disposition it makes no great difference whether the people outside her home are near or far, few or many;—there are books for spare minutes.
It may be of interest to some to know how we happened to come into Southern California, and something of the history of the ranches, Los Cerritos, “The Little Hills,” and Los Alamitos, “The Little Cottonwoods”—beautiful, lilting Spanish names, either one of which would have been preferable to the name chosen by those who bought of the ranch lands and promoted the seaside town of Long Beach. I am glad that we are free of responsibility for the choice of that prosaic name, or for the dubbing of Cerritos Hill, Signal, because of the presence on its top of a tripod used as a marker by surveyors.
When my father sailed up the western coast on the Fourth of July, 1851, the old S. S. Northerner, unseaworthy, hugged the coast, nearly wrecking herself by the way, on the rocks at Point Firmin; he, from his place on the deck looked across the mesa to Cerritos Hill, and watched the vaqueros at work with cattle, and like many a later comer, was captivated by the country and determined, if possible, sometime to possess a portion of that land. The time came in 1866, when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought from Don Juan Temple the Rancho Los Cerritos, paying him for it in San Francisco twenty thousand dollars in gold, or about seventy-five cents an acre for the twenty-seven
