casionally show much culture, and a ride on the stage-top afterward exhibits a wide range of rich fields. All of it could be subdued easily. It only wants water. And that is obtained by the simple digging of wells. You can see them all over this land. They are usually of the old-fashioned Yankee sort, a pole balanced on a cross-bar, with a stone at one end and a bucket at the other. The drawers of water stand two and two, either side by side or front to front, so that they can stimulate each other in their work. Sometimes they arise to the aristocracy of a horse turning over a wheel around which buckets are fastened that catch the water below, and dip it up, and turn it into troughs and tanks. This for surface wells. Deep ones have still a different way of being operated. A large cowskin bucket hangs by a pulley over the well. The rope passes over this pulley and is passed round a big wheel, or barrel, six feet in diameter, a hundred feet away. The horse pulls the rope around this wheel and so hoists the water to the trough.
Still other modes are used, but the chief is the old beam and the double man-power. We can save all drought in the States by these and more simple and cheap appliances. The long dry seasons to which we are not unfrequently doomed can be remedied by these preparations. It is far better for the farmer to be thus busy than to sit and see his crops perish of thirst. They will not cost much to get ready, if they are not used, and will repay all their expense in a single year of drought.
The hacienda continues for two or three miles, blasted outside its walls, luxuriant within. It closes with a handsomely constructed corral, into which a company of horsemen are driving a herd of cattle. One of the younger fry, not having learned the futility of all attempts to escape, breaks away from the herd and scampers adown the field. Instantly three of the horsemen race after it. It is an unequal contest from the start. The little black "beastie" shows pluck. But they are too much for him, those three men and three horses. Forty feet off out flew the lasso, and caught him just where it aimed, around the horns. They can grip anywhere, it is said—hoof, ear, horn. An enthusiastic laudator of their
