It is not a good year for grasshoppers this year; nothing like the year of which an inhabitant of Roseville spoke to me later in the day, when he said, "they ate up every bit of his garden-truck, and then sat on the fence and asked him for a chew of tobacco." The sheep ranges of the northern interior counties are less broken up than in the coast counties farther south; and it is better and more profitable, in my judgment, to pay five dollars per acre for grazing lands in the Sacramento Valley than two dollars and a half for grazing lands farther south and among the mountains.

The grazier in the northern counties has two advantages over his southern competitor: first, in the ability to buy low-lying lands on the river, where he can graze from three to six or even ten sheep to the acre during the summer months, and where he may plant large tracts in alfalfa; and, secondly, in a safe refuge against drought in the mountain meadows of the Sierras, and in the little valleys and fertile hill-slopes of the Coast Range, where there is much unsurveyed Government land, to which hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle are annually driven by the graziers of the plain, who thus save their own pastures, and are able to carry a much larger number of sheep than they otherwise would.
Moreover, nearness to the railroad is an important advantage for the sheep-farmer; and I found that the most enterprising and intelligent sheep men in the northern counties send their wool direct by railroad to the Eastern States, instead of shipping it to San Francisco to be sold.
Finally, much of the land now obtainable for grazing in the Sacramento Valley, at prices in some cases not too dear for grazing purposes, is of a quality which will make it valuable agricultural land as soon as the valley begins to fill up; and thus, aside from the profit from the sheep, the owner may safely reckon upon a large increase in the value of his land.

This can not be said of much of the grazing land of the southern coast counties, which is mountainous and broken, and fit only for grazing.
Of course I speak here of the average lands only.

There are large tracts or ranchos in the southern coast counties, such as the Lampoe rancho of Hollester & Diblee, and lands in the Salinas Valley, which are exceptionally fine, and to which what I have said of the coast panchos generally does not apply.
[Illustration: ANOTHER COAST-VIEW, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA.].