II.
San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests with Sacramento the honor of being third in importance in the State. You alight there at the small station. In the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a blacksmith's shop, and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These have a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a romantic Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended to come in search of the elixir of life. And so have the small picket-fences an American look, and the comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind them, with scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas. With the exception of an unusual number of French and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large, clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native wines, it is as downright a little Yankee town as ever was. There is much shade in the streets, and in a public green, but the trees are yet too small and low.
It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural district. It has excellent schools and all the other conveniences of life. A good deal of money has been spent on the principal business buildings. As in most other provincial towns throughout the State, they are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be described as the San Francisco style of architecture. An iron trestle-work tower was going up at the intersection of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two hundred feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the town. The white Court-house, in the classic style, though not large, is agreeably proportioned, and quite a model of its kind.
The week's doings at the Fair Grounds resolved them-
