With incredible labour, inspired and
sustained by his natural acuteness, he wrought a miracle upon a
singularly arid and sterile soil. I have been told that he was the
first of the foothill settlers to irrigate abundantly, the first to
plant out an orchard and vineyard, the first, certainly, to create a
garden out of a sage-brush desert. Teamsters hauling wheat from the
Carisa plains used to stop to shake the white alkaline dust from their
overalls under Uncle Jap's fig trees. They and the cowboys were always
made welcome. To such guests Uncle Jap would offer figs, water-melons,
peaches, a square meal at noon, and exact nothing in return except
appreciation. If a man failed to praise Uncle Jap's fruit or his
wife's sweet pickles, he was not pressed to "call again." The old
fellow was inordinately proud of his colts, his Poland-China pigs, his
"graded" bull, his fountain in the garden.
"Nice place you have, Mr. Panel," a stranger might say.
"Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes. Uster be nothin' but sun an' bushes
onst. It's nice, yas, and it's paid for."
"What a good-looking mare!"
"Yas; she's paid for, too.
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