yoi-hoi

Updated: May 24, 2025

But whatever route you choose for the "Hot Springs," and whatever pack of stage driver yarns you accept, know this that in all this matchless California, with climate of perpetual summer, the sky cloudless and the wind blowing six months from the genial west; the open field a safe threshing floor for the grandest wheat harvests of the world; nectarines and pomegranates and pears in abundance that perish for lack of enough hands to pick; by a product in one year of six million five hundred thousand gallons of wine proving itself the vineyard of this hemisphere; African callas, and wild verbenas, and groves of oleander and nutmeg; the hills red with five thousand cattle in a herd, and white with a hundred and fifty thousand sheep in a flock; the neighboring islands covered with wild birds' eggs, that enrich the markets, or sounding with the constant "yoi-hoi," "yoi-hoi," of the sea-lions that tumble over them; a State that might be called the "Central Park" of the world; the gulches of gold pouring more than fifty million of dollars a year into the national lap; lofty lakes, like Tahoe, set crystalline in the crown of the mountain; waterfalls so weird that you do not wonder that the Indians think that whosoever points his finger at them must die, and in one place the water plunging from a height more than sixteen times greater than Niagara, even in such a country of marvels as this, there is nothing that makes you ask more questions, or bow in profounder awe, or come away with more interesting reminiscences than the world renowned California geysers.

T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt) Talmage - Around The Tea-Table