How would you like to have your school close for two weeks, so that you could gather walnuts? Every year many of the boys and girls of Southern California are given a vacation just for this purpose. It is called the "walnut vacation," and occurs in the month of October.

These children do not take their baskets and go off to the woods where they can romp and play, watch the squirrels, and gather beautiful autumn leaves. They gather nuts from the trees which their parents own, for in Southern California there are many walnut ranches or groves. You see the vacation means a vacation for work instead of for play.

Walnut trees are set out in rows just as apple trees are, but their roots and branches extend to such a distance from the trunks that they need to be about twice as far apart.

The walnut harvest, which begins about the first of October, is a busy time. Men, women, boys, and girls may be seen in the groves, shaking the nuts from the trees, picking them up, and putting them into sacks.

The men shake the trees, and there is a shower of nuts to the earth. Do not go under the branches now unless you want to be pelted. A single tree has been known to yield three hundred pounds of nuts in a season.When the trees have been given a good shaking, there are still some nuts clinging to the branches. These are obtained by shaking the limbs separately, by means of long poles, to the ends of which wire hooks are fastened. As all of the nuts do not ripen at the same time, the trees are sometimes gone over two or three times.

Now the boys, girls, and women go to work filling pails and baskets and emptying them into sacks, for they can do this work as well as men.

Usually the nuts drop out of their covering or shuck when they strike the ground; but if they do not, the shuck must be removed. Sometimes the covering is cut off. If you handle the nuts with your bare hands, they will be stained almost black, and you will have to let the color wear off.

The days are bright and warm, and this sort of nutting becomes rather tiresome before sundown. The work must be done and the vacation is not a very long one, so each does his part cheerfully.When the nuts have been gathered, they are taken to the shed or place where they are to be washed. Here they are poured into a large wire cylinder which revolves in a tank filled with water. The machine is turned by a horse walking round and round, and it both washes and grades the nuts. The smaller ones pass through the meshes in the wire and are called second grade. The larger ones are known as first grade.

When the walnuts come out of the washer, they are spread out on shallow, wooden trays to dry. Sometimes several thousand trays may be seen on one ranch. They are loaded on to a small car and pushed to the part of the field where they are wanted.

If there is no foggy or cloudy weather, they will dry in about five days, but if there is, it may take ten.

After the nuts are thoroughly dried, the trays are placed on the car and pushed to the bleacher. This is a large box made of tarred paper. It is placed over the trays, and a quantity of sulphur is burned in it. This is simply to whiten the shells, for they sell for a higher price when they are bleached. Sometimes the nuts are whitened by dipping them into a liquid preparation.

The nuts are now sacked and marked, ready to ship. Soon after the boys and girls have finished their "walnut vacation," the nuts are on their way to the eastern part of the United States.

Most of the walnuts raised in California have soft shells. Some have such thin shells that they are called "paper shells." The walnuts that grow in the woods of Indiana, Illinois, and other states have hard shells. They are dark in color and are called black walnuts. The trees are quite valuable, as the wood is used in making furniture.