In the Footprints of the Padres

ogeneous to the last degree. It was hail-fellow-well-met, with a reservation; it asked no questions for conscience's sake; it would not have be

of a shady past imperil the happiness and prosperity of the future? All futures shoul

n-down "divines," as if it were but a step from the pulpit to the pickaxe. As for one's family, it was far better off in the old home so long as the

were but three or four other women in that part of the country, and one of these died. This lady wrote frequent and lengthy descriptive letters to a sister in New England, and these letters were afterward published serially in The Pioneer. They picture life as a highly-accomplished woman knew it in the camps and among the people whom Bret Harte h

e that was a mixture of Gringo and diluted Castilian-a life that smacked of the presidio and the hacienda,-tha

his admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition. She readily fo

filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance. There were young people's "parties" in those days, and the height of felicity was to be invited to them. As a heigh

t no one speaks of it above a whisper. As for the Hill, the Hillites hung on through everything; the waves of commerce washed all about it and began gnawing at its base; a deep gully was cut through it, and there a great tide of traffic ebbed and fl

and it ruined the Hill forever. There is nothing left to be done now but to cast it into the midst of the sea. I had sported on the green with the goats of goatland ere ever the stately mansion had been dreamed of; and it was my fate to

t was left to mourn there. Every summer the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin to its foundations. Every winter the rains beat upon it and drove through and through it, a

e a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance, almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed to relish it all-

rrelative and irrelevant; what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of San Francisco," and

pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming: it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an a

s French windows, and was lined with canvas; for there was not a trowel full of plaster in it. The ceiling bellied and flapped like an awning when the wind soughed through the clapboards

of bisque brilliantly tinted. At the two sides of the mantel stood pedestals of Italian marble surmounted by urns of the most graceful and elegant proportions, and profusely ornamented with sculptured fruits and flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case, and cabinets from China or East India; also a l

rred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this iso

d from one end of the coast to the other. She was a star contributor to the weekly columns of the Golden Era, a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best. It introduced Br

! About her were the trophies of her triumph, though she was personally known to few. Each post brought her tribute from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyon

tops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors. You could, had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full of cats a

rtainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and dowdy. The markets

over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old f

hite child born in San Francisco-I'd think it such myself,-and I'