LITMIR.BIZ

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       A song of sorrow, as wild and shrill

       As the homeless wind when it ioams the hill;

       So full of tears, so loud and long,

       That the grief of the world seemed turned to song.

      "But soon there came, through the weeping night,

       A glimmering angel clothed in white;

       And he rolled the stone from the tomb away,

       Where the Lord of the earth and the heavens lay;

       And Christ arose in the cavern's gloom,

       And in living lustre came from the tomb.

      "Now the bird that sat in the heart of the tree

       Beheld the celestial mystery,

       And its heart was filled with a sweet delight,

       And it poured a song on the throbbing night;

       Notes climbing notes, still higher, higher,

       They shoot to heaven like spears of fire.

      "When the glittering, white-robed angel heard

       The sorrowing song of that grieving bird,

       And heard the following chant of mirth,

       That hailed Christ, risen from the earth,

       He said, 'Sweet bird, be forever blest;

       Thyself, thy eggs, and thy moss-wreathed nest.'

      "And ever, my child, since that blessed night,

       When death bowed down to the Lord of light,

      ​

       The eggs of that sweet bird change their hue,

       And burn with red, and gold, and blue ;

       Reminding mankind, in their simple way,

       Of the holy marvel of Easter-day."

      I know that in a little time the march of reason will sweep this old tradition, as it has already swept away others which were once regarded as essentials of the Christian faith ; nevertheless I envied the simple, uneducated bird-catcher his childlike, unquestioning belief, and the song of the sweet night-singer of California will ever henceforth fall upon my ear more gratefully for its pleasant association with that story of holy marvel, which, although some of us may doubt, we must surely all alike admire.

      The sun was high in the heavens, next day, when I said good-by to Albert at Crystal Springs, and rode away into the Sierra Morena Mountains. It was a California autumn morning,—and, in saying that, I have left nothing unsaid in the way of description. Turning southwestward, the road, one of the finest I have ever ridden over, winds round and round, in and out, along the steep sides of a deep, rocky cafion, for miles, ascending by regular and easy grades the dividing ridge between the Bay of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. When nearly at the summit I paused to rest my panting horse and look back upon the scene below. And such a scene! It was a variation of that described in the story of my paseár, but, if possible, even more entrancingly beautiful. Eastward, the Bay of San Francisco, cairn, unruffled, and blue, glittered in the ​sun. The ocean mists rolling in through the Golden Gate half hid the towns which skirt the bay. The hills of Alameda, high and etherealized, rested like great straw-colored and purple clouds against the horizon; while Mount Diablo, monarch of the inland country, reared his dark head into the blue sky, above the mists and the lower mountains, like some great rocky island, seen from the shores of an unknown sea. Southward, between the hills of San Mateo and the Sierra Morena, stretching away for miles toward the redwood-covered heights of Santa Clara, lay the ever-beautiful Cañada del Reymundo. Live-oak groves are scattered through it, and near its centre rests a quiet little lake, with an island of green tules in the middle. All around the sides of the valley, among the groves in the little cañons, nestle quiet farm-houses, and in the centre, upon an elevated mesa, stands the last relic of the old semi-feudal Spanish-American times. This is an adobe house of one story, with broad veranda, formed by the wide roof being carried out all around. No garden, no grain-fields, not a single fruit-tree flourishes near it. The ranchero who built it and dwelt here among his herds, and paid tribute to the Holy Mother Church and the Most Catholic monarch, Don Carlos "of Spain, and India King," some eighty years ago, thought the country capable of no higher improvement, and dreamed not of the paradise it was to become when he and his should give place to the stranger who dwelt beyond the great Sierra Nevada somewhere. He built no roads, planted no trees, and left behind only ​his low-roofed jaical, and the musical Spanish name which he gave to the valley.

      On again. One of those curious bue-and-brown birds, with peaked cap and tail as disproportionately long as that of a peacock, called here a "Road Runner," and in Mexico "El Correro del Camino"—the courier of the road,—which never flies if it can avoid it, but runs with a speed which distances the fleetest horse, darted along in the road ahead of us. I galloped after it, vainly trying to get within shooting distance, until, tired of the sport, it jumped over the side of the mountain and disappeared in the bushes of the canon below. The road is cut most of the way out of the solid rock, and you look down from time to time almost perpendicularly into cañons hundreds and hundreds of feet. It is a succession, on a modified scale, of Cape Horn and the scenery on the South Fork of the American River in the Sierra Nevada, on the Central Pacific Railroad route, and at the same time on a scale quite large enough to try to the utmost the nerves of timid travelers.

      The flying mists, which had been scudding in broken clouds over the sierra, lifted and rolled away as I crossed the summit and began to descend towards Spanish Town. The Pillaritos Creek murmured hundreds of feet below, the narrow canon, near the mouth of which, half hidden in shade-trees, is the hamlet of Spanish Town. Beyond rolls the deep-blue waters of the broad Pacific, and Half-Moon Bay lies a few miles to the northward. I pass a wayside house where the yard is ​full of goats and everything speaks of Spanish-Americanism.

      A woman with lustrous black hair and eyes, and oval, olive-hued face, comes out with her black shawl or rebosa, folded Andalusian fashion around her head and shoulders. The Moors left those eyes, and that oval face and tawny-olive skin, in Spain; but the little girl who follows her has a fairer complexion, a sharper-cut face, and light-brown hair. Thus, little by little, we are conquering Spanish-America. At a little roadside grocery a whole family of Mexican or native Californians are in attendance. I called for a real's (ten cents) worth of apples, and they weighed me out four pounds; one holding the scales, another putting in the apples in a pail which a third held, while the rest looked on. It took the whole family to sell just ten apples; but such is "el costumbre del pais, señor"—the custom of the country, sir; and who is to commit the sacrilege of innovation?

      Two miles above Spanish Town, at the toll-gate, is a small, neat farm, owned by an intelligent American, past the meridian of life. As he came out to take the toll, I engaged him in conversation. He has one hundred and sixty acres, nearly one hundred of which are under cultivation. In the valley he raises beans, onions, fruit, etc., and on the hill-tops he has his early potato-fields, from which he sends to market the finest potatoes in December, January and February, after the lowland crops have become "old" and less salable. He has three acres of strawberries in full bearing. These he irrigates, ​and thus secures fine crops all the year round. He sometimes gets as high as a dollar per pound for strawberries at Christmas and New Year's, and he estimates that the crop yields him, on an average, twenty cents per pound in coin the year round. He has no family, and wants to sell out and go to Santa Barbara, where he has relatives. He thinks his farm, with improvements, is worth forty dollars per acre. The potato and onion-fields he rents to a party of Portuguese. There is a family of Mexicans upon the upper end of his ranche, but most of his neighbors are Germans, though the population of the town is about equally divided between native Californians, Americans and Europeans. His sole companion is a Chinaman, who carries on the strawberry culture and does the housework, and is, as he told me, worth any other two men, though he gets but two thirds the' wages. He could not say much for the society of the neighborhood, nor can I.

      Spanish Town contains little to attract a stranger. Turning southward here, the road runs through a rich, sloping plain, between the

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