A Little Girl in Old San Francisco

by Amanda M. Douglas

She should have all these things some day. He was working and saving for her. And times had changed very much. He and her mother could have been happy in a little cottage where the sharp north winds rushed down, and the drifts of snow hedged one in half the winter. She busy about household work, he wresting scanty crops from the grudging earth. Yet if she could have seen a world like this! Well, the little one should have it all, and see strange lands and no end of beautiful things, for the world kept improving all the time.

He began to feel a good deal more secure about her. At first, when he saw men from every State in the Union, men who had committed various crimes, tramps, and scamps, he had a vague fear that somewhere among them David Westbury would come to light. He would not know him, only the name. And he wished now he had changed his in this new western world. But he would know nothing about the child unless he went to the old home, and that was hardly likely. But if some day, stepping off a vessel or wandering around the docks, a man should clap him on the shoulder and say, "Hello, Chadsey, old man, I never thought to find you here!" he would shake him off, or pay his way somewhere else.

It had never happened, and was not likely to now. He could go on planning this delightful life for the little girl. Presently they would make another move, have a better house and finer furniture. He had lost nothing through this snap of hard times, neither had he made, but business looked brighter. Occasionally he had a longing to go to the mines. Several times he had dreamed of finding a great nugget, and once he dreamed that in stumbling over rocks and wilds, he had lost her. Night came on and all through the darkness he called and called, and woke with great drops of cold perspiration streaming down his brow. No, he could not go to the gold fields and leave her behind.

The weeks and months passed on. There was vacation when she went over to Oaklands, and had splendid times again, and was fascinated by Isola and her music, and they took up a peculiar friendship that seemed to rouse the dreamy girl and delight Mrs. Savedra. Then Mrs. Personette was going down to Monterey with her two girls for a fortnight, and nothing would do but Miss Holmes and Laverne should accompany them. It was not the Monterey of forty years later, but a queer old Spanish town with its convent, where they found Carmencita Estenega, who did not look like a joyous, happy girl, though next year she was to be married.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Personette; "it seems the same thing everywhere, just lovers and marriage. There is really no career for girls here but that, and the convent people are as anxious to marry them off as any one else. To be sure, they can become sisters, which covers the obloquy of old maidism. And so many of the husbands are not worth having, and desert their wives on the slightest pretext. I'd counted on taking some comfort with my girls, but here is Isabel considering every young man as a matrimonial subject, wanting to leave school and go into society, and her father saying, 'Why not?'"

Miss Holmes smiled a little.

"We used to think a girl ought to look at marriage in a serious light, and get ready for the important step; now it is fine clothes, an engagement ring, and a wedding gown. But I suppose in this wonderful land where your fruit buds, and blossoms, and ripens in a night, girls do mature sooner."

Some weeks later she saw her friend again and announced that she had been compelled to yield.

"Isabel would not go to school," she said. "If there had been a good boarding school anywhere near, I should have pleaded hard for that. But her father would not listen to her being sent East. She has a smattering of several branches. She can converse quite fluently in French and Spanish, she dances with grace and elegance, she has correct ideas of the fitness of things that are certainly attractive, and is quick at repartee. She reads the fashion magazines when they arrive, and the newspaper bits of arranging a table, cooking odd dishes, giving luncheons and dinners. She is really a fashionable young lady. And we are to give a ball for her, and after that I must see that she is properly chaperoned. My dear Marian, we do belong to the past generation, there is no denying it. And I half envy you that you can live out of the hurly-burly."

"I am glad myself," Miss Holmes returned. "So far as most things go, we could be living in some quaint old Puritan town. I don't know whether it is really best for the child, but it suits her uncle to have it so. Now she is going over to the Savedras two afternoons a week to study piano music. They think Isola improves by the companionship. And those French children, the Verriers, are very nice and trusty. They are up here quite often. She likes some of her schoolmates very well, and she and Olive have friendly spells," laughing.