The Tale of Grouse.
[ARDEN.]
Leaving el Toro after about a ten mile drive over two ranges of small mountains, through wild flowers, grain, cotton wood, and live oak trees and by a creek, a fine drive but not for wild horses, you wind past the home farm and turn sharply to your right over a bridge with a swing gate, to find yourself suddenly amongst big lawns and live oaks, great beds of roses and flowers, shrubbery, and a little lake and glass houses. At the back of this eight acres or more is a natural terrace one hundred feet high, covered with live oaks, geraniums, creepers, etc., and up which goes a flight of steps to the orange orchard at the top. Back of this on the mountains, they are all round. At the foot of this terrace stands the house, a long rambling collection of rooms, porches, entrances, open-air dining-room, etc., very prettily built to harmonize with the scenery. From the inside one looks out into a green sea of a dozen different shades of green; inside it is a perfect place, everything one can want from madame down to cocktails at which Mr. B. is a pastmaster. Pictures, music, books, and most of them with histories. The rides and walks up the canyon are beautiful, the one that goes on past the house winds through the mountains and across and across the creek, ferns and flowers are all about and one passes two little cabins, in the furthest of which they lived when they first came out, there are stories of a bear that comes here but we don't see anything of him—there are live stock, olives, oranges, etc., and bees, on the ranch. Friends are always coming and going, carriages meeting the train at el Toro twice a week for friends, and so many visitors (and uninvited guests) come that there has been a well sunk and grounds made for picnic parties about a quarter of a mile from the house. "Arden" is its name and madame played Rosalind on the lawn once, where the hammocks and tables for afternoon tea, etc., are, one forgets that there is any world outside here, why should you remember when there is all you want, and nothing to remind you? There are papers of course if you can't let them alone. "The world forgotten, by the world forgot", is something like it but not nice enough, and we do a little honey business and get stung enough to see what it is like, and sometimes garden with musical interludes and play whist and poker, and fight about gardening or cards, or whether dried currants are currants, and make cigarettes with crafty little machines, and go walks and get flowers sometimes drive or ride or shoot or fish, or watch R making a contraption for pumping water out of the lake, or go up to where a 40-foot high dam is starting across a road where the rocks nearly meet, this will make a big lake, more water, fish and boating, you don't know how the days go till you are away—then you know.
Arden, 1897.