"Venite agile, barchetta mia Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!"
accompanied by the enchanting fragrance of burning sage-brush, is wafted up to my sleeping-porch, and I know that Signor Constantino Garibaldi is early at work clearing the canyon side so that our Matilija poppies shall not be crowded out by the wild. It is a pleasant awakening to a
pleasant world as the light morning mist melts away from a bay as "bright and soft and bloomin' blue" as any Kipling ever saw. It seems almost too good to be true, that in a perfect Italian setting we should have stumbled on an Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works. True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate—the temptation to snip seems so irresistible.
Signor Garibaldi is a retired wine merchant driven out-of-doors by illness, a most courteous and sensitive soul, with a talent for letter-writing that is alone worth all the plumbago blossoms that he cut
away last year. The following letter was written to J—— while Garibaldi was in charge of our hill-top, the bareness of which we strove to cover with wild flowers until we could make just the kind of garden we wanted:
March 15.
Dear Sir: