I shall never forget my first experience of the spell. I was invited by my Grandmother to go to California for several months. There were four of us, and we were all tired, for one reason or another; Grandmother because she was eighty, and it's a strenuous matter to live eighty years; my Aunt because she had been desperately ill; C. C. because she had nursed my Aunt back to comparative health, and I because I had been a débutante that winter, and every one knows that that is the hardest work of all. We went as far south as the train would take us, and settled ourselves at Coronado to bask in the sunshine until the tiredness was gone and we became a band of explorers, with the world before
us! A pair of buggies drawn by nags of unblemished reputation for sagacity and decorum, driven by C. C. and me, carried us over many a picturesque and rough road. It invariably took us all day to get anywhere and back, irrespective of what the distance was supposed to be. The outfit was so old that I often had to draw up my steed and mend the harness with a safety-pin. Trailing Ramona was our favorite game. Fortunately for that part of the country, she and Allessandro managed to be born, or sleep, or marry, or die in pretty nearly every little settlement, ranch, or mission in San Diego County, and it's a great boon to the country. Now, of course, with a motor you can cover the ground in a day, but then, with a guaranteed horse and a safety-pinned harness, Ramona was good for weeks.
We usually took a picnic lunch, and it
was on one of these trips that I first saw the Smiling Hill-Top and knew it not for my later love. How often that happens! Jogging home, with the reins slack on the placid mare's back, Grandmother liked me to sing "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms" and "Araby's Daughter," showing that she was a good deal under the spell of the palm trees and the sunset, for I have the voice of a lost kitten. It also shows the perfect self-control of the horse, for no accidents occurred.
It was a very different Coronado from the present day, with its motors on earth and water, and in air. I liked ours better and hated to leave it, but after six weeks of its glory of sunshine I was deputed to go north to Pasadena to rent a bungalow for two months. It was my first attempt of the kind, and aided by a cousin into
whose care I had been confided, I succeeded in reducing the rent twenty-five dollars a month for a pretty cottage smothered in roses and heliotropes and well supplied with orange and lemon trees. I was rather pleased with myself as a business woman. Not so Grandmother. She was thoroughly indignant and announced her firm intention of paying the original rent asked, a phenomenon that so surprised our landlord, when I told him, that he insisted on scrubbing the kitchen floor personally, the day of her arrival. Thus did Raleigh lay down his cloak for the Queen!
Everything was lovely. It only rained once that spring—the morning after we had gone up Mount Lowe to see the sun rise, to be sure, but it would be a carping creature who would complain when only
one expedition had been dampened. For twenty years I cherished the illusion that this was a land of endless sunshine. I don't know where I thought the moisture came from that produces the almost tropical luxuriance of the gardens and the groves. I know better now and, strange to say, I have come to love a rain in its proper time and place, if it isn't too boisterous. We discovered a veteran of the Civil War turned liveryman, who for a paltry consideration in cash was ours every afternoon, and showed us something new each day, from racing horses on the Lucky Baldwin Ranch to the shadow of a spread eagle on a rock. Grandmother's favorite excursion was to a picturesque winery set in vineyards and shaded by eucalyptus trees. She was what I should call a wine-jelly, plum-pudding prohibitionist, and she
included tastes of port and fruit cordials as part of the sight-seeing to be done. You can be pretty at eighty, which is consoling to know. Grandmother, with a little curl over each ear and the pink born of these "tastes" proved it, and she wouldn't let us tease her about it either. It was an easy life, and so fascinating that I even said to myself, "Why not learn to play the guitar?" for nothing seemed impossible. It shows how thoroughly drugged I was by this time, for my Creator wholly omitted to supply me with a musical ear. I always had to have my instrument tuned by the young man next door, but I learned to play "My Old Kentucky Home" so that every one recognized it. Now, if years had not taught me some fundamental facts about my limitations, I should probably render twilight hideous
with a ukelele, for a ukelele goes a guitar one better, and Aloha oeè wailed languorously on that instrument would make even a Quaker relax.