Soon after we left the old home was sold, and grandfather and Aunt Martha moved to California, where the rest of us lived. The man who bought the place cut down the beautiful trees, tore down the house and built two small ones in its stead. But although the original house is gone in fact it will live in my mind as long as I do. I could draw its floor plan; I could set much of its furniture in the correct position.
The arrangement of the dining-room was for years very important for me, because the only way I could distinguish my right hand from my left was by seating myself in imagination beside grandfather at table where I was when I first learned which was which,—left toward him, right toward cellar door. And, being so seated, I recall another lesson,—vinegar should not be called beginniger.
It was in the south yard that we built the big snow-man; it was there that the sleigh upset when we turned in from the street with too much of a flourish, and pitched Nan and me deep into a snow bank; it was here under the apple trees that we turned somersaults; it was here that the horse stood on his hind legs to shake down his favorite apples from the tree. The same horse would come to the stone door-step by the kitchen and rattle the bucket there when he was thirsty; that was the doorstep where I placed my feet when papa made my little shoes shine like his boots; and here Elizabeth was packed in grandfather Weston’s old clock-case for her long ride to California,—as if she were going in a coffin to heaven. But the San Justo heaven lacked the great beds of lilies-of-the-valley, such as grew under the trees in the Maine yard.
These impressions were planted deep in my mind during the months I spent in the beautiful village, with its dignified white houses, its tall trees, its great river. But, once again on my westward way, they slipped back into the files of memory, displaced by the renewal of other old impressions, for I was making my fourth trans-continental trip, my fourth stop in Chicago with my mother’s brother, Josiah Hathaway.
What fun there was, riding a whole long week in a Pullman car with its many friendly people, and a new routine of life. In those days dining-cars, with leisurely meals and dainty service had not been discovered. There were irregular stops with only twenty minutes for refreshment, so that a child must depend largely on the luncheon basket. The bringing of the table and opening the tempting boxes and packages was a welcome break in the long day. There were tall green bottles of queen olives, and pans packed with fried chicken, and all the bread and jam one might eat. We had a can of patent lemonade,—strange greenish sugar, needing only a few drops from the little bottle embedded in the powder, and train water to make it into ambrosia. Such a meal involved soiled hands, but even the washing of them had a new charm, for mamma took with her to the dressing-room a bottle of Murray and Lanman’s Florida Water, a few drops of which in the alkali water made a milky bath fit for the hands of a princess.
When interest within the car failed there was the window, with its ever new pictures. If there were no houses or people, mountains or clouds to be seen, there might be a village of prairie dogs, and the rhythm of passing poles carrying the telegraph wires never failed. I saw cowboys on their dancing horses, and silent Indians, the women carrying on their backs little Hiawathas, and offering for sale bows and arrows or beaded moccasins.
Then night came, and with it the making of magic beds by the smiling black genie. Once, after I had been deposited behind the green curtains, we stopped at a way station, where, pressing my nose against the window pane, I saw by the light of a torch, a great buffalo head mounted on a pole, and many men moving in and out of the fitful light.
With groans and creakings, with bells and weird whistles we were soon under way again, and, to the steady song of the wheel, in the swaying springy bed, I was being whisked over the plains in as many days as father had once spent in months driving the first sheep to California.
We went back to San Justo and stayed there forever; and then, when I was almost seven, we went south to the Cerritos for a never-to-be-forgotten summer with my cousin Harry. When fall came, instead of returning to the ranch at San Juan we moved to Los Angeles, a little city, and there I lived until both it and I grew up.