Sunday, Jan. 7. Lapses from virtue are not unfrequently associated, in the character of the Spanish female, with singular exhibitions of charity and self-denial. She is often at the couch of disease, unshrinkingly exposed to contagion, or in the hovel of destitution, administering to human necessity. She pities where others reproach, and succors where others forsake. The motive which prompts this unwearied charity, is a secret within her own soul. It may be as a poor expiation for conscious error, or the impulse of those kindly sentiments not yet extinct, or gratitude for that humanity which foregoes merited reprehension. Be the cause what it may, it justly retains her within the pale of Christian charity, and entitles her to that sympathy in her own misfortunes which she so largely bestows on the sorrows of others.
Denunciation never yet protected the innocent, confirmed the wavering, or recovered the fallen. That spirit of ferocity which breaks the bruised reed, partakes more of relentless pride than virtuous disapprobation. Many sever themselves from all sympathy with the erring, from the mistaken apprehension that the wider the chasm, the more advantageous the light in which they will appear. But that chasm which seems so wide to them, narrows to a faint line in the eye of Omniscience. Forgiveness is our duty; not that forgiveness which scorns and forsakes the object on which it is bestowed, but which seeks to reclaim the erring, and reinstate the fallen in merited confidence and esteem. When repentant guilt trembled and blushed in the presence of Him whose divine example is our guide, no frown darkened His brow, no malediction fell from His lips; His absolving injunction was—go, and sin no more. The brightest stars are they which have emerged from a horizon of darkness.
Tuesday, Jan. 16. The climate on the seaboard is remarkably equable; it varies at Monterey, the year round, but little from sixty. You never lay aside your woollen apparel, and always feel ready for a bear-hunt, or any other field-sport that may tempt your taste or skill. Till the Americans came here there was hardly a house in the town which contained a fireplace; even the cooking was done in a detached apartment, seemingly to avoid the straggling rays of its grate. The children ran about in the winter months without a shoe, and in their little cotton slips, the perfect pictures of health. The girl of seventeen, the mother of forty, and the venerable lady, who had reached her threescore and ten, were never seen hovering around a fire: they were at their household affairs, in apartments where a coal had never been kindled; or in their gardens, where the last rain had revived their drooping plants; or out in the woods at pic-nics, where the very birds sung out in rivalry of their jocund mirth. Health spread its rose in the cheek, and elastic life thrilled in the bounding limb. The birth of a child was only a momentary pause in this scene of pleasurable activity, and more than compensated for its brief encroachment in a new bud of being, to be clustered among the rest—now blooming in fragrant life around the parent tree.
Think of this, ye mothers who cloister your daughters in air-tight parlors, with furnaces blowing in hot steam from below. It is no wonder they wither from their cradles, and that their bridal couch is often ashes. Your mistaken tenderness, vanity, and pride have supplied death with trophies long enough. Look here to California; among all these mothers and daughters, there is not one where the cankerworm of that disease is at work which has spread sorrow and dismay around your hearths. The insidious disguises and sapping advances of the consumption are not known here; I have not yet met with the first instance where this disease, contracted here, has found a victim. It is your in-door habits, hot parlors, prunellas, and twisting corsets, that clothe this generation with weeds, and bequeath to the next constitutions that fall like grass under the scythe of death. If your daughters won’t take out-door exercise from persuasion, then drive them forth as the guardian angel of Eden your erring progenitrix. It may have been that the development of her physical forces, as well as retributive justice, induced her expulsion from the luxurious roses, the balmy airs, and lulling streams of her first abode. But your Eves will come back again, and sparkling eyes, and buoyant spirits, and a vigorous pulse will commend your maternal wisdom; and when a man, worthy of your confidence and the affections of your daughters, wants a wife, his choice will not lie in a group of valetudinarians. He carries off a bird that floats a strong wing, and that can sing in concert with him as they build the nest out of which other harmonies are to charm the warbling grove; and then, too, the young fledglings will come back to you, all bright and beautiful, and touched with the spirit of gladness in which their breezy cradle swung. Why, is not this enough to make a mother’s soul leap to her laughing eyes!
Wednesday, Jan. 24. Nature never leaves any portion of her troubled domain without a compensation. Here, where the hills and plains, under the long summer’s drought, become so parched and dry that the grasshoppers cease to sing, she presents a pingrass, on which the cattle still thrive; and when this fails, it has already dropped a seed even more nutritious than the stem which sustained its bulbous cradle. For this, a California horse will leave the best bin of oats that ever waved in the harvest-moon. The first copious shower, which usually occurs in November, destroys it, but around its ruins another grass springs, to throw its green velvet, inwrought with millions of flowers, on the charmed eye. It is no wonder the birds here sing through the year, and forego those migrations to which they are subjected in other climes. The lay of the robin, the whistle of the quail, and the tender notes of the curlew, are always piping in the grove, or filling with melody the garden-tree.
Were the blackbird to migrate, and never come back, no farmer would regret his absence; for he is a mischievous bird, who has no respect for the rights of property. He squats by millions where he likes and would rob a wheat-field of its last kernel with a thousand thunders rattling overhead. His legions darken the heaven where they fly, and drown all other harmonies in the jargon of their obstreperous chatter. They are said to be good for a pot-pie; and there are enough of them here to plump a pie around which nations might sit and carve at will: and how much better to be carving a common pie than carving into each other’s lands,—to be popping at blackbirds than shooting each other. There is not a blackbird but what laughs under his glossy wing when he sees a man levelling his gun at another, which the sable rogue knows ought to be levelled at him; and when the smoke-clouds loom up from the field of battle, he chatters in very glee, and even the eyes of the sedate raven are filled with unwonted light. Man makes himself a mournful tragedy and ludicrous comedy in the great creation of God.
Wednesday, Feb. 7. There is one tree in California that is worthy of note, which is peculiar to the country, and as deserving a place on her coat-of-arms as her grizzly bear, and much more so, unless her people intend to overawe their neighbors with the terrors of their insignia. This tree is called the redwood, and closely resembles, in its texture, size, and antiseptic qualities, the giant cedars which have pinnacled, through the storms of a thousand years, the steeps of Lebanon. It is found on the table-lands between the coast range and the sea, and grows in distinct forests, like the savage tribes which once slumbered in its shadows. Its shaft rises straight and free of limbs, till high over the wave of other trees it can spread its emerald sails to the wind, compact as the royals of a ship of the line. The wood is of a pale red hue, and easily yields to any shape under the implements of the carpenter, but is not sufficiently firm for the severer tests of cabinet work. It resists decay, whatever may be its exposure, and in the ground or on the roof is true to its trust. The same shingle which shook the rain from your grandsire, wards it from you; and the same board which pannelled his coffin, echoes to the rumbling sounds of yours as you go down to join him. In a grove of these trees, only a short ride from Monterey, stands one measuring sixty feet in circumference! Of its height I am not certain, as I had no means of measuring it—say three hundred feet—or at least as high as the steeple of that church, a warden of which, who had caught the spirit of its elevation, is reported to have said in reply to a proposition for the introduction of lamps and an evening service, “this line goes through by daylight.” Let those versed in moral mensuration determine the elevation of that warden’s spiritual pride, and they will have the height of my tree exactly.
Friday, Feb. 16. Mr. Larkin has closed the amusements of the carnival with a splendid entertainment, graced with all the beauty and bravery of Monterey. As no egg could be broken after midnight, without trenching on the solemnities of Lent, each went equipped with these weapons, ready for an early contest. Several small volleys opened the engagement between some of the parties; while the fandango engrossed the attention of others. In this oval war the ladies are always the antagonists of the gentlemen, and, generally, through their dexterity, and larger supply of ammunition, bear off the palm. They will sometimes carry two or three dozen rounds each, and as snugly stowed away as cartridges in the box of a new recruit. Still both parties will fight it out—
“With blow for blow, disputing inch by inch,
Where one will not retreat, nor t’other flinch.”