es to wash. I have no faith that little flirt will marry the
Senor Don Ramon Garcia. He did not well to leave Monterey until after
the wedding. And to think--Ay! yi!"

"Thou hast a big letter for the wash-tub mail, Faquita."

"Aha, my Francesca, thou hast interest! I thought thou wast thinking
only of the bandits."

Francesca, who was holding a plunging child between her knees, actively
inspecting its head, grunted but did not look up, and the oracle of
the wash-tubs, provokingly, with slow movements of her knotted
coffee-coloured arms, flapped a dainty skirt, half-covered with drawn
work, before she condescended to speak further.

Twenty women or more, young and old, dark as pine cones, stooped or sat,
knelt or stood, about deep stone tubs sunken in the ground at the foot
of a hill on the outskirts of Monterey. The pines cast heavy shadows on
the long slope above them, but the sun was overhead. The little white
town looked lifeless under its baking red tiles, at this hour of
siesta. On the blue bay rode a warship flying the American colours. The
atmosphere was so clear, the view so uninterrupted, that the younger
women fancied they could read the name on the prow: the town was on the
right; between the bay and the tubs lay only the meadow, the road, the
lake, and the marsh. A few yards farther down the road rose a hill where
white slabs and crosses gleamed beneath the trees. The roar of the surf
came refreshingly to their hot ears. It leaped angrily, they fancied, to
the old fort on the hill where men in the uniform of the United States
moved about with unsleeping vigilance. It was the year 1847. The
Americans had come and conquered. War was over, but the invaders guarded
their new possessions.

The women about the tubs still bitterly protested against the downfall
of California, still took an absorbing interest in all matters,
domestic, social, and political. For those old women with grizzled locks
escaping from a cotton handkerchief wound bandwise about their heads,
their ample forms untrammelled by the flowing garment of calico, those
girls in bright skirts and white short-sleeved smock and young hair
braided, knew all the news of the country, past and to come, many hours
in advance of the dons and donas whose linen they washed in the great
stone tubs: the Indians, domestic and roving, were their faithful
friends.

"Sainted Mary, but thou art more slow than a gentleman that walks!"
cried Mariquita, an impatie