ment of beauty.

"I shall teach you better ways, my dear, better ways than you Yankees
know. I shall teach you new pretties." She nodded her head to Saxon's
underlinen on the line. "I see you make little laces. I know all
laces--the Belgian, the Maltese, the Mechlin--oh, the many, many loves
of laces! I shall teach you some of the simpler ones so that you can
make them for yourself, for your brave man you are to make love you
always and always."

On her first visit to Mercedes Higgins, Saxon received the recipe for
home-made soap and her head was filled with a minutiae of instruction in
the art of fine washing. Further, she was fascinated and excited by all
the newness and strangeness of the withered old woman who blew upon her
the breath of wider lands and seas beyond the horizon.

"You are Spanish?" Saxon ventured.

"No, and yes, and neither, and more. My father was Irish, my mother
Peruvian-Spanish. 'Tis after her I took, in color and looks. In other
ways after my father, the blue-eyed Celt with the fairy song on
his tongue and the restless feet that stole the rest of him away to
far-wandering. And the feet of him that he lent me have led me away on
as wide far roads as ever his led him."

Saxon remembered her school geography, and with her mind's eye she saw
a certain outline map of a continent with jiggly wavering parallel lines
that denoted coast.

"Oh," she cried, "then you are South American."

Mercedes shrugged her shoulders.

"I had to be born somewhere. It was a great ranch, my mother's. You
could put all Oakland in one of its smallest pastures."

Mercedes Higgins sighed cheerfully and for the time was lost in
retrospection. Saxon was curious to hear more about this woman who must
have lived much as the Spanish-Californians had lived in the old days.

"You received a good education," she said tentatively. "Your English is
perfect."

"Ah, the English came afterward, and not in school. But, as it goes,
yes, a good education in all things but the most important--men. That,
too, came afterward. And little my mother dreamed--she was a grand lady,
what you call a cattle-queen--little she dreamed my fine education was
to fit me in the end for a night watchman's wife." She laughed genuinely
at the grotesqueness of the idea. "Night watchman, laborers, why, we had
hundreds, yes, thousands that toiled for us. The peons--they are like
what you call slaves, almost, and the cowboys, who could ride two
hundred