sappeared from view as if they had been swallowed up in the plain.

A cross road from the turnpike is the usual approach to the casa or
mansion,--a long, low quadrangle of brown adobe wall in a bare but
gently sloping eminence. And here a second surprise meets the stranger.
He seems to have emerged from the forest upon another illimitable plain,
but one utterly trackless, wild, and desolate. It is, however, only
a lower terrace of the same valley, and, in fact, comprises the three
square leagues of the Robles Rancho. Uncultivated and savage as it
appears, given over to wild cattle and horses that sometimes sweep in
frightened bands around the very casa itself, the long south wall of the
corral embraces an orchard of gnarled pear-trees, an old vineyard, and
a venerable garden of olives and oranges. A manor, formerly granted by
Charles V. to Don Vincente Robles, of Andalusia, of pious and ascetic
memory, it had commended itself to Judge Peyton, of Kentucky, a modern
heretic pioneer of bookish tastes and secluded habits, who had bought it
of Don Vincente's descendants. Here Judge Peyton seemed to have
realized his idea of a perfect climate, and a retirement, half-studious,
half-active, with something of the seignioralty of the old slaveholder
that he had been. Here, too, he had seen the hope of restoring his
wife's health--for which he had undertaken the overland emigration--more
than fulfilled in Mrs. Peyton's improved physical condition, albeit
at the expense, perhaps, of some of the languorous graces of ailing
American wifehood.

It was with a curious recognition of this latter fact that Judge Peyton
watched his wife crossing the patio or courtyard with her arm around the
neck of her adopted daughter "Suzette." A sudden memory crossed his mind
of the first day that he had seen them together,--the day that he had
brought the child and her boy-companion--two estrays from an emigrant
train on the plains--to his wife in camp. Certainly Mrs. Peyton was
stouter and stronger fibred; the wonderful Californian climate had
materialized her figure, as it had their Eastern fruits and flowers, but
it was stranger that "Susy"--the child of homelier frontier blood and
parentage, whose wholesome peasant plumpness had at first attracted
them--should have grown thinner and more graceful, and even seemed to
have gained the delicacy his wife had lost. Six years had imperceptibly
wrought this change; it had never struck him before so forcib