r came in a glass bottle, and every little spiced fish that ever
came in a gay tin. A white-clad young man "demonstrated" a cake-mixer,
a blue-clad young woman "demonstrated" jelly-powders.

Nearby were the one or two big dry-goods stores, with lovely gowns in
their windows, and milliners' shops, with French hats in their smart
Paris boxes--there was even a very tiny, very elegant little shop where
pastes and powders and shampooing were the attraction; a shop that had
a French name "et Cie" over the door.

In short, there were modern women, and rich women, in Santa Paloma, as
these things unmistakably indicated. Where sixty years ago there had
been but a lonely outpost on a Spanish sheep-ranch, and where thirty
years after that there was only a "general store" at a crossroads, now
every luxury in the world might be had for the asking.

All this part of the town lay northeast of the sleepy little Lobos
River, which cut Santa Paloma in two. It was a pretty river, a boiling
yellow torrent in winter, but low enough in the summer-time for the
children to wade across the shallows, and shaded all along its course
by overhanging maples, and willows, and oaktrees, and an undergrowth of
wild currant and hazel bushes and blackberry vines. Across the river
was Old Paloma, where dust from the cannery chimneys and soot from the
railway sheds powdered an ugly shabby settlement of shanties and cheap
lodging-houses. Old Paloma was peppered thick with saloons, and
flavored by them, and by the odor of frying grease, and by an ashy
waste known as the "dump." Over all other odors lay the sweet, cloying
smell of crushed grapes from the winery and the pungent odor from the
tannery of White & Company. The men, and boys, and girls of the
settlement all worked in one or another of these places, and the women
gossiped in their untidy doorways. Above the Carew house and Doctor
Brown's, opposite, River Street came perforce to an end, for it was
crossed at this point by an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender,
rounded pickets. In the middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate,
with a smaller gate for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the
shabby, neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and
weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this had
been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and forlorn.
Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the last of the
sons and daughte