to draw up my steed and mend the
harness with a safety-pin. Trailing Ramona was our favorite game.
Fortunately for that part of the country, she and Allessandro managed to
be born, or sleep, or marry, or die in pretty nearly every little
settlement, ranch, or mission in San Diego County, and it's a great boon
to the country. Now, of course, with a motor you can cover the ground in
a day, but then, with a guaranteed horse and a safety-pinned harness,
Ramona was good for weeks.

We usually took a picnic lunch, and it was on one of these trips that I
first saw the Smiling Hill-Top and knew it not for my later love. How
often that happens! Jogging home, with the reins slack on the placid
mare's back, Grandmother liked me to sing "Believe Me If All Those
Endearing Young Charms" and "Araby's Daughter," showing that she was a
good deal under the spell of the palm trees and the sunset, for I have
the voice of a lost kitten. It also shows the perfect self-control of
the horse, for no accidents occurred.

It was a very different Coronado from the present day, with its motors
on earth and water, and in air. I liked ours better and hated to leave
it, but after six weeks of its glory of sunshine I was deputed to go
north to Pasadena to rent a bungalow for two months. It was my first
attempt of the kind, and aided by a cousin into whose care I had been
confided, I succeeded in reducing the rent twenty-five dollars a month
for a pretty cottage smothered in roses and heliotropes and well
supplied with orange and lemon trees. I was rather pleased with myself
as a business woman. Not so Grandmother. She was thoroughly indignant
and announced her firm intention of paying the original rent asked, a
phenomenon that so surprised our landlord, when I told him, that he
insisted on scrubbing the kitchen floor personally, the day of her
arrival. Thus did Raleigh lay down his cloak for the Queen!

Everything was lovely. It only rained once that spring--the morning
after we had gone up Mount Lowe to see the sun rise, to be sure, but it
would be a carping creature who would complain when only one expedition
had been dampened. For twenty years I cherished the illusion that this
was a land of endless sunshine. I don't know where I thought the
moisture came from that produces the almost tropical luxuriance of the
gardens and the groves. I know better now and, strange to say, I have
come to love a rain in its proper time and place, if it isn't too