ed. Mrs. Stevenson
herself always ascribed this strange act on the part of her husband's
old friend to his state of health, which had never been good and was
rapidly growing worse; and, because she believed he had become
embittered by his misfortunes, she bore no rancour. In referring to it
she repeated one of her favourite sayings, "To know all is to forgive
all," and when, after Mr. Henley's death, his widow wrote to her
asking for letters to be published in his "life," she sent them with a
kind and affectionate note.

While the house in San Francisco was building, Mrs. Stevenson went
away for a time, accompanied only by her maid, for a camping trip in
the Santa Cruz Mountains, down among the redwoods. The delights of the
place where they camped, in a shady little valley about ten miles from
Gilroy, soon won her heart completely, and she decided to purchase a
small ranch there for a permanent summer home. For the first season
she lived there in true campers' fashion, which she describes in a
letter to her daughter: "At the ranch I have one tent with a curtain
in the middle. We sleep on one side of the curtain and sit on the
other. I have only the most primitive facilities for cooking, and the
butcher is twelve miles away over a mountain road. He is anything but
dependable, and when I send for a piece of roast beef I may get a soup
bone of veal, or a small bit of liver, or a side of breakfast bacon,
which I keep hung in a tree. I cannot keep flour on a tree, so am
dependent on the boarding-house [a small summer resort about a quarter
of a mile distant] for my bread, and if they are short I have no
bread. If I find I lack something essential I have to spend a whole
day driving to town through the deep dust to get it. But of course I
am going to do all kinds of things by and by." The truth was that this
sort of life was exactly to her taste, and the wilder and rougher it
was the better it suited her. She was always, to the end of her days,
the pioneer woman, and the greensward of the woods went better to her
feet than carpeted halls.

Afterwards tents were put up for the accommodation of her family, and
every spring, after the rains were over, they all moved down to take
up a delightful out-of-door life such as can scarcely be enjoyed
anywhere in the world except in California. Cooking was done in the
open air, and meals were taken at a long table spread in a deep glen,
where the trees were so thick that it was pleasan