g that it should have been at that place that I first knew
Robert Louis Stevenson. Although the passing of the years has dimmed
the memory of those days to a certain degree, yet here and there a
high light gleams out in the shadowy haze of the picture and brings
back the impression of his face and personality and of the
surroundings and little events of our daily life in his company as
though they had happened but yesterday. The little town of Monterey,
being out of the beaten track of travel, and having no mines or large
agricultural tracts in its vicinity to stimulate trade, had dreamed
away the years since American occupation, and still retained much of
the flavour of the pastoral days of Spanish California. It is true
that at the _cascarone_[12] balls--at which the entire population,
irrespective of age or worldly position, dressed in silks or in
flannel shirts, as the case might be, still gathered almost weekly in
truly democratic comradeship--the egg-shells were no longer filled
with gold-dust, as sometimes happened in the prodigal Spanish days;
yet time was still regarded as a thing of so little value that no one
thought of abandoning the pleasures of the dance until broad daylight.
Along the narrow, crooked streets of the little town, with its
precarious wooden sidewalks, the language of old Castile, spoken with
surprising purity, was heard more often than English. In fact, as Mr.
Stevenson himself says in his essay on _The Old Pacific Capital_: "It
was difficult to get along without a word or two of that language for
an occasion."

[Footnote 12: These entertainments were so called in
allusion to the custom of breaking _cascarones_
(egg-shells), previously filled with finely cut coloured
or tinsel paper, upon the heads of the dancers. By the
time the midnight hour rolled around, every head
glittered with the confetti, and the floor was piled
several inches deep with it.]

High adobe walls, topped with tiles, concealed pleasant secluded
gardens, from which the heavy perfume of the floribundia and other
semitropical flowers poured out on the evening air. Behind such a wall
and in the midst of such a garden stood the two-story adobe dwelling
of the Senorita Maria Ygnacia Bonifacio, known to her intimates as
Dona Nachita. In the "clean empty rooms" of this house, furnished
with Spanish abstemiousness and kept in shini