(They both used this idiom of the personal pronoun, which I have heard attributed to Connecticut exclusively; they were both from Massachusetts, however, and I have heard the idiom from men and women of the South west.) How much determination had to do with it, I do not know; but it was not many days before Mrs. Johnson dressed and left her room. A little, slight woman she was, hardly five feet two, and girlish in build-this woman who had stood all day at her washtub with cancer far advanced. At first glance, the tottering steps and the shoulders sunken forward made me shrink with the instinctive dread of disease and suffering; and then I saw her face. There was nothing to be afraid of there, in spite of the pitiful, drawn lines of pain. Her expression was not even of endurance: it was steady, brave, almost cheerful. She would not doubt that she was going to succeed in at least wresting a few years' grace out of the hands of death-long enough to secure her children's future: why should she not be cheerful, then? You and I would have thought it needed something more to give any cause for cheerfulness: a little comfort in one's last years, for instance; a little easing of the struggle life had been; a release from physical torture; but I believe it never occurred to her that there was any act of legislature that she should be happy. They take things pitifully, terribly as a matter of course sometimes--these women who have hard lives. It must have been some ten days before Thanksgiving that Mrs. Johnson began to sit by the fire and talk with us. I wish I could give you the picture of the woman as it remains in my memory. The little unpainted, unpapered room, with the look of cleanness about the rough, light-colored pine boards; the small windows decorously shaded with spotless curtains made from old sheets; the rag carpet (of the very homeliest and roughest variety) on the floor; the great fireplace of rough stones; Mrs. Adams, dark and strong-featured, busy at some handiwork; and the small, bowed figure and uncomplaining face in the cushioned rocking-chair. The hair that rippled prettily on her forehead was just turning from brown to gray; she must have been a pretty girl: her younger daughters were very pretty children. Her simple, unfeigned interest in our interests, and her unvarying thoughtfulness, were wonderful. It was to her faithful watch over her sons' memories that I owed the continuance of my daily mail (a most weighty matter to me, three hundred miles from friends), when the creek between us and the village was flooded, and impassable except by the railroad trestle-work. In her interest and her consideration she did not seem to be making any effort of conscience to put aside herself for others; it seemed to be simply that it never had occurred to her to think of her position as making her any object of special attention, even from herself. I learned in those days, partly from her and partly from Mrs. Adams, something of what she felt was staked on her life and death. Her two eldest boys, perhaps eighteen and fourteen years old, were already known as rough, willful fellows. They were out of school now, but they had left a bad reputation behind them-chiefly because of mismanagement; for there had certainly been enough bad teaching there to ruin twenty such boys; and their mother's influence over them had never failed. They seemed the sort of lads who might easily turn either to good or evil according to the influences about them; and there was almost no influence for good to be found for them there, outside their own home. The only work for them, without money as they were, was among the sheep-herders, where they would well nigh forget that there was such a thing as clean and steady life; nor were they, apparently, the stuff to seek out for themselves a different life in some other part of the world, unless kept to the idea by their resolute little mother. "But she feels almost the worst of all about Lizzie," Mrs. Adams said. "Lizzie is sixteen years old, and she sees other girls, these Pikes, marrying at fourteen and fifteen. It's an awful place for a girl to be brought up in, anyway. I don't know any young man here Mrs. Johnson would like to see Lizzie like. Lizzie's a good girl, but she don't realize, you see, that there are men different from these. And there's no lack of men-low fellows-hanging round her now; men who come to the window and look in to see if her mother's at home before they offer to go in. The three little girls somebody's sure to take-they're pretty, nice-mannered, handy children-but she can't bear to think of their being scattered that way. And I don't know but what really her heart aches most over little Katie, just because she is the baby." Mrs. Johnson was to have all her family with her on Thanksgiving Day, at Mrs. Adams's. But before that day had come, she herself could no longer refuse to believe, that, however the wound of the surgeon's knife might heal, the disease was there still, fastening anew on the narrowing life. "I will have it cut out again," she said. "You cannot find a doctor to do it," they told her. it very quietly and simply, not seeming to mind the presence of others in the room; and they, frightened, sorrowful, yet only halfrealizing, childlike, evidently clung to her for comfort against herself; looked to her to somehow take care of them in this trouble as in others. She never flinched until, last of all, little Katie came in. She had not seen her mother since she left home, for they lived in the village, across the flooded creek, and the little feet could not be taken across the railroad bridge except for a great occasion; and now she ran across the room to her with a cry of delight, and the sweetest of uplifted baby faces. Mrs. Johnson clasped the little one with her left arm, securing the dimpled hand with her own right. hand, which she could move only a few inches, and her face sank suddenly down in an outbreak of sobbing on the pretty curly head. I never saw her break down again. She managed to make the Thanksgiving Day quietly cheerful to the children, after all. A few days later she returned to her own home. I did not see her again until early January. I had closed school at four "They must do it if I insist; it is my o'clock Friday, and I was going to take the affair," she said desperately. She read advertisements of lotions then. She did not care how painful any application was, she said. "So long as I am alive, if I am good for nothing but to walk the floor and scream, I can keep my family together." She was not unreasonable; she was convinced at last that to do anything further would only shorten instead of lengthening her life. It was the morning of Thanksgiving Day that she gave it up. She looked up, after long silence, and told me so, very simply and quietly, with infinite sadness in her voice, and yet-after all her desperate resistance-with that same pitiful, terrible acceptance of calamity as a matter of course. She did not seem to expect me to pity her; it would have seemed to her a very irrelevant thing to be thinking about her: the children's future was the thing to think of. They came in half an hour later-the boys first, and she talked to them about first homeward train at two o'clock Saturday morning. A day or two before, my secret dread of waiting till train-time in the hotelattachment of the saloon, and then being escorted to the station by the bar-keeper, was relieved by a message from Mrs. Johnson, asking me to wait for the train at her house. I found her little changed in appearance, though she must have been really much feebler. Her house was poor enough—a narrow, rough kitchen, with home-made bench and chairs, two boxes of bedrooms behind, and, I think, a garret-loft. I imagine the kitchen itself served as a sleeping-room when all were at home. Yet the home somehow escaped the appearance of squalor; and more simple refinement of behavior I have not found-no, not on Beacon Hill. After little Katie had been carried off from my lap and my stories to bed, Mrs. Johnson came and sat down by me. She would not yield to my urgency that she should go to rest. "I sleep so little, anyway," she said, "that it doesn't make any difference. I do take good care of myself; I don't want to shorten the time any. But it won't do me any harm, and I sha'n't see you again.” She said it as simply as if she had said, "I shall not wear that bonnet any more." She was glad I was going home to my friends this was a good place to get out of. She drifted very naturally into the story of her own life. "I was singing and noise going on! I was afraid to have him leave me a minute. I couldn't have any room at the hotel, and I had to sleep in the dining-room, and get dressed before the men came in. He used to get up long before light to go off to work and get well on before breakfast; and I was so afraid that I should sleep too long that I wouldn't get any sleep at all after he went. Then I hated to be there when the men came in, but I hadn't any place to go. After that, "I was a Lowell girl," she said. he took me to board with a woman that lived nicely brought up. I worked in the facto- out on the road a little way. She kept hens, ries, but not until after I had been to school and thought a good deal of them. I used a good deal. I went through the common to sit and sew while he was gone; and the schools; I had more education than he hens would come in the house and go pickdid, but his folks are more well-to-do. My ing round my feet. I couldn't bear to have folks are all gone; but one of his connections them-it seemed so dirty-and I would shoo is a judge now, and I hope that they will them off with my apron. But she used to take Katie and bring her up nicely. There get very angry at that, and swear at me. were the public libraries, too, in the East; She said I was too stuck up for her house. I always cared a good deal for that. There The women all were set against me: they isn't anything like that in this country. I said I was stuck up. But I was really afraid never expected to live this way.” of them. Her cooking was dreadful; it There was not a shade of complaint in seemed as if it would poison me; but it her tone. "There's one thing I wish," she said; "that I could hear a good organ again before I die-a good church-organ." "Why, mamma," cried Lizzie, dismayed, "isn't Clara Padgett's a good organ?" Evidently the poor child had regarded with exaggerated reverence the rattling melodeon, the one instrument of the sort in the country-side. It showed that her mother had kept these reminiscences out of sight, and that to-night's talk was stirring deep waters -as, indeed, the girl's eager attention to the whole story showed. Well, it's I always could be made her so angry for me to try to help her After some digression about organs, Mrs. be good." Johnson drifted back to her story. "I came out to Shasta to marry him," she said, "twenty years ago. I came alone, and he met me at the stage, and we were married right off. I shall never forget how the town frightened me. There was a fight going on when I got off the stage, and a man killed before we got to the hotel. I saw him lying dead at the foot of a tree. Then all the saloons, and the quarreling and "I took the 'Art Journal' the first two years I was in California," she said. "I couldn't afford it after that; but I have the old ones, and I've always enjoyed having them.” She went and brought me the volumes from a box-cupboard, where a few other books and the children's school-gear were bestowed; and we looked together over the old pages. It seemed to be a great pleasure to her to find out what some one else thought of the pictures, every one of which she knew so well. "There are two pictures there," she said, warming as she saw that I was interested, "that I care more about than all the others. When I found I couldn't have the magazine any more, and must look over the old ones, I got to looking at these a good deal, and they grew on me till they seem just like real. I'll show you." She turned the leaves readily to the places. The pictures were Raphael's "Crucifixion" and Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." The painters' names meant nothing to her, and she had no idea the pictures were celebrated ones. It seemed to please her greatly to hear that they were. bed; but first she could not be kept from moving feebly about the room to wait on me: to bring me wraps-for I was to sleep a little while on a couch made of chairs placed together-and to place ready something for me to eat before starting; she insisted on seeing me established as comfortably as possible, and arranging my coverings herself before she would go. And, in spite of all protest, Mr. Johnson sat forlorn and pathetic, with his troubled, helpless face, and bewildered gray hair, by the stove until two o'clock, to be ready to rouse me and take me to the train. As I was going, she spoke from her room; so I went in and said good by to her in the dark. Some three weeks later Mrs. Adams sent sent me a newspaper, with notice of the death Before midnight she consented to go to of "Mary, beloved wife of David Johnson." AT LINA'S GRAVE. THIS is the silent spot where Lina lies; She loved its solemn beauty, and she prayed, Here stand the stately redwoods, as of old; Unchanging, as the seasons come and go, In fadeless garments, stand the redwood trees; Must breathe away their lives on every breeze. Yet, fleeting though their fragile forms may be, This is the silent spot where Lina lies; She loved its solemn beauty, and she prayed, SAN FRANCISCO IN EARLY DAYS. REMINISCENCES of the early period of California are generally of interesting character, to the pioneers themselves as well as to the many who learn of that period only through personal narration or published accounts; and much as there has been given to the public in one form or other, through the newspapers, in periodicals, and in books, a great deal yet remains to be written. With delight and undiminished zest do the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England; of the sturdy Dutch settlers of New Netherlands; of William Penn and his peaceful Quaker associates and followers; of the broad-minded Lord Baltimore and his colony of Roman Catholics in Maryland; of the famous cavaliers of the proud Old Dominion; of the hardy Scotch and Irish of the Old North State; and of the honored Huguenots of South Carolina; together with the people who inhabit the vast region first brought to the notice of the civilized world by the explorations and adventures of De Soto, of Marquette and Hennepin, of Joliet and La Salle; and that other region which comprises the early settlement of the Oglethorpes and the favored land of Ponce de Leon, with its most ancient city within the boundaries of the United States-the St. Augustine of the Spanish pioneers, and the inconsiderable sea-port of the present day;with zest and delight do the descendants of all these historic characters, and the dwellers in all these different portions of our common country, still cherish the traditions and continue to recall the reminiscences peculiar to each and all, in song and story and in enduring print. And it is alike commendable and characteristic that the people of the Pacific coast chronicle and perpetuate the names and exploits of the discoverers and explorers, the pioneers and adventurers and settlers, who found this vast territory, and who did so much to redeem it from savage condition, and to lead the way to its VOL. I.-9. occupation and its settlement by the enterprising bands and multitudes who first organized the ways and means to the splendid growth which these States have already attained; with the more splendid future yet to attain, so grandly promised, and inevitably to be realized by coming generations. Among the pages of these reminiscences. of the early period of California settlement and statehood, those which appertain to San Francisco as the great cosmopolitan city of the State and coast can never fail to be appropriate and interesting. The pioneers who bore part in the events and scenes of that period, or who witnessed these, are passing away; and with the century which they emblazoned with their deeds and adventures, they must likewise become of the past and historic. Many of them have already gone before to the final rest; but their memories are cherished, and their names are embalmed in honorable mention among those who knew them in the life, and who will faithfully and tenderly transmit these memories to their descendants. The child whose eyes first opened upon the scene where San Francisco now sits in state has not yet reached the span of patriarchal years; but to no other in all the world has been vouchsafed the wonders he has witnessed in the material progress of mankind toward the highest condition of worldly prosperity. History contributes no similar instance. It was a pueblo of less than a hundred souls. It suddenly became the sea-port city of a hundred thousand. The wiping out of ancient Tyre by Alexander was not more speedy than the erection of San Francisco into a great commercial metropolis: the building of Rome was not more enduring, if faith is to be placed in tokens of imperishable nature. Figuratively, it was the phenomenon of a day; practically, it has every sign of the duration of incalculable ages. And its development, |