with little runs that corresponded with the linguist's "Have you the bread?" and getting a little more complicated at each lesson. Well, I took a lesson every day, and I assure you that it was very pleasant, sitting there with that softeyed girl, while she taught my refractory fingers the way they should go. After a while I got so that I could touch the strings to some purpose, and I used to sit up late at night, twanging away on gay fandangoes or soulful serenades. One warm evening I chanced to leave my door open. For about an hour I played softly, then noticing that the door was ajar, I shut it, not caring to disturb the other lodgers. Next morning the sleepless man across the hallway came to me in an ecstacy of delight.

"I was tossing on my pillow, last night," said he, with radiant face, "and had about despaired of sleep for the night, when, of a sudden, the music of your mandolin stole upon my nervous ear. The effect was magical. In less than ten minutes, as nearly as I can say, I was fast asleep."

This tickled me mightily. My little tricks with the mandolin were about my only accomplishment; and if my music was so soft and sweet, as he had said it was, it was certainly worth while to continue the practice. I told him I was glad if he had at last discovered an effective soporific that had no taste of morphine in it; but that I was anything but a trained musician, and that he would doubtless soon become very tired of my twanging, if he were to hear it long.

"On the contrary," he declared, "I am so convinced of the soothing effect of your mandolin that I came in to ask as a favor that you would leave your door open every evening when you sit down to play upon it."

"Oh, I'll stand all the blame, should there be any," said he; and he strode out with a lighter step than I had ever thought him capable of.

Well, of course it was all very well for a time, and I was surprised and pleased to note the highly beneficial effect of the music on my friend across the way; but how long could I keep it up? Not for long, of course. He had gained several pounds of flesh, his face had regained its color, his step was elastic, and he declared that he was himself again, and that he owed it all to me and to my mandolin. So I thrummed away each night, until at last I became very sick of it all, and vowed, in my inhuman way, that I wished I had never seen a mandolin.

As the music began to drop off, my friend became restive again. My indifference to his woes grew from day to day, and yet I often found myself, much against my will, playing the poor fellow to sleep. He was very grateful, and perhaps I ought to have continued to twang away, and feel glad that I was of some use to somebody in the world. But, somehow, all the good feeling had worn off. Let me assure you right here, that it is one thing to play the mandolin to appreciative listeners in a hall or drawing room, and another thing to sit and thrum away to put a man to sleep.

I had become indispensable to the poor fellow, so he was saddled on me like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea. That was the worst of it all. I hardly had the heart to desert him, and yet I knew not which was the most unendurable, his insomnia or my enforced mandolin-playing. "If I could only get a substitute,' thought I, "I would be willing to pay for him out of my own purse."

But a substitute of the right sort was not so easy to find. I hired an Italian fellow from the Barbary Coast, and he stole everything he could easily make off with. Then the honest-looking man from Tehama Street took occasion to

get very much intoxicated in my room, and caused me to be regarded with suspicion by my landlady. It would not do. The thing was becoming an infernal nuisance. I must get rid of nervous Mr. Keith. Ah, happy thought! Why not marry him to some woman who played the mandolin and who would be as willing to make sacrifices as I was unwilling? I owed the man nothing, but still I hated to desert him. Whom could I marry him off to? It was a serious question. In the first place, I doubted if he would be acceptable to any woman, if she knew of his malady. But she need not be told. After she married him she might take her time curing him, and it might not take so very long, after all. He seemed to be getting much better, and in time he might not require the mandolin treatment. If she really loved him she would certainly be willing to exert a little patience. Keith was a man of means, and he was not a bad matrimonial bargain, leaving aside his unnatural tendency toward sleeplessness. I might advertise him in the personal columns, and perhaps some willing widow would snatch him up in short order. "A wideawake man would like to correspond with a young woman of affectionate disposition, with a view to matrimony." How would that look? But, pshaw! How did I know that he would entertain the notion of marrying? The best way was to take him unaware. Eureka! There was that soft-eyed girl on Sutter Street. I would introduce them, and he might fall in love with her. That was the best plan I could devise.

Full of my great matrimonial project, I grasped the first opportunity to put it into working order. I took Keith with me to the soft-eyed girl, on some pre tense or other, and he became interested in her at their first meeting.

"What a lucky stroke," thought I. And yet, somehow, I was not altogether pleased when on my next meeting with the trim little mandolin teacher she re

marked that " Mr. Keith was one of the most entertaining men she had ever met."

Why I was not pleased I did not understand. Yet I remember quite distinctly that I ground my heel into the gravel walk and changed the subject. Whatever the feeling was, it seemed to have disappeared next day, for I managed to arrange another meeting of the two. It was not long before they became good friends, and it soon looked as if they might become something more. She entranced him with her sweet strains from the mandolin. "It will not be long," thought I, "before my struggle with insomnia will be over. It has been almost as bad as though I were afflicted with the dread malady myself." Just at this time the Great Event bobbed up on the horizon as an absolute certainty. I had been at one stroke, as it seemed, lifted above cheap boarding-houses, and all that they implied, and was now ready for a career in the financial arena such as I had long pictured to myself as the ideal life for a moneyed man. By making a few lucky moves among the chessmen on the stock exchange, I could retire in a year or two, if I chose, or I could keep on at the game until I should amass a fortune of which a Vanderbilt might not feel ashamed.

My first few sallies among the bulls and bears did not make me a millionaire. In fact, they threatened to drive. me to hard labor or strong drink. One night, after a particularly rough time of it among the animals of the exchange, I went home, feeling more blue than blue. I picked up the mandolin and opened my door. "No matter how down on my luck I may feel," thought I, "I will lull that poor Keith to sleep. He is in, of course. He is always in. So I will give him 'Old Madrid,' and send him off."

When I had finished playing, I went out upon the street. Glancing at a

tower clock near by, I was surprised to find that it was still early. Somehow my steps took me toward Sutter Street. On the way another blue wave swept over me. It had been an infernally rough day. Had those bears burned brimstone under me they could not have made me feel with any keener appreciation the fact that the devil's chosen haunt was not far away from their pit. Well, I had still a snug little fortune left out of the wreck. Perhaps the thing to do now was to let the bears have their old pit all to themselves.

Just as I reached the soft-eyed girl's gate, to which I turned with a feeling of flight from the bad old world that had been giving me such hard knocks, I saw two figures coming down the walk. Revealed by the gaslight, their faces turned out to be the hairy one of Keith, whom I had so religiously put to sleep, as I thought, a half-hour before, and the round, peachy one of the soft-eyed girl. I shrank into the shadow, and as they passed I heard him speak to her in a tone of voice that was so tender that it caused her eyelids to droop and made me feel like knocking him down.

They walked away up the street.

I

hung around the house until they returned, and it was the worst half-hour of my whole life, that spent waiting for them to come back. I did not let them see me, of course, but I had altogether too good a view of them from across the street. They lingered in the doorway and talked and talked, until I became firmly convinced that something ought to be done. Just when I was almost on the point of doing that something and rendering myself still more ridiculous than I had yet done, he tore himself away.

I did not thrum on the mandolin the next night, you may be sure. I went, instead, to the house on Sutter Street. And the next night, and the next.

It was out of the question was it not?-that she should marry such a man as he? Why, he cannot sleep a wink unless some one plays the mandolin for him or doses him with morphine. What a husband he would have been for her! I am mean enough to reflect that there are plenty of other mandolin players in the State of California, from which he may choose.

Of course I pity him. I can afford to. For the soft-eyed girl is mine. Frank Bailey Millard.

thar. An' quail yuh c 'n hear a screechin' aroun' anywhar. Wil' cats 'n' coyotes don't turn up a missin' nuther. Then there's fine fishin' off'n the rocks, an' all sorts of sea animals 'n' birds a-floatin' 'n' a-flutterin' roun' fur yuh t' look et when yuh git tired. Ef you like aEf you like apickin' shells 'n' purty stones, 'n' Injun relics, yuh 'll get et all thar."

"Really, now, that is fine," said Jeff. "We had better go. I want to show you Californians that an Englishman can shoot. Besides, those Indian relics, When can we start?"

"I say, boss," drawled Hank, with an earnest stare, "y're the best natered Englishman I ever seen. Mos' on 'em would 'a' bin hoppin mad afore this."

Thirty-six hours after, at 6 o'clock, A. M., we were ready to start. Mr. and Mrs. Harker, Elsie, and I, occupied an open carriage, while Jeff and Georgia were on horseback.

On the high seat of a farm wagon sat Hank and his wife. The wife we had engaged, "sight-unseen," on Hank's recommedation, for cook. We knew this was hazardous, but our first impression was a relief, as Uncle John exclaimed,

"She must be a good cook, for God never created any one without some redeeming quality."

"What a figure for my sketch-book," said Georgia. "Cross eyes, crooked mouth, round shoulders, brown skin, and such queer attire. Her name is Marguerite."

"But notice the mass of beautiful curling brown hair," said Jeff.

"And which is more important," added Aunt Minnie, "her dress though queer is clean, and ironed without a wrinkle."

The wagon was loaded with tents, boxes of provisions and cooking utensils, rolls of blankets, bales of hay, sacks of barley, and so forth.

"Wull, I reck'n we hain't forgot nothin',- by jinks, whar's the pups!"

Placing two fingers in his mouth, he sent forth a long, shrill whistle, and around the corner bounded two ordinary looking hounds.

"Are those the best dogs you can get?" inquired Jeff, leaning over with a critical look.

"Ef yuh know any better, bring 'em along," complacently drawled Hank, gathering up his reins.

"O, them's good; they'll bay any deer yuh 'll start," volunteered a bystander.

"I guess so," laughed Hank tormentingly.

Clear, fresh, and sweet, was the morning. A cool,perfumed atmosphere penetrated the senses with soft intensity. The noise of our wheels and hoofs seemed profanity, at an hour when nature had stilled even the breezes, as if listening to the glad morning thrills of the meadow-larks, answered from the tree-tops with carols by many voices. The grass in places was still green, and some belated flowers awaited the sun to open the folded petals. The dew spread as a gauzy covering over all, but was crushed into the dust by the unthinking tread of our horses. The fields of ripening grain seemed covered with an airy down, which was in reality the multitude of sharp spikes on the bearded heads.

On we drove, past broad patches of wild mustard in beautiful canary-colored bloom; fields of new-mown hay; widespreading orchards; the historic Santa Ynez Mission; and then the Santa Ynez River, which we found to be but a little rippling stream, wandering here and there over a broad, sandy bed, which lay between the high banks. It is a mighty, impassable torrent during the winter rains.

The sun grew warm, and we welcomed the forest's thick shade,- long avenues of oaks with branches closed overhead, made more soft and dreamy by the lacelike hangings of pale moss. In their