Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 2

with dust. Officers from the post,
with cork helmets and white trousers, came across the river and stood
in the broad shadows of adobe door-ways, gaping, and switching their
legs with bamboo canes. "It's magnificent," one seemed to hear them
mutter, "but it isn't war!" Groups of Mexicans stood about, or, selecting
a white wall, leaned against it, as they are apt to do at home, for the
better relief of their swarthy faces and brilliant scarfs; and slowly
moving down the street, stopping occasionally to speak to the various
clusters of men, there went the beneficent if somewhat untidy figure of
the Catholic father, in whose company we had breakfasted, a fat, jolly,
anecdotal inheritor of the mantle of some founder of the Missions. The
sun took absolute and merciless possession of the street. You put your
hand in your pocket for the smoked glass through which you observed
the last eclipse. Everything seemed bleached,--the white buildings, the
yellow road, the eyebrows of the cow-boys.
We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy,
drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry
arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised
to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a
sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it. The country

through which we passed afforded views of superb breadth and a most
interesting and delightful quality. No landscape has in the exact sense
such charm as one in which Nature manifests herself in a large and
simple way: one feels with a thrill that she is about to tell the secret.
The earth lay almost in its nakedness beneath the inane dome of the sky.
But over the large simplicity of form one was soon aware of an
exquisite play of hues. The easy undulations, as they ran off to the
unattainable horizon, were so many waves of delicate and varying color.
There were great sweeps of ochre, of gray, of fresh, light green, pointed
with black dots of live-oak, and traversed by tortuous lines of indigo
where the pecan treed creeks pursued their foiled courses, and troops of
little hills grouped themselves about,--pink, pinkish, purple, purpling
blue, white, as they faded from view like the evanescent cherubs in the
corner of an old master. The hills, however, were little only because the
stretch was so vast; it was really a broad plafond upon which they had
solemnly entered to dance a minuet with the playful shadows of the
clouds. The sky possessed everything. There was so much of it that
existence seemed to have become in a sense a celestial--or at least an
aerial--affair: the world was your balloon.
After the third creek-crossing the road ran straight as an avenue through
a broad, level reach, and we flew along gayly. The little mesquite-trees,
prim, dainty, and delicate, stood about in seeming order, civilizing the
landscape and giving it the air of an orchard; the prairie-dog villages
were thrown into a tumult of excitement by our passage; a
chaparral-cock slipped out of a bush, stared an instant, pulled the string
that lifts his tail and top-knot, and settled down for a race directly under
the horses' feet. We passed the point of a hill, gained a slight rise, and
the ranch was in sight. It must be confessed that it was not in
appearance all that the name might imply,--not the sort of place for
which one starts after having provided one's self with a navy revolver
and a low estimate of the value of human life. It was, in fact, a very
pretty and domestic scene, a little village of half a dozen buildings and
a net-work of white limestone and brush corrals. Shortly I was supping
in a neat little cottage, and endeavoring in the usual way to be
agreeable to some one in muslin. In this modern world we change our
skies, truly, but not--not our bric-a-brac. On the walls of the pretty
dining-room one beheld with rising feeling one's old friends the

Japanese fan and the discarded plate still clinging with the touching
persistence of the ivy to the oak. To be sure, there was a tall half-breed
Indian moving about with the silent agility of the warpath, but he wore
a white apron, and his hideous intention was to fill one's wineglass. If
the longitude had led me to meditate right buffalo's hump, "washed
down" with something coarse and potent enough to justify the phrase, it
was clear that I was painfully behind the stroke of the clock. Life, good
lady, takes an undignified pleasure in arranging these petty shocks to
the expectations, which we soon learn to dismiss with a smile. The cold