Ramona | Page 9

and, moreover, precisely the end which Senora Moreno
had had in her own mind from the beginning; but not even Juan Canito
himself suspected its being solely her purpose, and not her son's. As for
Felipe, if any person had suggested to him that it was his mother, and
not he, who had decided that the sheep-shearing would be better
deferred until the arrival of Father Salvierderra from Santa Barbara, and
that nothing should be said on the ranch about this being the real reason
of the postponing, Felipe would have stared in astonishment, and have
thought that person either crazy or a fool.
To attain one's ends in this way is the consummate triumph of art.
Never to appear as a factor in the situation; to be able to wield other
men, as instruments, with the same direct and implicit response to will
that one gets from a hand or a foot,-- this is to triumph, indeed: to be as
nearly controller and conqueror of Fates as fate permits. There have
been men prominent in the world's affairs at one time and another, who
have sought and studied such a power and have acquired it to a great
degree. By it they have manipulated legislators, ambassadors,
sovereigns; and have grasped, held, and played with the destinies of
empires. But it is to be questioned whether even in these notable
instances there has ever been such marvellous completeness of success
as is sometimes seen in the case of a woman in whom the power is an
instinct and not an attainment; a passion rather than a purpose. Between
the two results, between the two processes, there is just that difference
which is always to be seen between the stroke of talent and the stroke
of genius.
Senora Moreno's was the stroke of genius.
II
THE Senora Moreno's house was one of the best specimens to be found
in California of the representative house of the half barbaric, half
elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there by Mexican

men and women of degree in the early part of this century, under the
rule of the Spanish and Mexican viceroys, when the laws of the Indies
were still the law of the land, and its old name, "New Spain," was an
ever-present link and stimulus to the warmest memories and deepest
patriotisms of its people.
It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gayety in it, more
also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen
again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still;
industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out its
century,-- in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is left
standing one such house as the Senora Moreno's.
When the house was built, General Moreno owned all the land within a
radius of forty miles,-- forty miles westward, down the valley to the sea;
forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando Mountains; and good forty
miles more or less along the coast. The boundaries were not very
strictly defined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon
land by inches. It might be asked, perhaps, just how General Moreno
owned all this land, and the question might not be easy to answer. It
was not and could not be answered to the satisfaction of the United
States Land Commission, which, after the surrender of California,
undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the way it
had come about that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor
woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it
looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the claims
based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Fico, her husband's most
intimate friend, was disallowed. They all went by the board in one
batch, and took away from the Senora in a day the greater part of her
best pasture-lands. They were lands which had belonged to the
Bonaventura Mission, and lay along the coast at the mouth of the valley
down which the little stream which ran past her house went to the sea;
and it had been a great pride and delight to the Senora, when she was
young, to ride that forty miles by her husband's side, all the way on
their own lands, straight from their house to their own strip of shore.
No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them
always as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the

least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a
conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the
real bitterness of the