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Updated: May 29, 2025
The dull, red-tiled roofs of the old Spanish adobes gleamed through the green of the pepper-trees, the tips of the tall, straggling blue-gums stood out sharply against the sky, and the twin towers of the old Mission rose in dazzling whiteness above a wilderness of verdure. The friendly faces on the wharf first merged themselves into a blurred mass of moving atoms, then sank into nothingness.
Their mother had come out to her father's home in California to grow strong and well. The sun burned a pink into the blossoms of the oleander hedges, and the wind blew life into the swaying branches of the pepper-trees, but neither seemed to make her any better. After awhile she could not even be carried out to her place in the hammock. Then they sent for Doctor Tremont and the children.
Ebony-trees, cotton-wood, pepper-trees, and palms, were intermixed with tree-ferns, magnolias, white oaks, and willows. Here and there, too, a sunbeam marked out a vast circle of light upon the dark water, and myriads of aquatic insects, gnats, dragon-flies, and butterflies sported in the air or swam over the glittering surface.
There we took a carriage, and at the maddest gallop it ever was my lot to travel we raced up that lovely smooth avenue, between rows of wild pepper-trees which met overhead, to Athens; through Athens at a run, and reached the Acropolis, blown almost to pieces ourselves, and with the horses in a white foam. Up to that time the Acropolis had been but a name to me.
And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him. Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all.
The date of each rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade. Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture.
"I shan't," promised Dorothy. Perhaps no one ever beheld a more strangely assorted group than the one which now walked along the road, through pretty green fields and past groves of feathery pepper-trees and fragrant mimosa.
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