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The bluejacket nine was still at baseball practice, but the marines were at the far end of the field, too distant to attract particular attention. A third battalion formed and stacked arms in front of the barracks. Presently, without so much as a bugle-note for warning, the two battalions formed, picked up their arms, and defiled out of sight, back of a screen of shade-trees.
The dwellings, as I progressed, became handsome; the negro quarters were less like huts and cattle-sheds; the ripe wheatfields stretched almost to the horizon; the lawns and lanes were lined with ancient shade-trees; there were picturesque gates and lodges; the fences were straight and whitewashed, there were orchards, heavy with crimson apples, where the pumpkins lay beneath, like globes of gold, in the rows of amber corn.
The only beauties of the place, and those unintentional, were the long lines of hand-planted shade-trees, uglified as far as possible with whitewashed trunks and croppy heads, but still lovable, growing, living things. The only building in town with a touch of picturesqueness was the grain elevator.
Its longest streets, High and Broad, bisect the city north and south, and east and west respectively. The uniform width of the former is one hundred feet, and the breadth of the latter is one hundred and twenty feet. Broad Street is planted with four rows of shade-trees for its entire length east of Capitol Square, where it penetrates the fashionable residence district.
I think I never saw a fence come down more quickly, and, as if by magic, a village sprung up, with its streets running north and south beneath those beautiful shade-trees. A crystal stream of pure water ran along in the valley below, which supplied us with water for every purpose. We stayed here two weeks.
Sundown, returning, declined an invitation to come in, and sat on the veranda, smoking cigarettes and making mental note of the exterior details of the hacienda: its garden, shade-trees, corrals, and windmill. Should prosperity smile upon him, he would have a windmill, be Gosh!
There is a mile of open front, showing the cheerful faces of fine residences through handsome shade-trees and over well-kept lawns; but here, where our ferry lands, and where we see the city proper, stoops and kitchens, stove-pipes and stairways, ash-piles and garbage-shoots, are stuck out in contempt of the river's charms and the city's comeliness."
The road, which was to be nicely trenched and gravelled, wound through a variety of shade-trees to the highest point of land, where the view of the house, lawn and lake burst upon the eye of the visitor. When Mr. Curtis was, in after years, complimented by his friends for the taste and artistic skill with which he had laid out his grounds, he always pointed to his wife, saying,
He sat dreaming in the trellised vineries, or wandered with his host along the walks overhung by carefully trimmed shade-trees.
The night, gentle with warm air from the south, surrounded her pleasantly, and the perpetual smoke was thinner. Now that the furnaces of dwelling-houses were no longer fired, life in that city had begun to be less like life in a railway tunnel; people were aware of summer in the air, and in the thickened foliage of the shade-trees, and in the sky.
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