fingers are as dancing points of thought ; she whose feet
upon the sward are Hghter than the soft south wind ;
she whose voice is angels' music singing whence she
came ; she whose charms are crowned by goodness
and sweet, gentle sympathy; such is gentle, virtuou-s
woman.
Spaniards who had wives in Spain were forbidden by King Ferdinand to reside in any of the colonies ; they must go after them. There were no King- Ferdinands to make the men of California bring out their wives. At first wives were few, but houris in abundance came from the uttermost parts of the earth, whose beauty and virginity, like the black-eyed dam- sels of paradise, were, in the eyes of the soiled and solitary Californians, renewable at pleasure. Of these, as the Koran tells of the houris in paradise, each wo- man-worshipper, if he possessed sufficient gold-dust, might have seventy-two. So that for women, the mines became like Torquemada's fabulous Lizard is- lands, a retreat for outcast damsels of every species.
In the cities, particularly, and sometimes in the mines, there were not lacking Aspasias of the superior t3^pe, refined and cultivated women whom sinuous cir- cumstances had driven from the garden of chastity, and whose intellectual attractions were surpassed only by their personal charms. When, however, the young men began to think of making this country their home, they longed for home comforts and happiness, chief among which was a wife. Whereupon they, some of them, marry and are soon led to thank God for the blessing of no children.
How often when deatli's tidings came of a loved one gone, father, mother, wife, or child, has the soli- tary mourner withdrawn from his boisterous compan- ions, retired to the woods or to the hill-side, and there held his lonely funeral. The hope of his life, perhaps, his morning and evening star, that for which he had come hither, the main-spring and motive of all his toil, suddenly destroyed. Oh ! God, is it n
