garden was so far cared for that it was watered, and the palms and aloes and fig-trees had reached a mighty growth; but its paths were weed-grown, and the statues and urns raised by its original owners lay overturned in the rank grass.
The house itself, dropping fast into peeling, unpainted decay, was commodious, with the high, airy rooms that were built in the days when all Californians seemed to be prosperous, and space was not too valuable to be sacrificed to comfort. The rooms still showed traces of their fine beginnings. There were exceedingly bad and elaborate frescos on the lofty ceilings of the lower floor, and great mirrors incased in gold moldings crowned the mantelpieces. In the musty, unaired parlors, where the puckered inside shades of faded silk were always down to keep the sun from revealing the threadbare secrets of the pale old carpets and the frayed satin arm-chairs, the colonel felt as if he were having a nightmare of the old days. It was all so like in its largeness, its rich stiffness, its obvious expensiveness, but so terribly unlike in its stuffy, squalid, unclean penury.
In the evening at dinner they met their fellow-boarders. The wide dining-room, with long windows opening on one of the many balconies that projected from the walls, showed the same frescos, the same pale, rose-strewn
