Page:A La California.djvu/37

 Rh was poetry itself; and, beggar that I am, I swung in that hammock, smoked the fragrant cigarritas, and talked of books and poetry and travel in foreign lands, with that fair daughter of the Golden Land, until four o'clock in the afternoon.

I ought to say that I am ashamed of myself; but I am not. I glory in my shame! I would do it again, and think none the less of myself and my fellow-man—and woman—for so doing. And so would you, my reader, or you are no friend of mine,—a blockhead, an idiot, a confirmed misanthrope, or something worse. If you do not sympathize with me in this feeling, drop the book right here, and never take it up again; you and I will not do to travel together.

All earthly things end sometime and somewhere, and my siesta followed the rule. At four o'clock I saddled up old Don Benito, who had been neighing and manifesting his impatience to be off for hours, and, with Linden, rode up a long, winding pathway in the cañon, through the thick, overhanging forest of laurel, madrono, live-oak, tea-oak ceonotus, buckeye, and wild cherry, to the summit of the high hill range, above the valley upon the west. Doves, and pretty, tufted California quail rose up and whirred away into the thickets as we rode along, and rabbits and hares ran before us in the pathway, affording us abundant opportunity for using our guns.

On the summit of the range was a fine wheat-field of two or three hundred acres, and there the birds fairly swarmed. We used our guns until the sport became such no longer, and then threw ourselves