Page:Dawn and the Dons.pdf/116



In all the annals of time, there is no record of a situation like that in California during the forty years of pastoral peace from 1781 to 1821. The hardships of that earlier decade were soon forgotten; the trials of travel by sea and by land quickly faded from memory; Arcadian content descended upon this distant land of perpetual springtime, and the curtain of isolation hid from a happy people the turmoil and strife of other lands.

To them it mattered not at all that a young military genius from Corsica fought his way to the throne of France, made war on the rest of Europe, rose to the zenith of kingly power, made and unmade kings and princes, and aroused all Europe to sanguinary conflict. In the lotus-land of California, a carefree people, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” lived in peaceful quiet while the new-born United States engaged in old-