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Rh waves come as gently to the land as if they were in play; and you can ride along with your horse's feet in the water, and the green cliffs almost over your head; and the air off the water is like wine in one's head.”

“Cannot we go there?” she said longingly. “Would it not be safe?”

“I dare not,” he answered regretfully. “Not now, Majella; for on the shore-way, at all times, there are people going and coming.”

“Some other time, Alessandro, we can come, after we are married, and there is no danger?” she asked.

“Yes, Majella,” he replied; but as he spoke the words, he thought, “Will a time ever come when there will be no danger?”

The shore of the Pacific Ocean for many miles north of San Diego is a succession of rounding promontories, walling the mouths of cañons, down many of which small streams make to the sea. These cañons are green and rich at bottom, and filled with trees, chiefly oak. Beginning as little more than rifts in the ground, they deepen and widen, till at their mouths they have a beautiful crescent of shining beach from an eighth to a quarter of a mile long, The one which Alessandro hoped to reach before morning was not a dozen miles from the old town of San Diego, and commanded a fine view of the outer harbor. When he was last in it, he had found it a nearly impenetrable thicket of young oak-trees. Here, he believed, they could hide safely all day, and after nightfall ride into San Diego, be married at the priest's house, and push on to San Pasquale that same night. “All day, in that cañon, Majella can look at the sea,” he thought; “but I will not tell her now, for it may be the trees have been cut down, and we cannot be so close to the shore.”

It was near sunrise when they reached the place.