Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/388

 368 ness, in order that, though outside and inside crumble off, there may be a good deal left. Like a number of other things, it stands very well while not assailed; and in this climate it is rarely assailed by violent extremes of temperature.

The typical adobe house of the best class is stuccoed and whitewashed. It is large on the ground, two stories in height, and has verandas. Again, it is of but one story, with an interior court-yard. It has green doors and shutters, and green, turned posts, in what we now call the "Queen Anne style," and it is comfortable and home-like to look at.

One of them contains the first piano ever introduced into California, and the owners are people who made haste to sell out their all at San Francisco and invest it here, in order to reap the greater prosperity which was thought to be waiting upon Monterey. Two old iron guns stand planted as posts at the corners of the dwelling. In front of others are some walks neatly made of the verterbræ of whales, taken by the Monterey Whaling Company. The company is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men, chiefly Portuguese, of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They pursue their avocation from the shore in boats, with plenty of adventure and no small profit.

Monterey, which is now not even a county seat, was the Spanish capital of the province from the time it was thought necessary to have a capital. The missionary father, Junipero Serra, came here from Mexico in the year 1770. It was next a Mexican capital under eleven successive governors. Then it became the American capital, the first port of entry, the scene of the first Constitutional Convention of the State, and an outfitting point for the southern mines. Money in those early days was so