the eyes of competitors, and unostentatious merit
passed unnoticed ; great men, if success can be called
greatness, were too near their beginning to inspire
that respect necessary to the formation of an aris-
tocracy in social circles. There were here no old
families whose merit, wealth, or respectability had
long helfl their neighbors in esteem, though there
were the beginnings of many such.
Woman played her part in early California annals, her influence being abnormal as much by reason of its absence as its presence. For the absence of women had a strange effect upon the men, although they themselves were scarcely aware of it. Religion they could do well enough without, while dwelling for a time in this wilderness, but that their life should be limited to a community of men was indeed a new ex- perience. It was like a void in nature, something dropped out of their existence.
After all, which condition was the harder: her's whose smile dissembled the sinking heart on parting ; her's whose brave words belied the glistening tear that hung trembling on the droopmg eyelid ; hers whose lot it was, all through the cold winter with him away, to fight the hunger-wolf that prowled about the door, and keep her little ones from freezing, or his who abandons all for the hope of getting gold?
There is but one thing this side of heaven lovelier than the form and face of woman, and that is her heart-bloom. Fed by the veiled virtues, the poetic courtesies, the delicate influences and affections, with all the tender sacrifices locked within, it fills the at- mosphere with its fragrance, redeems man from him- self, and makes a paradise of what were otherwise a barren waste. A thing in some form desired by all men, she whose heart beats true to the coming and going of her friends ; she whose brain was all ablaze with ten thousand tender fantasies ; she through whose eyes one sees her heaven-lit soul i she whose deft
