HELEN HUNT JACKSON (1831-1885) Helen Hunt Jackson, or 'H. H.' as she was long known to magazine readers, was the daughter of Professor Fiske of Amherst College, and her early years, as was the whole life of her contemporary and neighbor Emily Dickinson,― were passed in the academic atmosphere of the old New England college town. The second period of her life was domestic. She married Captain Edward B. Hunt of the United States army, and, happy in her home and her children, had no thought of a literary career. Then came her tragedy: her husband was killed in an accident, her children died shortly afterwards, and she was left alone. Then began the third period of her life. She turned to poetry to voice her emotions, and under the signature ‘H. H.' sent forth her cries of bereavement, of helplessness, of resignation. Her first volume, Poems, appeared in 1870, and from that time she gave herself wholly to literary work. In prose she put forth series after series of 'Bits of Talk' papers, she wrote on travel, she turned at length to fiction and was the author of the much-speculated-upon Saxe Holm's stories of the seventies. So voluminous and versatile was she that Dr. Holland at one time contemplated an issue of Scribner's, Monthly made up wholly of her contributions. Her later years were connected with the West. She married William S. Jackson, a banker of Colorado Springs, and, visiting California, became intensely interested in the wrongs that had been done the Indian. She was appointed by the Government to investigate the condition of the Mission Indians and at length made a report. She made use of her material for a telling book A Century of Dishonor, 1881, and three years later she followed it with Ramona, a romance, which she intended to be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Indian.' The book is her one contribution to American literature that is destined at all to survive. It came hot from her sympathies and her convictions, and, unlike the most of her other fiction, it has 'bite' and life and convincingness. Her problem is concealed in her picturesque material, the romantic mission lands of Southern California at the moment when the old Spanish règime was passing She is at her best when painting pictures of such Spanish survivals as the old Mission Priest, and the last of the old line of Spanish Grandees, Señora Moreno, and the half Indian half Spanish maiden, Ramona. away. THE SENORA MORENO1 The Señora Moreno's house was one of the best specimens to be found in California of the representative house of the half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there by Mexican men and women of degree in the early part of this century, under the rule of the Spanish and Mexican viceroys, 10 when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land, and its old name, 'New Spain,' was an ever-present link and stimulus to the warmest memories and deepest patriotisms of its people. there still; industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out its century, in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is left standing one such 5 house as the Señora Moreno's. When the house was built, General Moreno owned all the land within a radius of forty miles,- forty miles westward, down the valley to the sea; forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando Mountains; and a good forty miles more or less along the coast. The boundaries were not very strictly defined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon land 15 by inches. It might be asked, perhaps, just how General Moreno owned all this land, and the question might not be easy to answer. It was not and could not be answered to the satisfaction of the It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers 20 United States Land Commission, which, 1 Publication permitted by Little, Brown & Co., owners of the copyright. after the surrender of California, undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land never feel secure of a foot of even this. Any day, she said, the United States Government might send out a new Land Commission to examine the decrees of the 5 first, and revoke such as they saw fit. Once a thief, always a thief. Nobody need feel himself safe under American rule. There was no knowing what might happen any day; and year by year the titles; and that was the way it had come Señora in a day the greater part of her Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite Luckily for the Señora Moreno, her 45 title to the lands midway in the valley was better than to those lying to the east and the west, which had once belonged to the missions of San Fernando and Bonaventura; and after all the claims, counter- 50 claims, petitions, appeals, and adjudications were ended, she still was left in undisputed possession of what would have been thought by any new-comer into the country to be a handsome estate, but which seemed to the despoiled and indignant Señora a pitiful fragment of one. Moreover, she declared that she should antagonism deepened on the Señora's fast aging face. It gave her unspeakable satisfaction, when the Commissioners, laying out a road down the valley, ran it at the back of her house instead of past the front. 'It is well,' she said. Let their travel be where it belongs, behind our kitchens; and no one have sight of the front doors of our houses, except friends who have come to visit us.' Her enjoyment of this never flagged. Whenever she saw, passing the place, wagons or carriages belonging to the hated Americans, it gave her a distinct thrill of pleasure to think that the house turned its back on them. She would like always to be able to do the same herself; but whatever she, by policy or in business, might be forced to do, the old house, at any rate, would always keep the attitude of contempt,- its face turned away. One other pleasure she provided herself with, soon after this road was opened, a pleasure in which religious devotion and race antagonism were so closely blended that it would have puzzled the subtlest of the priests to decide whether her act were a sin or a virtue. She caused to be set up, upon every one of the soft rounded hills which made the beautiful rolling sides of that part of the valley, a large wooden cross; not a hill in sight of her house left without the sacred emblem of her faith. That the heretics may know, when they go by, that they are on the estate of a good Catholic,' she said, and that the faithful may be reminded to pray. There have been miracles of conversion wrought on the most hardened by a sudden sight of the Blessed Cross.' There they stood, summer and winter, rain and shine, the silent, solemn, out55 stretched arms, and became landmarks to many a guideless traveler who had been told that his way would be by the first turn to the left or the right, after of San Luis Obispo Mission, stood in close rows against the walls, and in them were always growing fine geraniums, carnations, and yellow-flowered musk. 5 The Señora's passion for musk she had inherited from her mother. It was so strong that she sometimes wondered at it; and one day, as she sat with Father Salvierderra in the veranda, she picked passing the last one of the Señora Moreno's crosses, which he could n't miss seeing. And who shall say that it did not often happen that the crosses bore a sudden message to some idle heart journeying by, and thus justified the pious half of the Senora's impulse? Certain it is, that many a good Catholic halted and crossed himself when he first beheld them, in the lonely places, standing out in 10 a handful of the blossoms, and giving sudden relief against the blue sky; and if he said a swift short prayer at the sight, was he not so much the better? The house was of adobe, low, with a 15 wide veranda on the three sides of the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which looked to the south. These verandas, especially those on the inner court, were supplementary 20 rooms to the house. The greater part of the family life went on in them. Nobody stayed inside the walls, except when it was necessary. All the kitchen work, except the actual cooking, was done here, 25 in front of the kitchen doors and windows. Babies slept, were washed, sat in the dirt, and played, on the veranda. The women said their prayers, took their naps, and wove their lace there. Old Juanita 30 shelled her beans there, and threw the pods down on the tile floor, till towards night they were sometimes piled up high around her, like corn-husks at a husking. The herdsmen and shepherds smoked there, lounged there, trained their dogs there; there the young made love, and the old dozed; the benches, which ran the entire length of the walls, were worn into hollows, and shone like satin; the 40 tiled floors also were broken and sunk in places, making little wells, which filled up in times of hard rains, and were then invaluable addition to the children's resources for amusement, and also to the 45 comfort of the dogs, cats, and fowls, who picked about among them, taking sips from each. them to him, said, 'I do not know why it is, but it seems to me if I were dead I could be brought to life by the smell of musk.' 'It is in your blood, Señora,' the old monk replied. When I was last in your father's house in Seville, your mother sent for me to her room, and under her window was a stone balcony full of growing musk, which so filled the room with its odor that I was like to faint. But she said it cured her of diseases, and without it she fell. You were a baby then.' 'Yes,' cried the Señora, but I recollect that balcony. I recollect being lifted up to a window, and looking down into a bed of blooming yellow flowers; but I did not know what they were. How strange!' 'No. Not strange, daughter,' replied Father Salvierderra. 'It would have been stranger if you had not acquired the taste, thus drawing it in with the mother's milk. It would behoove mothers to remember this far more than they do.' Besides the geraniums and carnations and musk in the red jars, there were many sorts of climbing vines, some coming from the ground, and twining around the pillars of the veranda; some growing in great bowls, swung by cords from the roof of the veranda, or set on shelves against the walls. These bowls were of gray stone, hollowed and polished, shining smooth inside and out. They also had been made by the Indians, nobody knew how many ages ago, scooped and polished by the patient creatures, with only stones for tools. The arched veranda along the front was a delightsome place. It must have been 50 eighty feet long, at least, for the doors of five large rooms opened on it. The two westernmost rooms had been added on, and made four steps higher than the others; which gave to that end of the 55 Señora. She was never without a young veranda the look of a balcony, or loggia. Here the Señora kept her flowers; great red water-jars, hand-made by the Indians Among these vines, singing from morning till night, hung the Señora's canaries and finches, half a dozen of each, all of different generations, raised by the bird-family on hand; and all the way from Bonaventura to Monterey, it was thought a piece of good luck to come into posses sion of a canary or finch of Señora Moreno's raising. Between the veranda and the river meadows, out on which it looked, all was garden, orange grove, and almond orchard; the orange grove always green, never without snowy bloom or golden fruit; the garden never without flowers, summer or winter; and the almond orchard, in early spring, a fluttering to canopy of pink and white petals, which, seen from the hills on the opposite side of the river, looked as if rosy sunrise clouds had fallen, and become tangled in ing by the faithful old sacristan of San Luis Rey, at the time of the occupation of that Mission by the United States troops, soon after the conquest of Cali5 fornia. Aghast at the sacrilegious acts of the soldiers, who were quartered in the very church itself, and amused themselves by making targets of the eyes and noses of the saint's statues, the sacristan, stealthily, day by day and night after night, bore out of the church all that he dared to remove, burying some articles in cottonwood copses, hiding others in his own poor little hovel, until he had the tree-tops. On either hand stretched 15 wagonloads of sacred treasures. Then, away other orchards,- peach, apricot, pear, apple, pomegranate; and beyond these, vineyards. Nothing was to be seen but verdure or bloom or fruit, at whatever time of year you sat on the Señora's 20 south veranda. A wide straight walk shaded by a trellis so knotted and twisted with grapevines that little was to be seen of the trellis wood-work, led straight down from 25 the veranda steps, through the middle of the garden, to a little brook at the foot of it. Across this brook, in the shade of a dozen gnarled old willow-trees, were set the broad flat stone washboards on 30 which was done all the family washing. No long dawdling, and no running away from work on the part of the maids, thus close to the eye of the Señora at the upper end of the garden; and if they had known how picturesque they looked there, kneeling on the grass, lifting the dripping linen out of the water, rubbing it back and forth on the stones, sousing it, wringing it, splashing the clear water 40 in each other's faces, they would have been content to stay at the washing day in and day out, for there was always somebody to look on from above. Hardly a day passed that the Señora had not visit- 45 ors. She was still a person of note; her house the natural resting-place for all who journeyed through the valley; and whoever came, spent all of his time, when not eating, sleeping, or walking over the 50 place, sitting with the Señora on the sunny veranda. Few days in winter were cold enough, and in summer the day must be hot indeed to drive the Señora and her friends indoors. There stood on the.55 veranda three carved oaken chairs, and a carved bench, also of oak, which had been brought to the Señora for safe keep still more stealthily, he carried them, a few at a time, concealed in the bottom of a cart, under a load of hay or of brush, to the house of the Señora, who felt herself deeply honored by his confidence, and received everything as a sacred trust, to be given back into the hands of the Church again, whenever the Missions should be restored, of which at that time all Catholics had good hope. And so it had come about that no bedroom in the Señora's house was without a picture or a statue of a saint or of the Madonna; and some had two; and in the little chapel in the garden the altar was surrounded by a really imposing row of holy and apostolic figures, which had looked down on the splendid ceremonies of the San Luis Rey Mission, in Father Peyri's time, no more benignly than they now did on the humbler worship of the Señora's family in its diminished estate. That one had lost an eye, another an arm, that the once brilliant colors of the drapery were now faded and shabby, only enhanced the tender reverence with which the Señora knelt before them, her eyes filling with indignant tears at thought of the heretic hands which had wrought such defilement. Even the crumbling wreaths which had been placed on some of these statues' heads at the time of the last ceremonial at which they had figured in the Mission, had been brought away with them by the devout sacristan, and the Señora had replaced each one, holding it only a degree less sacred than the statue itself. This chapel was dearer to the Señora than her house. It had been built by the General in the second year of their married life. In it her four children had been christened, and from it all but one, |