And lapped by cloudland's misty foam, Some throned in heaven's serenest smiles, 35 I love midsummer uplands, free I love midsummer sunsets, rolled SWEETHEART, GOOD-BYE! A SONG Sweetheart, good-bye! Our varied day 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 5 HELEN HUNT JACKSON (1831-1885) Helen Hunt Jackson, or 'H. HI.' 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 Indiau.' 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 away. 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 if Spanish maiden, Ramona. THE SENORA MORENO 1 5 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 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 United States Land Commission, which. after the surrender of California, undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land 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 1 Publication permitted by Little, Brown & Co., owners of the copyright. 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 10 lines of sadness, resentment, anxiety, and antagonism deepened on the Señora's fast aging face. titles; and that was the way it had come about that the Señora Moreno now called herself a poor woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the claims based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Pico, her husband's most intimate friend, was disallowed. They all went by the board in one batch, and took away from the Señora in a day the greater part of her best pasture-lands. They were lands which had belonged to the Bonaventura Mission, and lay along the coast at the mouth of the valley down which the lit; 15 tle stream which ran past her house went to the sea; and it had been a great pride and delight to the Señora, when she was young, to ride that forty miles by her husband's side, all the way on their own 25 lands, straight from their house to their own strip of shore. No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the 25 least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the real bitterness of the surrender was not so much to the empire 30 which gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up. Prov inces passed back and forth in that way, helpless in the hands of great powers, have all the ignominy and humiliation of 35 defeat, with none of the dignities or compensations of the transaction. Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite of having to acknowledge herself beaten ; but California lost all. Words cannot tell 40 the sting of such a transfer. It is a marvel that a Mexican remained in the country; probably none did, except those who were absolutely forced to it. 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 55 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. 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. She 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, outstretched 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 |