A Daughter of the Vine. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066129705

Table of Contents

       BOOK I

       I

       II

       III

       IV

       V

       VI

       VII

       VIII

       IX

       X

       XI

       XII

       XIII

       XIV

       XV

       XVI

       XVII

       XVIII

       XIX

       XX

       XXI

       BOOK II

       I

       II

       III

       IV

       V

       VI

       BOOK III

       I

       II

       III

       IV

       V

       VI

       VII

       VIII

       A FRAGMENT

BOOK I

       Table of Contents

I

       Table of Contents

      Two horses were laboriously pulling a carriage through the dense thickets and over the sandhills which in the early Sixties still made an ugly breach between San Francisco and its Presidio. The difficulties of the course were not abridged by the temper of the night, which was torn with wind and muffled in black. During the rare moments when the flying clouds above opened raggedly to discharge a shaft of silver a broad and dreary expanse leapt into form. Hills of sand, bare and shifting, huge boulders, tangles of scrub oak and chaparral, were the distorted features of the landscape between the high far-away peaks of the city and the military posts on the water’s edge. On the other side of the bay cliffs and mountains jutted, a mere suggestion of outline. The ocean beyond the Golden Gate roared over the bar. The wind whistled and shrilled through the rigging of the craft on the bay; occasionally it lifted a loose drift and whirled it about the carriage, creating a little cyclone with two angry eyes, and wrenching loud curses from the man on the box.

      “It’s an unusually bad night, Thorpe, really,” said one of the two occupants of the carriage. “Of course the winters here are more or less stormy, but we have many fine days, I assure you; and they’re better than the summer with its fogs and trade winds—I am speaking of San Francisco,” he added hastily, with newly acquired Californian pride. “Of course it is usually fine in the country at any time. I believe there are sixteen different climates in California.”

      “As any one of them might be better than England’s, it is not for me to complain,” said the other, good-naturedly. “But I feel sorry for the horses and the man. I don’t think we should have missed much if we had cut this ball.”

      “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Life would be suicidal in this God-forsaken country if it were not for the hospitality of the San Franciscans. Some months ago two officers whose names I won’t mention met in a lonely spot on the coast near Benicia Fort, on the other side of the bay, with the deliberate intention of shooting one another to death. They were discovered in time, and have since been transferred East. It is better for us on account of San Francisco—Whew! how this confounded thing does jolt!—and the Randolph parties are always the gayest of the season. Mr. Randolph is an Englishman with the uncalculating hospitality