An evening sky, broken by wandering clouds, which hastening onward
toward the north, bear their rich gifts of longed-for rain to the brown
meadows, filling the heavens from east to west with graceful lines and
swelling bosoms, save, just at the horizon where the sun descended
paints a broad, lurid streak of crimson, glowing amid the deepening
shadows, a coal in dead, gray ashes.

Darker grows the streak, as a stain of blood, while the clouds about it
now assume a purple tinge with gloomier shadings; suddenly in the centre
of the lurid field starts out as if that moment born to Earth, with
clear, silver light, the Evening Star. The colour slowly fades till all
is dead and ashy, and the silver star drops down below the purpled
hills, leaving for a moment a soft, trembling twilight; the dense clouds
then rolling in between, blot out the last sign of departed day and
night is come.

It was Christmas Eve. The winter was late, and rain had fallen during
the last few weeks only, so that the fields were just assuming the fresh
pea-green colour of their new life, and the long, dead grass still
standing above the recent growth gave that odd smokey appearance to the
hills and mesas, so familiar to all us Californians also in our olive
groves. The night, however, was dark and nothing of hills, or mesas, or
gray fields, could be seen as the hurrying bands of clouds joined
together in one great company, overspreading the whole sky and clothing
all in a dreary shroud of blackness.

The little arroyo, which was dry in the summertime, had now risen,
increased by last week's tribute to be quite a large stream, tearing