Meanwhile the light quickened, and gradually disclosed the form and
outline of the adjacent domain. An avenue cut through a park-like
wood, carefully cleared of the undergrowth of gigantic ferns
peculiar to the locality, led to the entrance of the canada. Here
began a vast terrace of lawn, broken up by enormous bouquets of
flower-beds bewildering in color and profusion, from which again
rose the flowering vines and trailing shrubs that hid pillars,
veranda, and even the long facade of a great and dominant mansion.
But the delicacy of floral outlines running to the capitals of
columns and at times mounting to the pediment of the roof, the
opulence of flashing color or the massing of tropical foliage,
could not deprive it of the imperious dignity of size and space.
Much of this was due to the fact that the original casa--an adobe
house of no mean pretensions, dating back to the early Spanish
occupation--had been kept intact, sheathed in a shell of dark-red
wood, and still retaining its patio; or inner court-yard,
surrounded by low galleries, while additions, greater in extent
than the main building, had been erected--not as wings and
projections, but massed upon it on either side, changing its rigid
square outlines to a vague parallelogram. While the patio retained
the Spanish conception of al fresco seclusion, a vast colonnade of
veranda on the southern side was a concession to American taste,
and its breadth gave that depth of shadow to the inner rooms which
had been lost in the thinner shell of the new erection. Its
cloistered gloom was lightened by the red fires of cardinal flowers
dropping from the roof, by the yellow sunshine of the jessamine
creeping up the columns, by billows of heliotropes breaking over
its base as a purple sea. Nowhere else did the opulence of this
climate of blossoms show itself as vividly. Even the Castilian