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.

Among these vines, singing from morning till night, hung the
Senora's canaries and finches, half a dozen of each, all of different
generations, raised by the Senora. She was never without a young
bird-family on hand; and all the way from Bonaventura to
Monterey, it was thought a piece of good luck to come into
possession of a canary or finch of Senora 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 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 the tree-tops. On either hand stretched 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 Senora's 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 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