River, which cut Santa Paloma in two. It was a pretty river, a
boiling yellow torrent in winter, but low enough in the summer-time
for the children to wade across the shallows, and shaded all along
its course by overhanging maples, and willows, and oaktrees, and an
undergrowth of wild currant and hazel bushes and blackberry vines.
Across the river was Old Paloma, where dust from the cannery
chimneys and soot from the railway sheds powdered an ugly shabby
settlement of shanties and cheap lodging-houses. Old Paloma was
peppered thick with saloons, and flavored by them, and by the odor
of frying grease, and by an ashy waste known as the "dump." Over all
other odors lay the sweet, cloying smell of crushed grapes from the
winery and the pungent odor from the tannery of White & Company. The
men, and boys, and girls of the settlement all worked in one or
another of these places, and the women gossiped in their untidy
doorways. Above the Carew house and Doctor Brown's, opposite, River
Street came perforce to an end, for it was crossed at this point by
an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender, rounded pickets. In the
middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate, with a smaller gate
for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the shabby,
neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and
weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this
had been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and
forlorn. Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the
last of the sons and daughters had gone away into the world. The
house, furnished just as they had left it, was for sale, but the
years went by, and no buyer appeared; and meantime the garden
flowers ran wild, the lawns were dry and brown, and the fence was
smothered in coarse rose vines and rampant wild blackberry vines.
Dry grass and yarrow and hollow milkweed grew high in the gateways,
and when the village children went through them to prowl, as