It was a singularly imposing but hardly attractive
presence, thought young Arguello, until Rezanov,
after stepping on shore and bowing formally, sud-
denly smiled and held out his hand. Then the im-
pressionable Spaniard "melted like a woman," as
he told his sister, Concha, and would have embraced
the stranger on either cheek had not awe lingered
to temper his enthusiasm. But Rezanov never made
a stauncher friend than Louis Arguello, who vowed
to the last of his days that the one man who had
fulfilled his ideal of the grand seigneur was he that
sailed in from the North on that fateful April
morning of 1806.



II

As Rezanov, heading the procession with young
Arguello, entered the wide gates of the Presidio, he
received an impression memorably different from
that which led earlier travelers to describe it in-
clemently as a large square surrounded by mud
houses, thatched with reeds. It is true that the walls
were of adobe and the roofs of tule, nor was there
a tree on the sand hills encircling the stronghold.
But in this early springtime--the summer of the
peninsula--the hills showed patches of verdure, and
all the low white buildings were covered by a net-