pride, unchallenged by the haughty Spaniard.

Miguel Peralta was happy. He had invited all the officials to attend
the nuptials by the Golden Gate. Venus was in the ascendant. The
red planet of Mars had set, he hoped, forever. The officers and
gentry contemplated a frolicsome ride around the Salinas bend, over
the beautiful passes to Santa Clara valley and the town of Yerba
Buena.

Peralta's marriage was an excuse for general love making. A display
of all the bravery of attire and personal graces of man and maid
was in order.

The soldier drifted into the land of dreams haunted by Juanita
Castro's love-lit eyes and rare, shy smile. No vision disturbed
him of the foothold gained in Oregon by the Yankees. They sailed
past the entrance of San Francisco Bay, on the Columbia, in 1797,
but they found the great river of the northwest. They named it after
their gallant bark, said to be the legal property of one General
Washington of America.

The echoes of Revolutionary cannon hardly died away before the
eagle-guided Republic began to follow the star of empire to the
Occident.

Had the listless mariners seen that obscured inlet of the Golden
Gate, they had never braved the icy gales of the Oregon coast.
Miguel Peralta's broad acres might have had another lord. Bishop
Berkeley's prophecy was infallible. A fatal remissness seemed to
characterize all early foreign adventure on Californian coasts.