and simplicity. Greenery and blooms nodded from without the deep-
embrasured windows, and the room expressed the sense of cleanness,
chastity, and coolness.

On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases--most
ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a
twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked-
stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the
foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain. There were brighter
pictures, of early Mexican-Californian life, a pastel of twilight
eucalyptus with a sunset-tipped mountain beyond, by Reimers, a
moonlight by Peters, and a Griffin stubble-field across which gleamed
and smoldered California summer hills of tawny brown and purple-
misted, wooded canyons.

"Say," Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick
and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter,
"here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the
Big House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to
it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's
a boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me.
That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He's housekeeper, or manager, of
the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job--and, say, it
runs that smooth you can't hear it."

"Forrest's the real wooz," Naismith nodded. "He's the brains that
picks brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even
a three-ring circus."

"Which last is some compliment," Thayer concurred heartily.