hanting
face. She was very fond of me, and used to bring me wild cherries which
her brothers had gathered for her. Many a morning I have raised my eyes
from my book, startled by that vision of infant loveliness--for her
step had the still grace of a snow-flake--standing in beautiful silence
by my side.

But the most interesting of all my pets was a widow whom we used to
call the "long woman." When but a few weeks on the journey, she had
buried her husband, who died of cholera after about six hours' illness.
She had come on; for what else could she do? No one was willing to
guide her back to her old home in the States, and when I knew her she
was living under a large tree a few rods from the rancho, and sleeping
at night, with all her family, in her one covered wagon. God only knows
where they all stowed themselves away, for she was a modern Mrs.
Rogers, with "nine small children and one at the breast." Indeed, of
this catechismal number the oldest was but fifteen years of age, and
the youngest a nursing babe of six months. She had eight sons and one
daughter. Just fancy how dreadful! Only one girl to all that boy!
People used to wonder what took me so often to her encampment, and at
the interest with which I listened to what they called her stupid talk.
Certainly there was nothing poetical about the woman. Leigh Hunt's
friend could not have elevated _her_ commonplace into the sublime. She
was immensely tall, and had a hard, weather-beaten face, surmounted by
a dreadful horn comb and a heavy twist of hay-colored hair, which,
before it was cut, and its gloss all destroyed by the alkali, must,
from its luxuriance, have been very handsome. But what really
interested me so much in her was the dogged and determined way in which
she had set that stern, wrinkled face of hers against poverty. She
owned nothing in the world but her team, and yet she planned all sorts
of successful ways to get food for her small, or rather large, family.
She used to wash shirts, and iron them on a chair, in the open air of
course, and you can fancy with what success. But the gentlemen were too
generous to be critical, and as they paid her three or four times as
much as she asked, she accumulated quite a handsome sum in a few days.
She made me think of a long-legged very thin hen scratching for dear
life to feed her never-to-be-satisfied brood. Poor woman! She told me
that she was compelled to allowance _her_ young ones, and that she
seldom gave t