post-office, sitting on boxes
by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some
looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various
stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and
the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but no
one addressed him.

They turned aside soon into a broad cross street with no sidewalk,
where the coarse dust was in places ankle deep. Behind them, beyond
the main street, a few groups of yellowing cottonwoods on bare banks
of reddish clay marked the course of the Sacramento; before them the
street faded into a limitless expanse of gravel, thinly dotted in the
distance with dull green oaks, and bounded by long knolls, like
wrinkles in the plain, dark with oaks against the smoky sky of
September--a sky dull blue above, dull gray near the horizon.

Along either side of the street the flimsy wooden houses were set
back, each in its yard, and surrounded by oleanders; sometimes there
would be a few parched roses, a trellis of Madeira-vine, a patch of
carefully nursed grass, often a row of China trees, whose fallen
black seeds stippled the dust--but always the great rosy clumps of
oleanders, glorying in the heat and drought. Every evening after
dinner the owners come out, and stand watering these gardens with hose
and sprinkler, till all along the street there is a murmur like rain
and a smell of damp earth, and here and there through the warm
twilight a glimpse of the white sprays of water; while the families
sit on the porches and doorstep, and gossip and laugh. At this hour,
however, the little gardens and splendid oleanders lay hot and
deserted in the dusty afternoon.

"I haven't till now had time to spare from being anxious to be
interested," Miss Northrop said. "I was rather panic-stricken this
morning, and things were awful, instead of interesting, in proportion
to their newness."

This bit of pathos stiffened Will's manner with the awkwardness of
over-feeling, as he asked: "Now, what can I do for you--Winifred?"

The awkwardness made him more like the school-boy Will; and then, a
familiar face four thousand miles from home seems more familiar than
it really is. Miss Northrop answered confidingly: "I will tell you all
about it, and then you will know what to do. I wrote to Judge
Garvey--some one referred me to him at Sacramento--and asked if I
might teach the school. He wrote back that I might, fixed the day, and
direc