the view of
the long harbor leading from the sea into Valencia, and planted a
rampart of other trees to hide the iron-ore pier, and they sodded the
raw spots where the men had been building, until the place was as
completely transformed as though a fairy had waved her wand above it.

It was to be a great surprise, and they were all--Clay, MacWilliams,
and Langham--as keenly interested in it as though each were preparing
it for his honeymoon. They would be walking together in Valencia when
one would say, "We ought to have that for the house," and without
question they would march into the shop together and order whatever
they fancied to be sent out to the house of the president of the mines
on the hill. They stocked it with wine and linens, and hired a volante
and six horses, and fitted out the driver with a new pair of boots that
reached above his knees, and a silver jacket and a sombrero that was so
heavy with braid that it flashed like a halo about his head in the
sunlight, and he was ordered not to wear it until the ladies came,
under penalty of arrest. It delighted Clay to find that it was only
the beautiful things and the fine things of his daily routine that
suggested her to him, as though she could not be associated in his mind
with anything less worthy, and he kept saying to himself, "She will
like this view from the end of the terrace," and "This will be her
favorite walk," or "She will swing her hammock here," and "I know she
will not fancy the rug that Weimer chose."

While this fairy palace was growing the three men lived as roughly as
before in the wooden hut at the terminus of the freight road, three
hundred yards below the house, and hidden from it by an impenetrable
rampart of brush and Spanish bayonet. There was a rough road leading
from it to the city, five miles away, which they had extended still
farther up the hill to the Palms, which was the name Langham had
selected for his father's house. And when it was finally finished,
they continued to live under the corrugated zinc roof of their office
building, and locking up the Palms, left it in charge of a gardener and
a watchman until the coming of its rightful owners.

It had been a viciously hot, close day, and even now the air came in
sickening waves, like a blast from the engine-room of a steamer, and
the heat lightning played round the mountains over the harbor and
showed the empty wharves, and the black outlines of the steamers, and
the whi