d to see, was at her
home on the edge of the city. No trouble in finding the place: any one
could direct me. It was a cosy cottage in the midst of a garden and
shaded by thickly leaved trees. Some one was bowed down among the
strawberry beds, busy there; yet the place seemed half deserted and
very, very quiet. Big bamboo chairs and lounges lined the vine-curtained
porch. The shades in the low bay-window were half drawn, and a glint of
sunshine lighted the warm interior. I saw heaps of precious books on the
table in that deep window. There was a mosquito door in the porch, and
there I knocked for admittance. I knocked for a long time, but received
no answer. I knocked again so that I might be heard even in the
strawberry bed. A little kitten came up out of the garden and said
something kittenish to me, and then I heard a muffled step within. The
door opened--the inner door,--and beyond the wire-cloth screen, that
remained closed against me, I saw a figure like a ghost, but a very
buxom and wholesome ghost indeed.

I asked for the hostess. Alas! she was far away and had been ill; it
was not known when she would return. Her address was offered me, and I
thought to write her,--thought to tell her how I had sought out her
home, hoping to find her after years of patient waiting; and that while
I talked of her through the wire-cloth screen the kitten, which she must
have petted once upon a time, climbed up the screen until it had reached
the face of the amiable woman within, and then purred and purred as only
a real kitten can. I never wrote that letter; for while we were chatting
on the porch she of whom we chatted, she who has written a whole armful
of the most womanly and lovable of books, Helen Hunt Jackson, lay dying
in San Francisco and we knew it not. But it is something to have stood
by her threshold, though she was never again to cross it in the flesh,
and to have been greeted by her kitten. How she loved kittens! And now I
can associate her memory with the peacefulest of cottages, the easiest
of veranda chairs, a bay-window full of books and sunshine, and a
strawberry bed alive with berries and blossoms and butterflies and bees.
And yonder on the heights her body was anon laid to rest among the
haunts she loved so dearly.

CHAPTER IV.

A Whirl across the Rockies.

A long time ago--nearly a quarter of a century--California could boast a
literary weekly capable of holding its own with any in the land. This