and within a
radius of forty miles,--forty miles westward, down the valley to the
sea; forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando Mountains; and good
forty miles more or less along the coast. The boundaries were not very
strictly defined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon
land by inches. It might be asked, perhaps, just how General Moreno
owned all this land, and the question might not be easy to answer. It
was not and could not be answered to the satisfaction of the United
States Land Commission, which, after the surrender of California,
undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the
way it had come about that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor
woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it
looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the claims
based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Fico, her husband's most
intimate friend, was disallowed. They all went by the board in one
batch, and took away from the Senora in a day the greater part of
her best pasture-lands. They were lands which had belonged to the
Bonaventura Mission, and lay along the coast at the mouth of the valley
down which the little stream which ran past her house went to the sea;
and it had been a great pride and delight to the Senora, when she was
young, to ride that forty miles by her husband's side, all the way on
their own lands, straight from their house to their own strip of shore.
No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always
as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the least
realized that the taking possession of California was not only a
conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the
real bitterness of the surrender was not so much to the empire which
gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up.
Provinces passed back and forth in that way, helpless in the hands of
great powers, have all the ignominy and humiliation of defeat, with none
of the dignities or compensations of the transaction.

Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite of having to acknowledge herself
beaten; but California lost all. Words cannot tell the sting of such
a transfer. It is a marvel that a Mexican remained in the country;
probably none did, except those who were absolutely forced to it.

Luckily for the Senora Moreno, her title to the lands midway in the
valley was better than to those lying to the eas