r, and he knows all
about the law, and can speak the American language, what chance is there
for us? We can't take care of ourselves any better than the wild beasts
can, my Majella. Oh, why, why did you come with me? Why did I let you?"

After such words as these, Alessandro would throw himself on the ground,
and for a few moments not even Ramona's voice would make him look up. It
was strange that the gentle girl, unused to hardship, or to the thought
of danger, did net find herself terrified by these fierce glooms and
apprehensions of her lover. But she was appalled by nothing. Saved from
the only thing in life she had dreaded, sure that Alessandro lived, and
that he would not leave her, she had no fears. This was partly from
her inexperience, from her utter inability to conceive of the things
Alessandro's imagination painted in colors only too true; but it was
also largely due to the inalienable loyalty and quenchless courage of
her soul,--qualities in her nature never yet tested; qualities of
which she hardly knew so much as the name, but which were to bear her
steadfast and buoyant through many sorrowful years.

Before nightfall of this their first day in the wilderness, Alessandro
had prepared for Ramona a bed of finely broken twigs of the manzanita
and ceanothus, both of which grew in abundance all through the canon.
Above these he spread layers of glossy ferns, five and six feet long;
when it was done, it was a couch no queen need have scorned. As Ramona
seated herself on it, she exclaimed: "Now I shall see how it feels to
lie and look up at the stars at night! Do you recollect, Alessandro,
the night you put Felipe's bed on the veranda, when you told me how
beautiful it was to lie at night out of doors and look up at the stars?"

Indeed did Alessandro remember that night,--the first moment he had ever
dared to dream of the Senorita Ramona as his own. "Yes, I remember it,
my Majella," he answered slowly; and in a moment more added, "That was
the day Juan Can had told me that your mother was of my people; and that
was the night I first dared in my thoughts to say that perhaps you might
some day love me."

"But where are you going to sleep, Alessandro?" said Ramona, seeing that
he spread no more boughs. "You have made yourself no bed."

Alessandro laughed. "I need no bed," he said. "We think it is on our
mother's lap we lie, when we lie on the ground. It is not hard, Majella.
It is soft, and rests one better tha