_
Tadeo's _burro_, she peeped over the _burro's_ long ears--at the
place where the road turns suddenly just before it dips to cross the
valley--and caught sight once more of the dome of the cathedral, and
the clock-tower of the market-house, and the old Bishop's palace on
its hill in the far background, with the Mitras rising beyond, and
a flame of red and gold above the Sierra left when the sun went
down,--when Pancha's longing eyes rested once more on all these dear
sights of home, she buried her little face in _tio_ Tadeo's pudgy
shoulder and fairly sobbed for joy.

Many a person, though, coming a stranger and with a stranger's
prejudices into this gentle, lovely Mexican land, would have thought
Pancha's love of home quite incomprehensible; for her home, the house
in which she dwelt, was not lovely to eyes brought up with a rigorous
faith in right angles and the monotonous regularity of American city
walls. In point of fact, persons of this sort might have held--and,
after their light, with some show of justice--that Pancha's home was
not a house at all.

Crossing the city of Monterey from west to east is a little valley,
the _arroyo_ of Santa Lucia, into which, midway in its passage,
comes through another _arroyo_ of a few hundred yards in length the
water from the _ojo de agua_--the great spring whereat the Conde's
commissioners paused content, and beside which the holy fathers sang
songs of praise. Along both banks of these two little valleys grow
trees, and canebrakes, and banana groves, and all manner of bushes and
most pleasant grass; and in among the bushes and trees, here and
there, are little huts of wattled golden cane overlaid with a thatch
of brown. And it was in one of these _jacals_, standing a stone's
throw below the causeway that crosses the _arroyo_ of the _ojo
de agua_, upon the point of land that juts out between the two
valleys before they become one, that Pancha was born, and where most
contentedly she lived. Over the _jacal_ towered a great pecan tree;
and a banana grew graciously beside it, and back of it was a huddle
of feathery, waving canes. Truly it was not a grand home, but Pancha
loved it; nor would she have exchanged it even for one of the fine
houses whose stone walls you could see above and beyond it, showing
grayly through the green of the trees.

For nearly all the years of her little life the love of the beautiful
city of Monterey, of her poor little home that yet was so dear to