Yours respectfully,
CONSTANTINO GARIBALDI.

Unquestionably he has humor. After receiving more or less mixed orders
from me, I have heard him softly singing in the courtyard, "Donna e
mobile." I only regret that as a family we aren't musical enough to
assist with the "Sextette" from "Lucia!"

Ever since we came to California we have been lucky about gardeners. I
don't mean as horticulturists, but from the far more important standard
of picturesqueness. Of course no one could equal Garibaldi with the
romance of a distant relationship to the patriot and the grand manner no
rake or hoe could efface, but Banksleigh had his own interest. He was an
Englishman with pale blue eyes that always seemed to be looking beyond
our horizon into space. There was something rather poetic and ethereal
about him. Perhaps he didn't eat enough, or it may have been the effect
of "New Thought," in one of the fifty-seven varieties of which he was a
firm believer. He told me that his astral colors were red and blue, and
that a phrenologist had told him that a bump on the back of his head
indicated that he ought never to buy mining stock. With the same
instinct that undid Bluebeard's and Lot's wives he had tried it, and
is once more back at his job of gardening with an increased respect
for phrenology.

I have a grudge against phrenologists myself. I had a relative who
went to one when he was a young man, and was told that he had a
wonderful baritone voice that he ought to cultivate. Up to that time
he had only played the flute, but afterwards he sang every evening
through a long life.

It distressed Banksleigh to see me lying about in hammocks on the
verandah. He usually managed to give the vines in my neighborhood extra
attention--like Garibaldi, he was a confirmed pruner. He told me that he
wished I would take up New Thought, and was sure that if I thought
strong I'd be strong. I wonder? One summer, lying in bed in a hospital
where the heat was terrific, I found myself repeating over and over:

"Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting,
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,"

and finding it far more cooling than iced orange juice. Was not I
proving Banksleigh's contention? I was thinking cool and I was cool. In
his own case New Thought seemed to work. He always looked ready to give
up forever, and yet he never did.

California is full of people with queer quirks and they aren't confined
to ga