ering to her poor Indians, her face alight with
unquenchable memory and with surety of an eventual everlasting tryst.
Those Castilian roses! They perfume forever one's memories of this
pair, puissant in faith, in this novel that is a poem and a shrine of
that love which lives when death itself is dead.

WILLIAM MARION REEDY

REZANOV

I

As the little ship that had three times raced with death sailed past
the gray headlands and into the straits of San Francisco on that
brilliant April morning of 1806, Rezanov forgot the bitter
humiliations, the mental and physical torments, the deprivations and
dangers of the past three years; forgot those harrowing months in the
harbor of Nagasaki when the Russian bear had caged his tail in the
presence of eyes aslant; his dismay at Kamchatka when he had been
forced to send home another to vindicate his failure, and to remain in
the Tsar's incontiguous and barbarous northeastern possessions as
representative of his Imperial Majesty, and plenipotentiary of the
Company his own genius had created; forgot the year of loneliness and
hardship and peril in whose jaws the bravest was impotent; forgot even
his pitiable crew, diseased when he left Sitka, that had filled the
Juno with their groans and laments; and the bells of youth, long still,
rang in his soul once more.

"It is the spring in California," he thought, with a sigh that curled
at the edge. "However," life had made him philosophical; "the moments
of unreasonable happiness are the most enviable no doubt, for there is
neither gall nor satiety in the reaction. All this is as enchanting
as--well, as a woman's promise. What lies beyond? Illiterate and
mercenary Spaniards, vicious natives, and boundless ennui, one may
safely wager. But if all California is as beautiful as this, no man
that has spent a winter in Sitka should ask for more."

In the extent and variety of his travels Rezanov had seen Nature more
awesome of feature but never more fair. On his immediate right as he
sailed down the straits toward the narrow entrance to be known as the
Golden Gate, there was little to interest save the surf and the masses
of outlying rocks where the seals leapt and barked; the shore beyond
was sandy and low. But on his left the last of the northern mountains
rose straight from the water, the warm red of its deeply indented
cliffs rich in harmony with the green of slope and height. There was
not a tree; the mountains, the