ments later they were still more deeply impressed by the
appearance of their distinguished visitor as he stood erect in the boat
that brought him to shore. In full uniform of dark green and gold
lace, with cocked hat and the splendid order of St. Ann on his breast,
Rezanov was by far the finest specimen of a man the Californians,
themselves of ampler build than their European ancestors, had ever
beheld. Of commanding stature and physique, with an air of highest
breeding and repose, he looked both a man of the great world and an
intolerant leader of men. His long oval face was thin and somewhat
lined, the mouth heavily moulded and closely set, suggestive of sarcasm
and humor; the nose long, with arching and flexible nostrils. His eyes,
seldom widely opened, were light blue, very keen, usually cold. Like
many other men of his position in Europe, he had discarded wig and
queue and wore his short fair hair unpowdered.

It was a singularly imposing but hardly attractive presence, thought
young Arguello, until Rezanov, after stepping on shore and bowing
formally, suddenly smiled and held out his hand. Then the
impressionable Spaniard "melted like a woman," as he told his sister,
Concha, and would have embraced the stranger on either cheek had not
awe lingered to temper his enthusiasm. But Rezanov never made a
stauncher friend than Louis Arguello, who vowed to the last of his days
that the one man who had fulfilled his ideal of the grand seigneur was
he that sailed in from the North on that fateful April morning of 1806.

II

As Rezanov, heading the procession with young Arguello, entered the
wide gates of the Presidio, he received an impression memorably
different from that which led earlier travelers to describe it
inclemently as a large square surrounded by mud houses, thatched with
reeds. It is true that the walls were of adobe and the roofs of tule,
nor was there a tree on the sand hills encircling the stronghold. But
in this early springtime--the summer of the peninsula--the hills showed
patches of verdure, and all the low white buildings were covered by a
network of soft dull green and archaic pink. The Castilian rose, full
and fluted, and of a chaste and penetrating fragrance, hung singly and
in clusters on the pillars of the dwellings, on the barracks and
chapel, from the very roofs; bloomed upon bushes as high as young
trees. The Presidio was as delicately perfumed as a lady's bower, and
its cannon fa