omar will always bring
delightful recollections of the gracious hospitality of Senor Cave
Coutts, sitting at the head of that table hewed in the forties. Little
did Senor Coutts realize that he, the last of the dons in San Diego
County, was to furnish copy for my novel; that his pride of ancestry,
both American and Castilian, his love for his ancestral _hacienda_ at
the Rancho Guajome, and his old-fashioned garden with the great
Bougainvillea in flower, were the ingredients necessary to the
production of what I trust will be a book with a mission.

When we call again at the Moreno _hacienda_ on the Rio San Luis Rey,
Carolina will not be there to metamorphose her home into a restaurant
and serve us _galina con arroz_, _tortillas_ and _frijoles refritos_.
But if she should be, she will not answer, when asked the amount of the
score: "What you will, _senor_." Ah, no, Mul. Scoundrels devoid of
romance will have discovered her, and she will have opened an inn with
a Jap cook and the tariff will be _dos pesos y media_; there will be a
strange waiter and he will scowl at us and expect a large tip. And
Stephen Crane's brother, the genial judge, will have made his fortune
in the mine on the hill, and there will be no more California wine as a
first aid to digestion.

I had intended to paint the picture that will remain longest in your
memory--the dim candle-light in the white-washed chapel at the Indian
Reservation at Pala, during Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament--the
young Indian Madonna, with her naked baby lying in her lap, while she
sang:

"Come, Holy Ghost, creator blest,
And in my heart take up thy rest."

But the picture was crowded out in the make-up. There was too much to
write about, and I was always over-set! I saw and felt, with you, and
regarded it as more poignantly pathetic, the tragedy of that little
handful of San Luisanos, herded away in the heart of those barren hills
to make way for the white man. And now the white man is almost gone
and Father Dominic's Angelus, ringing from Mission San Luis Rey, falls
upon the dull ear of a Japanese farmer, usurping that sweet valley,
hallowed by sentiment, by historical association, by the lives and
loves and ashes of the men and women who carved California from the
wilderness.

I have given to this book the labor of love. I know it isn't
literature, Mul, but I have joyed in writing it and it has, at least,
the merit of sincerity. It is an expressio