In spite of these various drawbacks we led a most happy life. It was so easy. The bungalow was so attractively furnished; our own oranges and limes grew at the door. There was just room for us with nothing to spare, that had to be kept in order, and our landlady was as different from the cold-hearted ones we had known as the bankers and real-estate men. She seemed to be always trying to think of what we might need, and to provide it. Dear Miss W----, she will never be a good business woman from the world's point of view; she is too generous and too unselfish! We all loved her. Many were the hours I inveigled her into wasting while we sat on bales of the goats' hay and discussed life and the affairs of the country--but mostly life with its curious twists and turns--its generosities and its stinginesses. The boys spent their time in the goat-pen making friends of the little kids, whose various advents added so much interest to the spring, and learning much from Miss W----, whose attitude towards life was so sane and wholesome for them to know.
"Buckaboo," the only buck on the ranch when we came, was a dashing young creature, prancing about and kicking up his heels for the pure joy of living. Joedy informed J---- that he reminded him of him, "only in a goat way, father"--a tribute to the light-heartedness that California had already brought to at least one member of the family.
If our Sabine Farm's vocation was goats, its avocation was surely roses. We were literally smothered in them. A Cecil Brunner with its perfect little buds, so heavily perfumed, covered one corner of the house. The Lady Bankshire, with its delicate yellow blossoms, roofed our porch, and the glorious Gold of Ophir, so thorny and with little fragrance, concealed our laundry from the road. There was a garden of bush roses of all kinds to cut for the house, and the crowning glory of all was a hedge of "Tausend Schön," growing luxuriantly, and a blaze of bloom in May. After years of illness and worry, it was good to feel life coming back joyously in a kind of haven--or heaven--of roses.
When Alice stepped through the looking-glass and ran out into that most alluring garden, she must have felt much as I did long ago when I stepped off the Santa Fé Limited and found myself in Southern California for the first time! It isn't just the palm trees and the sunshine, though they are part of the charm. It isn't even the mocking-birds and the orange blossoms altogether. It is something you can't really put your finger on, that lures you from your old habits and associations. At first you are simply glad that you have left the cold and snow behind you, and that the earth is so sweet with flowers, and then you begin to find a new world of possibilities. There are all sorts of little garden gates with golden keys on glass tables, and you set about growing shorter or taller, as the case may be, to make yourself a proper height to reach the key and slip through the door. You don't even need to hurry, if you are firm about not grasping the hand of any Red Queen that may come your way, and yet it isn't a land of mañana; it's a land of "Why Not?" The magic has nothing to do with one's age; I feel it now even more than I did twenty years ago, and Grandmother felt it at eighty just as I did at eighteen. Ulysses could have himself lashed to the mast and snap his fingers at the Sirens, but I know of no protection against the Southwest except to somehow close the shutters of your imagination. However, let me not be a Calvinist; because it is enchanting, why should I fear it?