Chapter I
Background
I was born on a sheep ranch in California, the San Justo, near San Juan Bautista, an old mission town of the Spanish padres, which stands in the lovely San Benito Valley, over the hills from Monterey and about a hundred miles south of San Francisco.
The gold days were gone and the time of fruit and small farms had not yet come. On the rolling hills the sheep went softly, and in vacant valleys cropped the lush verdure of the springtime, or, in summer, sought a scanty sustenance in the sun-dried grasses.
Intrepid men had pushed the railroad through the forbidding barrier of the Sierras, giving for the first time easy access to California, and thus making inevitable a changed manner of life and conditions.
I am a child of California, a grand-child of Maine, and a great-grand-child of Massachusetts. Fashions in ancestry change. When I chose mine straight American was still very correct; so I might as well admit at once that I am of American colonial stock, Massachusetts variety.
Up in the branches of my ancestral tree I find a normal number of farmers, sea-captains, small manufacturers, squires, justices of the peace, and other town officers, members of the general court, privates in the
