conductor; we put our tickets—bought at the neighboring drug store—into a glass box near the door. It is told that on the Main street line it was the custom for the driver on late trips to stop the car, wind the reins around the brake handles, and escort lone lady passengers to their front doors,—so much for leisure and gallantry in old Los Angeles. Even as late as 1890 the car once waited while a lady ran into Mott’s market for her meat!
Sometimes we took the car for Sixth and Pearl and then walked on down to Twelfth, where Aunt Margaret lived for a time. The street was a grass-bordered road and along the west side the footpath followed a zanja (a ditch for water). Mr. H. K. W. Bent, the postmaster, and a man who was in every way a value to the community, had an orange grove here and lived in it. As I passed it I would meditate, not on his high position, (he was my Sunday School superintendent), but on the strange thing I had heard about him. He ate pie for breakfast! That was undoubtedly a taste brought straight from New England. We happened to import a different one; we had doughnuts twice a day every day in the year. His taste, being different, was queer. I guess each family had beans and brown bread at least once a week, with frequent meals of boiled codfish, attended by white sauce and pork scraps.
The trip on the other line was out past vineyards, an occasional house, one of them being the adobe mistakenly called the headquarters of General Fremont,
