Much of this was due to the fact that the original casa--an adobe house of no mean pretensions, dating back to the early Spanish occupation--had been kept intact, sheathed in a shell of dark-red wood, and still retaining its patio; or inner court-yard, surrounded by low galleries, while additions, greater in extent than the main building, had been erected--not as wings and projections, but massed upon it on either side, changing its rigid square outlines to a vague parallelogram.

While the patio retained the Spanish conception of al fresco seclusion, a vast colonnade of veranda on the southern side was a concession to American taste, and its breadth gave that depth of shadow to the inner rooms which had been lost in the thinner shell of the new erection.

Its cloistered gloom was lightened by the red fires of cardinal flowers dropping from the roof, by the yellow sunshine of the jessamine creeping up the columns, by billows of heliotropes breaking over its base as a purple sea.

Nowhere else did the opulence of this climate of blossoms show itself as vividly.

Even the Castilian roses, that grew as vines along the east front, the fuchsias, that attained the dignity of trees, in the patio, or the four or five monster passion-vines that bestarred the low western wall, and told over and over again their mystic story--paled before the sensuous glory of the south veranda.
As the sun arose, that part of the quiet house first touched by its light seemed to waken.