When the departing visitors of Judge Peyton, now owner of the rancho, reach the outer plains again, after twenty minutes' drive from the house, the canada, rancho, and avenue have as completely disappeared from view as if they had been swallowed up in the plain.
A cross road from the turnpike is the usual approach to the casa or mansion,--a long, low quadrangle of brown adobe wall in a bare but gently sloping eminence.

And here a second surprise meets the stranger.
He seems to have emerged from the forest upon another illimitable plain, but one utterly trackless, wild, and desolate.

It is, however, only a lower terrace of the same valley, and, in fact, comprises the three square leagues of the Robles Rancho.

Uncultivated and savage as it appears, given over to wild cattle and horses that sometimes sweep in frightened bands around the very casa itself, the long south wall of the corral embraces an orchard of gnarled pear-trees, an old vineyard, and a venerable garden of olives and oranges.

A manor, formerly granted by Charles V.to Don Vincente Robles, of Andalusia, of pious and ascetic memory, it had commended itself to Judge Peyton, of Kentucky, a modern heretic pioneer of bookish tastes and secluded habits, who had bought it of Don Vincente's descendants.