were felicitous, and as unchangeable as the everlasting hills;
Florence went over to the enemy; and Alfred, laughing at
Madeline's protest, declared the cowboys had elected her queen of
the ranges, and that there was no help for it. So the name stood
"Her Majesty's Rancho."

The April sun shone down upon a slow-rising green knoll that
nestled in the lee of the foothills, and seemed to center bright
rays upon the long ranch-house, which gleamed snow-white from the
level summit. The grounds around the house bore no semblance to
Eastern lawns or parks; there had been no landscape-gardening;
Stillwell had just brought water and grass and flowers and plants
to the knoll-top, and there had left them, as it were, to follow
nature. His idea may have been crude, but the result was
beautiful. Under that hot sun and balmy air, with cool water
daily soaking into the rich soil, a green covering sprang into
life, and everywhere upon it, as if by magic, many colored
flowers rose in the sweet air. Pale wild flowers, lavender
daisies, fragile bluebells, white four-petaled lilies like
Eastern mayflowers, and golden poppies, deep sunset gold, color
of the West, bloomed in happy confusion. California roses,
crimson as blood, nodded heavy heads and trembled with the weight
of bees. Low down in bare places, isolated, open to the full
power of the sun, blazed the vermilion and magenta blossoms of
cactus plants.

Green slopes led all the way down to where new adobe barns and
sheds had been erected, and wide corrals stretched high-barred
fences down to the great squares of alfalfa gently inclining to
the gray of the valley. The bottom of a dammed-up hollow shone