It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gayety in it,
more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be
seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there
still; industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out
its century,-- in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is
left standing one such house as the Senora Moreno's.
When the house was built, General Moreno owned all the land
within a radius of forty miles,-- forty miles westward, down the
valley to the sea; forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando
Mountains; and good forty miles more or less along the coast. The
boundaries were not very strictly defined; there was no occasion,
in those happy days, to reckon land by inches. It might be asked,
perhaps, just how General Moreno owned all this land, and the
question might not be easy to answer. It was not and could not be
answered to the satisfaction of the United States Land
Commission, which, after the surrender of California, undertook to
sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the way it had
come about that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor
woman.
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