A mighty cheer shook the air amidst the thunder of cannon; then another, and another.

Every lip in the room was white.

“What is that?” asked Dona Eustaquia.  Her voice was hardly audible.

“They have raised the American flag upon the Custom-house,” said the herald.

For a moment no one moved; then as by one impulse, and without a word, Dona Modeste Castro and her guests rose and ran through the streets to the Custom-house on the edge of the town.

In the bay were three frigates of twenty guns each.  On the rocks, in the street by the Custom-house and on its corridors, was a small army of men in the naval uniform of the United States, respectful but determined.  About them and the little man who read aloud from a long roll of paper, the aristocrats joined the rabble of the town.  Men with sunken eyes who had gambled all night, leaving even serape and sombrero on the gaming table; girls with painted faces staring above cheap and gaudy satins, who had danced at fandangos in the booths until dawn, then wandered about the beach, too curious over the movements of the American squadron to go to bed; shopkeepers, black and rusty of face, smoking big pipes with the air of philosophers; Indians clad in a single garment of calico, falling in a straight line from the neck; eagle-beaked old crones with black shawls over their heads; children wearing only a smock twisted about their little waists and tied in a knot behind; a few American residents, glancing triumphantly at each other; caballeros, gay in the silken attire of summer, sitting in angry disdain upon their plunging, superbly trapped horses; last of all, the elegant women in their lace mantillas and flowered rebosas, weeping and clinging to each other.  Few gave ear to the reading of Sloat’s proclamation.

Benicia, the daughter of Dona Eustaquia, raised her clasped hands, the tears streaming from her eyes.  “Oh, these Americans!  How I hate them!” she cried, a reflection of her mother’s violent spirit on her sweet face.

Dona Eustaquia caught the girl’s hands and flung herself upon her neck.  “Ay!  California!  California!” she cried wildly.  “My country is flung to its knees in the dirt.”

A rose from the upper corridor of the Custom-house struck her daughter full in the face.

II

The same afternoon Benicia ran into the sala where her mother was lying on a sofa, and exclaimed excitedly:  “My mother!  My mother!  It is not so bad.  The Americans are not so wicked as we have thought.  The proclamation of the Commodore Sloat has been pasted on all the walls of the town and promises that our grants shall be secured to us under the new government, that we shall elect our own alcaldes, that we shall continue to worship God in our own religion, that our priests shall be protected, that we shall have all the rights and advantages of the American citizen—­”