and “Tags” will live as long as I do—­and yet they are a perfect pest.  If they are outdoors they want to come in, or vice versa.  It is practically impossible to sneak off in the motor without their escort and they bark at my best callers.  Since they made substantial sums of money begging for the Red Cross, they have added a taste for publicity to their other insistent qualities and come into the drawing-room, and sit up in front of whoever may be calling, with a view to sugar and petting.  And the worst of it is I can’t maintain discipline at all.  Rags has had to be anointed with a salve compounded of tar and sulphur.  It is an indignity and quite crushes his spirit, so that after it has been put on he wishes to sit close to me for comfort.  The result is that I become like a winter overcoat just emerging from moth-balls rather than hurt his feelings.  Of course it makes some difference whether the pet that is annoying you belongs to you or a neighbor.  I doubt whether I could have loved Boost, however, even if I had known him from the shell.

In spite of these various drawbacks we led a most happy life.  It was so easy.  The bungalow was so attractively furnished; our own oranges and limes grew at the door.  There was just room for us with nothing to spare, that had to be kept in order, and our landlady was as different from the cold-hearted ones we had known as the bankers and real-estate men.  She seemed to be always trying to think of what we might need, and to provide it.  Dear Miss W——­, she will never be a good business woman from the world’s point of view; she is too generous and too unselfish!  We all loved her.  Many were the hours I inveigled her into wasting while we sat on bales of the goats’ hay and discussed life and the affairs of the country—­but mostly life with its curious twists and turns—­its generosities and its stinginesses.  The boys spent their time in the goat-pen making friends of the little kids, whose various advents added so much interest to the spring, and learning much from Miss W——­, whose attitude towards life was so sane and wholesome for them to know.

“Buckaboo,” the only buck on the ranch when we came, was a dashing young creature, prancing about and kicking up his heels for the pure joy of living.  Joedy informed J——­ that he reminded him of him, “only in a goat way, father”—­a tribute to the light-heartedness that California had already brought to at least one member of the family.

If our Sabine Farm’s vocation was goats, its avocation was surely roses.  We were literally smothered in them.  A Cecil Brunner with its perfect little buds, so heavily perfumed, covered one corner of the house.  The Lady Bankshire, with its delicate yellow blossoms, roofed our porch, and the glorious Gold of Ophir, so thorny and with little fragrance, concealed our laundry from the road.  There was a garden of bush roses of all kinds to cut for the house, and the crowning glory of all was a hedge of “Tausend Schoen,” growing luxuriantly, and a blaze of bloom in May.  After years of illness and worry, it was good to feel life coming back joyously in a kind of haven—­or heaven—­of roses.