find her still a handsome woman, and very glad to see me.  How we walked the deck together, hour after hour, talking over the old times,—­ the ships, the captains, the crews, the traders on shore, the ladies, the Missions, the southeasters! indeed, where could we stop?  He had sold the Ayacucho in Chili for a vessel of war, and had given up the sea, and had been for years a ranchero. (I learned from others that he had become one of the most wealthy and respectable farmers in the State, and that his rancho was well worth visiting.) Thompson, he said, hadn’t the sailor in him; and he never could laugh enough at his fiasco in San Diego, and his reception by Bradshaw.  Faucon was a sailor and a navigator.  He did not know what had become of George Marsh (ante, pp. 255-258), except that he left him in Callao; nor could he tell me anything of handsome Bill Jackson (ante, p. 104), nor of Captain Nye of the Loriotte.  I told him all I then knew of the ships, the masters, and the officers.  I found he had kept some run of my history, and needed little information.  Old Senor Noriego of Santa Barbara, he told me, was dead, and Don Carlos and Don Santiago, but I should find their children there, now in middle life.  Dona Angustias, he said, I had made famous by my praises of her beauty and dancing, and I should have from her a royal reception.  She had been a widow, and remarried since, and had a daughter as handsome as herself.  The descendants of Noriego had taken the ancestral name of De la Guerra, as they were nobles of Old Spain by birth; and the boy Pablo, who used to make passages in the Alert, was now Don Pablo de la Guerra, a Senator in the State Legislature for Santa Barbara County.

The points in the country, too, we noticed, as we passed them,—­ Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Point Ano Nuevo, the opening to Monterey, which to my disappointment we did not visit.  No; Monterey, the prettiest town on the coast, and its capital and seat of customs, had got no advantage from the great changes, was out of the way of commerce and of the travel to the mines and great rivers, and was not worth stopping at.  Point Conception we passed in the night, a cheery light gleaming over the waters from its tall light-house, standing on its outermost peak.  Point Conception!  That word was enough to recall all our experiences and dreads of gales, swept decks, topmast carried away, and the hardships of a coast service in the winter.  But Captain Wilson tells me that the climate has altered; that the southeasters are no longer the bane of the coast they once were, and that vessels now anchor inside the kelp at Santa Barbara and San Pedro all the year round.  I should have thought this owing to his spending his winters on a rancho instead of the deck of the Ayacucho, had not the same thing been told me by others.