It was not the recommended, witty, black-eyed Margaret, however, who won the love of Llewellyn, but the oldest girl, tall, blue-eyed Sarah, whose name I bear. She captured his heart, and soon left Maine to go with him the long way, by Panama, to the distant ranch of San Juan. What more natural than when, after a time, brother Jotham returned to his home, he should go over to the neighboring parsonage to bear the greetings of his sister-in-law, Sarah, to her family? It is told that, when upon this errand he met at the gate the lovely Margaret, he lost his heart completely. He never regained it. When he was eighty he told me emphatically that his wife not only had been the most beautiful woman in California, but that she still was. A few months after this meeting Margaret traveled with friends across the Isthmus, and up the coast to San Francisco, there to be met by her sister and taken to San Justo to await her marriage day, which came shortly. She was married in her new home in old San Juan by the minister, Dr. Edwards, who had recently been a missionary among the Choctaw Indians. A letter describing the ceremony tells of the usual preparations, the making of bride’s cake and wedding cake, of putting the finishing touches on the little house, of the arranging of the wedding veil and the gathering in the early evening of the group of friends and relatives, including three little folks that had already come into the different families. The home began immediately, and a few days later a call at the house discovered the bride happy in her house work and doing the first family washing. This wedding ceremony was the first that Dr. Edwards had ever performed for white people, but it is reported to have been so well done that no one would have guessed inexperience. It is to be hoped that his later services in this line were as successful as this one. He was still the minister in San Juan when I was a child and he was wont to entertain me by repeating the Lord’s prayer in Choctaw. The same letter which reports the marriage speaks of the new ranch house that was building and of the hope that it would be ready for occupancy in about two months, which dates the building for me,--early in 1863. Each of the cousins when he married had brought his wife back to the San Justo, where they occupied in common a comparatively small house, which in my childhood was used for the hired men. But children were coming and a larger home was necessary. The men were intimate and congenial, and dreamed of an enlargement and continuation of their associated lives; the income was ample so they proceeded to build them a great house, a communal house, a staunch Maine house, white-painted and green-shuttered, as solid and true today as sixty years ago,--but, alas, now idle. This was the house in which I was born.