It was what grandfather called a “notable housewife” that undertook the rehabilitation of that wreck of a house. Gradually as the young couple got ahead improvements were made, each one to be rejoiced in and enthused about by the interested visiting relatives. I remember when certain doors were cut, when the windows were enlarged, when the first lawn went in, when two fuchsia bushes were brought from Los Angeles, (one of them is still in its place, bravely blossoming), and a rare yellow calla. Aunt Susan took care of the chickens, with the privilege of spending all her returns for books; great was the occasion when a big stuffed armed chair could be purchased for the young head of the family. Little by little changes were made in the building itself, that added to both its comfort and its charm. One of the first was the building of a high tank with its cool house underneath which has served more than forty years for the storing of food; only recently a self-icing refrigerator has come to its aid. To supply this tank with water a busy ram down by the spring, over-hung with willows and decked with water hyacinths, steadily chug-chugged its days and nights away. A bath room shortly followed, its installation holding the excited imagination of the children; a little later the house sprouted a wing, containing two bedrooms, “No. 1” and “No. 2,” and the moving of dining room and kitchen three times marked the expansion of the home. The growing habits of the place persist; it is alive. Each time I go back I find some new thing, now a garden, now a modern heating plant skillfully contrived to circumvent the cellarless condition and massive walls, last of all a cactus garden boasting some imported sand to simulate a desert, but crying out for rocks and stones, which are not to be found in adobe soil. The vision and industry of one little woman made from the dilapidated pile of mud bricks one of California’s most charming homes, whose generous hospitality, continued by her son and his wife, have made the old place widely known. It is a rare thing in this new country to find a house that has been occupied continuously by one family for almost fifty years. In contrast to this ranch house the one at Cerritos has fallen from its high estate and is now but a shell of its old self. It has long been deserted and has been kept in repair only sufficient to prevent its meeting the fate of neglected adobes, that of melting away under the winter rains. Little do the many people who daily pass it on their way to Long Beach dream of its former beauty, its gay and busy life. Don Juan Temple planned and built it about 1844. For it he imported bricks from the East, shipping them around the Horn. They were used in the foundation of the house, for paving two long verandas, for marking off the garden beds, and for lining a sixty-foot well and building a large cistern.