I am glad to see this bronze tablet affixed to this noble adobe building. I take it, that when some of the wooden eye-sores that here abound are torn down, in the necessary beautification that should precede 1915, this old historic building--a monument to Spanish chivalry and hospitality--will be spared. We have too few of them left to lose any of them now. And of all buildings in the world, the Presidio army post should guard this one with jealous care, for here was enacted one of the greatest, sweetest, most tragic love stories of the world--a story which is all the Presidio's own, and which it does not have to share with any other army post. To you, men of the army, my appeal ought to be an easy one. You have no desire to escape the soft impeachment that the profession of arms has ever been susceptible to the charms of woman. The relation of Mars to Venus is not simply a legend of history, is founded on no mere mythology--their relationship is as sure as the firmament, and their orbits are sometimes very close together. There is one name that should be the perennial toast of the men of this Presidio. We have just celebrated by a splendid pageant the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Balboa, and we chose for queen of that ceremony a beautiful girl by the name of Conchita. There was another Conchita once, the daughter of the comandante of this Presidio, the bewitching, the beautiful, the radiant Concha Argueello. In this old Presidio she was born. In the old Mission Dolores she was christened. Here, it is told, that in the merry exuberance of her innocent babyhood, she danced instead of prayed before the shrine. In the glory of these sunrises and day-vistas and sunsets, she passed her girlhood and bloomed into womanhood. In this old adobe building she queened it supremely. Here she presided at every hospitality; here she was the leader of every fiesta. To this bay, on the 8th of April, 1806[11], in the absence of her stern old father in Monterey, and while the Presidio was under the temporary command of her brother Luis, there came from the north the "Juno," the vessel of the Russian Chamberlain Rezanov, his secret mission an intrigue of some kind concerning this wonderland, for the benefit of the great Czar at St. Petersburg. He found no difficulty in coming ashore. Father was away. Brother was kind. Besides, the Russian marines looked good, and the officers knew how to dance as only military men know how to dance. The hospitality was Castilian, unaffected, intimate, and at the evenings' dances in this old building their barrego was more graceful than any inartistic tango, and in the teaching of the waltz by the Russians--there was no "hesitation."