Three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination--that which we have already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and the adventurous trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past Sur and Pieoras Blancos. The Valley road turns off at the top of the divide between Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the landward side of the Mission into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara, the Place of Springs. Here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country." Deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no roof but the windy tent of stars. Years since there used to come out of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but I fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded pines. The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos behind, goes south and south, between high trackless hills and the lineless Pacific floor. From the Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and disappear in narrow cañons down which, it is reported, immeasurable redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim, violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. Now and then one ventures in that direction as far as Arbolado, to return prophesying. But the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned possibility. V OLD SPANISH GARDENS Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore. But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of _mañana por la mañana_, was muddily dark, and her moustache--but one does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the mate to it. Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt--have not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?--you did not require the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have danced _la jota_ with Dona Ina Manuelita.