Many a person, though, coming a stranger and with a stranger's prejudices into this gentle, lovely Mexican land, would have thought Pancha's love of home quite incomprehensible; for her home, the house in which she dwelt, was not lovely to eyes brought up with a rigorous faith in right angles and the monotonous regularity of American city walls. In point of fact, persons of this sort might have held--and, after their light, with some show of justice--that Pancha's home was not a house at all. Crossing the city of Monterey from west to east is a little valley, the _arroyo_ of Santa Lucia, into which, midway in its passage, comes through another _arroyo_ of a few hundred yards in length the water from the _ojo de agua_--the great spring whereat the Conde's commissioners paused content, and beside which the holy fathers sang songs of praise. Along both banks of these two little valleys grow trees, and canebrakes, and banana groves, and all manner of bushes and most pleasant grass; and in among the bushes and trees, here and there, are little huts of wattled golden cane overlaid with a thatch of brown. And it was in one of these _jacals_, standing a stone's throw below the causeway that crosses the _arroyo_ of the _ojo de agua_, upon the point of land that juts out between the two valleys before they become one, that Pancha was born, and where most contentedly she lived. Over the _jacal_ towered a great pecan tree; and a banana grew graciously beside it, and back of it was a huddle of feathery, waving canes. Truly it was not a grand home, but Pancha loved it; nor would she have exchanged it even for one of the fine houses whose stone walls you could see above and beyond it, showing grayly through the green of the trees. For nearly all the years of her little life the love of the beautiful city of Monterey, of her poor little home that yet was so dear to her, of the good father and mother who had cared for her so well since she came to them from the kind God who sends beautiful children into the world, for her little brother and sister, the twins Antonio and Antonia, who gave a world of trouble,--for they were sad pickles,--but who repaid her by a world of childish lovingness for her care: for nearly all her life long these loves had sufficed to fill and to satisfy Pancha's heart. But within a year now a new love, a love that was stronger and deeper than all of these put together, had come to her and had grown to be a part of her life. And Pancha knew, down in the depths of her heart, that this love had begun on the very first day that her eyes had rested upon Pepe's gallant figure and handsome face--the day when Pepe, having been made captain of a brave company of _contrabandistas_, had come up to Monterey to partake of the Holy Sacrament at Easter, and to be blessed by his old father, and to receive the congratulations of his friends.