Hardy men from the West and South are taking up lands. Cool traders are buying great tracts. Temporary officials have eager eyes fixed on the Mexican grants. At all the landings and along the new roads, once trails, little settlements are springing up, for your unlucky argonaut turns to the nearest avocation; inns, stables, lodging-houses and trading-tents are waited on by men of every calling and profession. Each wanderer turns to the easiest way of amassing wealth. The settlers must devise all their own institutions. The Mexicans idly wrap their serapes around them, and they avoid all contact with the hated foreigner. Beyond watching their flocks and herds, they take no part in the energetic development. Cigarito in mouth, card playing or watching the sports of the mounted cavaliers are their occupations. Dismounted in future years, these queer equestrian natures have never learned to fight the battle of life on foot. The law of absorption has taken their sad, swarthy visages out of the social arena. The cavalcade of Southerners sweeps over the alamedas. They dash across the Salinas and up to wooded Monterey. There the first constitutional convention assembles. Their delighted eyes have rested on the lovely Santa Cruz mountains, the glorious meadows of Santa Clara, and the great sapphire bay of Monterey. The rich Pajaro and Salinas valleys lie waiting at hand. Thinking also of the wondrous wealth of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, of the tropical glories of Los Angeles, Philip Hardin cries: "Gentlemen, this splendid land is for us! We must rule this new State! We must be true to the South!" To be in weal and woe "true to the South" is close to the heart of every cavalier in Philip Hardin's train. The train arrives at Monterey, swelled by others faithful to that Southern Cross yet to glitter on dark fields of future battle. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo closed a bloody Conflict on February 2, 1848. It is the preamble to a long struggle. It is destined in the West to be bloodless until the fatal guns trained on Fort Sumter bellow out their challenge to the great Civil War. It is only then the mighty pine will swing with a crash against the palm. Hardin knows that recruits, true of blood, are hastening to the new land of El Dorado. As he leads his dauntless followers into Monterey his soul is high. He sees the beloved South sweeping in victory westward as proudly as her legions rolled over the fields of Monterey and Buena Vista.