A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters   By: Charles A. Gunnison (1861-1897)

AND

BENICIA'S LETTERS.

BY

CHARLES A. GUNNISON

PRESS OF COMMERCIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY.

TO

THE MOTHER AND SISTERS

OF

EDOUARD STOLTERFOHT,

This Christmas book is offered, to keep in memory sunny winter days, spent in Rostock, Hohen Niendorf bei Kroepelin, and Gross Kussewitz, and with the added hope that Poppendorf bei Bentwish will not forget that I wrote in the house book

You have a gentle cure for parting's pain; It is your German word Aufwiederseh'n.

These are just old fashioned Christmas tales, to be read before an open fire, with a heart full of charity for me. There is no modern realism in them, for every word is a lie, the telling of which has given me the greatest pleasure. I have also stolen a quotation from Hawthorne, which is the best thing in the book, and last I have had the exquisite joy of bloodless murder in killing one of my people. Thus, you see, I need your charity truly, for I have broken deliberately, for your entertainment, Three out of a possible Ten.

CHARLES A. GUNNISON, In the Embarcadero Rd. Palo Alto, Santa Clara. Christmas, 1896.

[Illustration: Scroll]

A Napa Christchild.

I.

An evening sky, broken by wandering clouds, which hastening onward toward the north, bear their rich gifts of longed for rain to the brown meadows, filling the heavens from east to west with graceful lines and swelling bosoms, save, just at the horizon where the sun descended paints a broad, lurid streak of crimson, glowing amid the deepening shadows, a coal in dead, gray ashes.

Darker grows the streak, as a stain of blood, while the clouds about it now assume a purple tinge with gloomier shadings; suddenly in the centre of the lurid field starts out as if that moment born to Earth, with clear, silver light, the Evening Star. The colour slowly fades till all is dead and ashy, and the silver star drops down below the purpled hills, leaving for a moment a soft, trembling twilight; the dense clouds then rolling in between, blot out the last sign of departed day and night is come.

It was Christmas Eve. The winter was late, and rain had fallen during the last few weeks only, so that the fields were just assuming the fresh pea green colour of their new life, and the long, dead grass still standing above the recent growth gave that odd smokey appearance to the hills and mesas, so familiar to all us Californians also in our olive groves. The night, however, was dark and nothing of hills, or mesas, or gray fields, could be seen as the hurrying bands of clouds joined together in one great company, overspreading the whole sky and clothing all in a dreary shroud of blackness.

The little arroyo, which was dry in the summertime, had now risen, increased by last week's tribute to be quite a large stream, tearing noisely among the rocks and over its old courses, giving friendly greetings of recognition to the old water marks and dashing a playful wave now and then about the worn roots of the enormous laurel tree whose branches reached high above and far around.

Beneath the tree's protecting limbs, a little cabin, of roughest workmanship, found shelter from the wind, or shade from the intense heat of summer; the house was built almost entirely of logs, excepting the upper part where boards had been used and through which were cut the three windows which served to light the single room it contained.