Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
than her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the
surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her
noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
about the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman. She
was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
and turned our red canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
number.
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