Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-06-08
BY KATHLEEN NORRIS

So Philip and Abigail had signaled a
shallop he had rowed them
too, and had unconsciously affected her
parents destinies thereby.
For letters had gene to Boston on
that ship and letters four months later
somehow had struggled overland in
answer. The respective families Of
Abigail and Philip had been perfectly
delighted at their venture and wrote
that they were certainly ehvious of the
jewellers in a country where there were
no snow, no thunderstorms and no
poverty. They said they were having
a terrible Winter and that Abigail'S
father had shut himself up in the attic
for nine days after hearing Of the fate
of the Abby Baldwin.
Philips brother Silas and Abigail's
brother Adoniram had been so fired
with enthusiasm that they had sold out
their interest in the family. shoe bust
ness and were now on their way to ST.
Joe hoping to join a caravan, and
Philips aged mother, a blue-nosed
crepe-clad widow'of At, who was sink
ing rapidly to her grave, as her years
beseemed, had sent a message to the
effect that she was coming, too, soon'3
she could get rid CT Sans place.
This had somewhat flattered and
somewhat dashed the Western branch
of the family, but they had been more
pleased than otherwise and had at
once assumed the complacency of those
whose judgment is justified.
In due course the 400 acres became
1000 acres, and the Is head of cattle
that of many hundred head. The
pioneers became 1.-The lucky Law
rences." Brothers, cousins, old mother,
old father, they flourished and waxed
fat. Abigail bore eight daughters and
a son, and the girls all married during
the late sixties and early seventies, in
a land in which women were still rare
and priced.
San Francisco grew like mushroom
and Philip might have opened a thou
sand doors to great wealth had he been
a man to see. But he closed one after
the other with his own hand and went
blindly on in an infatuation of salts
faction with his rolling acres, his miles
of fruit trees, the growing family over
which he ruled supreme.
Some of the girls went East when
they married, some lived in San Fran
cisco or Stockton, some died. 1t was
not salubrious day for pioneer women,
with one out of every seven dying in
childbirth. Some were poor, opening
boarding houses, scrimping in lonely
cross-road villages.
But no one of them ever forgot that
she was lucky Lawrence and belonged
to distinguished New England family.
They boarded mahogany and lace and
yellowed old glass berry bowls; they
sent back to Boston for faded primitive
paints; they talked necessarily Of the
significant fact that the Lawrences had
not come to California as pioneers. Oh,
dear, no! Mother Lawrence had come
to San Francisco harbor on her we'd
ding trip, on one of Grandfather Bald
wins own trading ships.
The one son, Patterson Lawrence,
duly married. too, and lived in the
house with which his parents had re-
placed the old adobe hacienda. The
place for hides and ropes and farm ma
chinery. The new house stood 800 feet
nearer the highway and was reached
by long lane of poplars and euca-
lyptus.
Abigail, and after her her daughter
in-law, in their fervor to encourage
shade in that hot, dry country, planted
eve. ything upon which they could put
their hands, close to the house. They
did not foresee that the pampas grass
and the verbena trees, the peppers and
roses and evergreens would grow closer,
thicker, darker every year. Eventually
the pretentious old frame building with
its scallops Of mill work and its bay
windows, its cupola and balustraded
roof, was caught tightly in dusty, heavy
LEAKAGE, and the garden filled with
messy, slippery patches where even in
Summer no light crept in on the sickly
grass.
The house built in the early 70s had
three wide steps in front coming up
from the path, and shallow veranda
upon which bay windows. on either side
of the door, protruded. The door itself
was wide and made wider by the rec
tangles of colored glass that framed it.
In the door were panels of dark red
glass, with woodland scenes, deer, will
low trees, bridges. etched upon them in
white. For 80 years the house of Law
renee had been in eclipse and the gar
den showed it.
The baronial acres had long since
melted away; the sleepy, prosperous
town of ClipperSville was situated where
the CastellaZo bull ring had once stood
and only the four acres surrounding the
house and a small farm some miles
away down toward the marshes re-
manned to the lucky Lawrences Of the
ancestral glory. Acre by acre old Philip
Lawrence and his son Patterson had
their fortunes decline; the old
pioneer of the Yerba Buena days lived
to see the end of the century and the
end of his own prosperity, and died
leaving what remained in hands even
less capable than his own.
For Patterson Lawrence was a poet
who lived merely to gather worthless
old books about him, to dream over the
penning of Insignificant
essays which were rarely printed and
for which he was never paid. He read
papers to infant chambers of commerce
from Sacramento to Riverside, compar-
ing California to Athens, and hymning
peoples, fog, Junipero Sierra and sea
gulls in countless verses all beginning
with rapturous praise of the Golden
State.
At 40 he married a poets daughter
who had been precariously existing for
all her 16 years upon bread. water and
sonnets from the Portuguese in a
shanty on Rincon Hill. Editha, before
Ter early death, brought to the house
of Lawrence two sons and three daugh-