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Rh had been floating gallantly overhead—and behold it was only our flag. They never asked us for any other.

We have had a great many Russian and English gentlemen and ladies on board to-day, and the time has passed cheerfully away. They were all happy-spirited people, and I never heard our mother tongue sound so pleasantly as it did when it fell from those English lips in this far-off land. I talked to the Russians a good deal, just to be friendly, and they talked to me from the same motive; I am sure that both enjoyed the conversation, but never a word of it either of us understood. I did most of my talking to those English people though, and I am sorry we can not carry some of them along with us.

We have gone whithersoever we chose, to-day, and have met with nothing but the kindest attentions. Nobody inquired whether we had any passports or not.

Several of the officers of the Government have suggested that we take the ship to a little watering-place thirty miles from here, and pay the Emperor of Russia a visit. He is rusticating there. These officers said they would take it upon themselves to insure us a cordial reception. They said if we would go, they would not only telegraph the Emperor, but send a special courier overland to announce our coming. Our time is so short, though, and more especially our coal is so nearly out, that we judged it best to forego the rare pleasure of holding social intercourse with an Emperor.

Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sebastopol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!—fragments of houses, crumbled walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation every where! It is as if a mighty earthquake had spent all its terrible forces upon this one little spot. For eighteen long months the storms of war beat upon the helpless town, and left it at last the saddest wreck that ever the sun has looked upon. Not one solitary house escaped unscathed—not one remained habitable, even. Such utter and complete ruin one could hardly conceive of. The houses had all been solid, dressed stone structures; most of them were ploughed


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 stranger stood close by the padre's side, alert to all that was going forward; between them and the door, as if making a background for the drama then shaping, the travelers who were guests of the mission, Don Geronimo, Sergeant Olivera and Captain del Valle were grouped, none of them wiser for what had passed between the American and his interpreter than Padre Ignacio himself.

"If it is a strange tale, it fits the man," Padre Ignacio. "Proceed, Brother Mateo."

"This stranger, then, says that he comes from a land called Kentucky, a place I have heard of, Padre Ignacio, and I think it may be true as he says. This Kentucky lies on the eastern shore of the Mississippi; it is a province of the new American republic founded by Washington—you will remember, Padre Ignacio, that a ship from the United States of America put into the bay of Monterey some years ago, but none of its men was permitted to land."

"I remember the ship, with its strange flag," Padre Ignacio said.

"This man tells a thing that is almost incredible, quite incredible, I believe, in the absence of verification. He says that Napoleon of France has sold to the president of the United States the territory of Louisiana. It is a thing that casts a doubt on his integrity."

"How long ago does he say this took place?"

"As much as three years, Padre Ignacio."

"It may be true; we have no right to doubt him. The wars that engage Spain have kept our ships said

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 from the seas, we have had no news these five years from Europe here in California. But what has the sale of Louisiana to do with this man's presence here?"

"He says that the president of his country sent out an expedition to explore the new territory, through and beyond the Stony Mountains to the Pacific, Oregon already being part of the new republic's domain, as you know. This man was one of the party of surveyors or explorers, attached to the expedition as hunter. The party reached the Pacific, he declares, crossing the snowy mountains and passing in boats down the great Oregon river, which he declares has been named the Columbia. Midway of the mountains, on the return home, this man was lost in a snow storm which continued many days. His wanderings led him into a maze of mountain and desert, so far from his comrades that he gave up all hope of finding them. He made a course to the south, hoping to find Sante Fé, in Spanish territory, in which place he might meet hunters, or a caravan of French traders with whom he could return to the Mississippi.

"But no; he was too far to the west. Nothing remained to him in that misadventure, he declares, but to point his way like a mariner at sea, over desert and mountain toward California. A ship, he believed, might come some day to a port of that land and carry him to his own country. So he breaks out of his exile in mountain and wild waterless desert, and comes in the night like a moth led by a


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 candle, to the open kitchen door of this mission, and here he stands, let his tale be true or false."

"How long ago does he say it was since he lost his comrades in the storm?" Padre Ignacio inquired.

"He says it was in April."

"And it is now September," Padre Ignacio said, looking with strange mingling of compassion and admiration upon the man who had borne such adventures in an unpeopled land. "Ulysses wandered longer, but he did not go so far. It is a strange tale, as you have said, Brother Mateo, but not incredible. Geronimo, see that he is well lodged. Give him suitable clothing; have the barber attend to his hair."

"Padre Ignacio, your pardon, but a word," Captain del Valle stepped forward quickly, still red about the eyes from the extraordinary puffing of his cheeks which he had practiced during Padre Mateo's recital of the stranger's story. "This is a matter for the civil authorities, a thing of the highest importance. I request that this man be delivered to me, to be held for the order of his excellency, the governor."

"It is a strange rudeness, Captain del Valle, to interfere with my hospitality. Upon what grounds do you justify this demand?"

"Padre Ignacio," Captain del Valle's voice was grave and severe, his manner suddenly that of the stern and haughty soldier who knows no greater law than that of his immediate duty, "the story this man tells of the purchase of Louisiana Territory by


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 the yankee republic is true; we have known of it many months. The country of the yankee republic now touches the dominion of Spain; it is but a step from the purchase of Louisiana by some shrewd trick of this nation of sharp traders, to the seizure of the Spanish dominion of New Mexico, California. The military authorities have been warned; we have been watching. This man is a spy. I demand his surrender in the king's name!"

"It is folly," Padre Ignacio returned, leveling the captain's argument and demand to nothing with an impatient sweep of the hand.

"He stands condemned by his own act in entering California," Captain del Valle protested, his heat rising, his face losing its color in the seriousness of his purpose. "The edict of King Carlos and the cortes never has been revoked. California is closed to foreigners; to enter it is death."

"That applies only to those who come in the spirit of conquest, or to trade; not to a poor wanderer such as this. Peace, Captain del Valle! This man is under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the hospitality of this place shall not be abused."

"You overstep your bounds, Padre Ignacio," the soldier contended, not new in this controversy between military and ecclesiastical authority in Alta California, a thing of growing bitterness. "You are not greater than king and cortes. But very well; tonight I grant the sanctuary you have given this innocent barbarian, as you seem to believe him. But let him set foot in the king's road"


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 "Peace!" commanded Padre Ignacio, sternly, lifting an interdicting hand. "Take him, Geronimo, as I have directed, and attend to his comfort. But stay; what is your name?"

"He says it is John Miller," Padre Mateo answered, after repeating the question. "In Castilian, Juan Molinero."

"Juan Molinero," Padre Ignacio repeated, strangely, as if he found a marvel in it. "What a propitious name!"


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HAT a strange man you are, John Miller," said Padre Mateo looking at him in unmasked admiration as they walked together at the border of a field of maize, where the hurrying clear water of an irrigation ditch murmured over boulders with which its bottom and sides had been paved with infinite labor and pains.

"Yes; the barber turned a basket over my head and cut around the edges. I couldn't make him understand that I wanted it cut close to my head, or maybe he thought the shock of losing so much hair all at once would be too great."

"He could not understand why anybody but a soldier or a priest would want his hair and beard shorn away at all," Padre Mateo laughed. "It is the fashion among the gente fina, that is to say the best people, to wear the hair long, and the beard in such fashion as you saw on Captain del Valle's chin But you, my friend, you look this morning as if you had risen from a sickness, with your bare face all white where the beard covered it, and brown as the leather of my sandal above. See how the neophytes stare at you. They doubtless think you are some


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 new species of two colors, such as they have not seen before."

"You can't blame 'em for starin', I must look like a skinned eel in this outfit."

Padre Mateo put out his hand, halting the stranger in his hasty stride, while he fell back a step to look him over with humorously critical eye.

"The trousers are a trifle close-fitting," said he, "and the jacket is somewhat too short, both of body and sleeves. But the hat is excellent, the sash is faultless, and the boots are a marvel of elegance. Taken as a whole, for a wardrobe assembled out of the odds and ends about the place, it is quite remarkable."

"Yes, I'll bet I'd scare a blind horse," Miller grumbled, keenly ashamed of his strange garb, anxious to get along to the river dam, toward which they were headed, and out of sight of the Indians busy irrigating the almost ripe corn.

"You are a man transformed today," said Padre Mateo, proceeding slowly, in no hurry whatever to be on his way. "You would have been better for a beard, brought to an arrowhead point, and for some of your golden ringlets, at least long enough to strike you mid-neck. Such a hat as you have with its high peak and broad brim, makes your clean face look like a pea."

"It's the fashion in my country to wear the face smooth, Padero."

"Padre, padre," the priest corrected him, patiently, evidently not for the first time. "Stop where


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 you are, Juan Molinero, and stand until you have it right. Now, say it after me, slowly: Padre Mateo; Padre Mateo."

Padre Mateo beat out the simple syllables with his finger as if he directed a tune; John Miller, henceforward to be Juan Molinero in California, stood by with long lean legs spraddled, repeating the two words until he had both sound and inflection as smooth on his tongue as oil.

"Now, that will do very well," Padre Mateo commended him. "Your tongue is not stubborn, you will acquire the speech readily. It is necessary, it is very necessary, that you begin at once. You are a man of some learning, I think, Juan; you have been in school?"

"Back in Virginia, padre, I had some schooling. I could have gone to college if I'd stayed there, and made something out of myself, maybe a lawyer, like every second man in Virginia. But I went venturin' off to Kentucky with a band of boys like myself, and the woods swallered me. A man soon loses all he ever got out of books when he's amongst wild Indians and wild animals in the woods, Padre Mateo."

"That is so, Juan; even here that is so. The refinements leave a man, unless he spends the night with his books like Padre Ignacio. There is one whom no wilderness can erase, no solitude obscure. And what age have you now, Juan?"

"Thirty-three."

"That is a good age, that is a man's age, it was


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 the age of Our Señor. You will grow as big as an oak here in California—if you keep within the bounds of the mission, and out of Captain del Valle's hands."

"I thought that little toad of a soldier had his eye on me last night. What have I done? What's wrong?"

"You have come to California, Juan Molinero," Padre Mateo gravely replied. "That is enough. The king of Spain always has been jealous of California; he is keeping it for Spaniards, alone. There is a law that closes this land to all other men, and the penalty on the head of a foreigner who enters here is death."

"The devil you say!" John Miller stopped, staring in amazement at hearing such a barbarous edict. "What's the reason you don't hand me over, then? If that's the law, how does it come that I'm safe in one place and not in another?"

"There is one law for the civil authorities, another for the missions," the priest returned. "You have heard of ecclesiastical law?"

"Yes, I've heard of it."

"And of sanctuary, Juan Molinero?"

"Sanctuary, yes. But that was a long time ago; they don't have laws that a man's safe from when he dodges into a church in these days."

"That is still the law here, Juan Molinero. You are under ecclesiastical protection; you have found sanctuary here with us at this mission. But if you put foot in the king's road before our door—then,


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 there is Captain del Valle and the king's edict. It is very simple."

"That's a strange fix for a man to be in," said Miller. He walked on with head bent, plainly downcast and troubled by his peculiar peril. "And I've got to stay here, right here on this farm, till ages know when? is that it?"

"If you leave your sanctuary, it is very plain that Captain del Valle will carry you before the governor, who is a stern man, a man without mercy. He will apply the law without a doubt, my poor Juan Molinero; he will stand you against the first wall and shoot you through the heart."

"That's kind of a snap judgment to take on a stranger," Juan Molinero mused as he curbed his long stride to conform to the priest's leisurely gait. He appeared more interested in the peculiar phase of the situation than concerned over his own peril, turning the matter in his mind, viewing it for its unusual aspects as a student of jurisprudence might have done.

"It seems an inhospitable decree, indeed," the priest admitted, "but you can see that it is necessary to protect a land so isolated as California from the feet of adventurous men, such as Englishmen, who grasp and claim in their wicked greed all lands that their ships touch. The decree was designed for the protection of the missions, in the first place. The king wanted the great work of redeeming these gentiles to go forward without molestation or


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 curious onlooking from strangers. It was, it is, the work of holy church alone."

"But it's holy church, as you call it, that's taken me under its wing. How's that?"

"That is another matter, Juan Molinero," Padre Mateo said, haughty and distant, as if he had withdrawn into the secret places where holy church kept its reasons for its commissions and omissions hidden away from the eyes of men. "But this I will have you know: Padre Ignacio gave you sanctuary before he heard your name."

"My name?" said Juan Molinero, his wonder widening into amazement. "My name don't carry any weight away out here in California. What's my name got to do with any act of friendship any man does me here?"

"Padre Ignacio believes you were directed here by the hand of God, Juan; let your deeds prove you worthy his belief. The moment he heard your name pronounced he declared that providence had sent you. We have wanted a miller sorely here at San Fernando, and there were no more in the prisons of Mexico."

"But I'm a miller in name, only, Padre Mateo. As I have told you, I was a planter in Virginia, and later in Kentucky, growing tobacco. That, and hunting game in the woods, and defending my life against wild Indians, is all I know."

"It does not matter, Juan," Padre Mateo declared, easy and confident in his way as a man who saw the certainty of a thing desired; "you shall


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384 through and through by cannon balls—unroofed and sliced down from eaves to foundation—and now a row of them, half a mile long, looks merely like an endless procession of battered chimneys. No semblance of a house remains in such as these. Some of the larger buildings had corners knocked off; pillars cut in two; cornices smashed; holes driven straight through the walls. Many of these holes are as round and as cleanly cut as if they had been made with an auger. Others are half pierced through, and the clean impression is there in the rock, as smooth and as shapely as if it were done in putty. Here and there a ball still sticks in a wall, and from it iron tears trickle down and discolor the stone.

The battle-fields were pretty close together. The Malakoff tower is on a hill which is right in the edge of the town. The Redan was within rifle-shot of the Malakoff; Inkerman was a mile away; and Balaklava removed but an hour’s ride. The French trenches, by which they approached and invested the Malakoff were carried so close under its sloping sides that one might have stood by the Russian guns and tossed a stone into them. Repeatedly, during three terrible days, they swarmed up the little Malakoff hill, and were beaten back with terrible slaughter. Finally, they captured the place, and drove the Russians out, who then tried to retreat into the town, but the English had taken the Redan, and shut them off with a wall of flame; there was nothing for them to do but go back and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns. They did go back; they took the Malakoff and retook it two or three times, but their desperate valor could not avail, and they had to give up at last.

These fearful fields, where such tempests of death used to rage, are peaceful enough now; no sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about them, they are lonely and silent—their desolation is complete.

There was nothing else to do, and so every body went to hunting relics. They have stocked the ship with them. They brought them from the Malakoff, from the Redan, Inkerman, Balaklava—every where. They have brought cannon balls,


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 do it, you shall build his water-mill. His faith in you, his great hope, will be your inspiration. Yonder is the dam, and there is the sluice that is at once for the mill-wheel and the mother ditch of our irrigation system. The poor mill! it has been a sad failure, Juan; the grist is splashed and ruined by the wheel. It is a thing we have not been able to overcome."

"No wonder!" said Juan, smiling as he looked at the clumsy arrangement. "You've got your hopper right against your wheel—how on earth did you ever expect to keep the grist dry?"

"See?" said the Padre Mateo, jubilant, beaming in satisfaction. "Already you prove that Padre Ignacio was not mistaken. If you know nothing of mills, how do you know this? Ah, Juan Molinero, you are the man! He shall have the mill of his heart at last."

"It's plain you've got to move the buhrstones off a distance, and house them against the weather," said Juan, curiously studying the detail of the crude mill. "A long shaft is what you want, padre, connecting the wheel and the buhrs by a little trick called a bevel gear. It's as simple as a clock."

"Hear him!" Padre Mateo applauded, speaking as if to an audience apart. "Juan Molinero is the physician who puts his hand on the ailment of our poor crippled mill; Juan Molinero is the artificer who shall set it turning out a golden stream of flour. Padre Ignacio never had faith in a man to be deceived."


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Rh broken ramrods, fragments of shell—iron enough to freight a sloop. Some have even brought bones—brought them laboriously from great distances, and were grieved to hear the surgeon pronounce them only bones of mules and oxen. I knew Blucher would not lose an opportunity like this. He brought a sack full on board and was going for another. I prevailed upon him not to go. He has already turned his state-room into a museum of worthless trumpery, which he has gathered up in his travels. He is labeling his trophies, now. I picked up one a while ago, and found it marked “Fragment of a Russian General.” I carried it out to get a better light upon it—it was nothing but a couple of teeth and part of the jaw-bone of a horse. I said with some asperity:

“Fragment of a Russian General! This is absurd. Are you never going to learn any sense?”

He only said: “Go slow—the old woman won’t know any different.” [His aunt.]

This person gathers mementoes with a perfect recklessness, now-a-days; mixes them all up together, and then serenely labels them without any regard to truth, propriety, or even plausibility. I have found him breaking a stone in two, and labeling half of it “Chunk busted from the pulpit of Demosthenes,” and the other half “Darnick from the Tomb of Abelard and Heloise.” T have known him to gather up a handful of pebbles by the roadside, and bring them on board ship and label them as coming from twenty celebrated localities five hundred miles apart. I remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of course, but it does no good. I get the same tranquil, unanswerable reply every time:

“It don’t signify—the old woman won’t know any different.”

Ever since we three or four fortunate ones made the midnight trip to Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction to give every body in the ship a pebble from the Mars-hill where St. Paul preached. He got all those pebbles on the seashore, abreast the ship, but professes to have gathered them


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 "There's water enough," said Juan, measuring with calculative eye the lake that filled the deep river-bed and flooded to the flanking hillocks; "you picked a good site for your dam."

"It will be a blessing when you get the mill turning, Juan. As it is, all our flour and meal of the maize are ground by hand-turned stones, with a sweep that the Indians put shoulders to and tramp a dizzy circle hour after hour. They are discontented at such labor; too often the lash of good Geronimo cuts their backs when they lag. When the water is set working for us, it will be a pleasure to feed the mill and carry away the warm meal from its mouth. Your work here will be a blessing, Juan; you shall hear them sing when they carry in the corn."

"So that Geronimo feller whips 'em, heh? That's what the long whip that I saw hanging by the door is for, what?"

"They are children, wilful and defiant children, very often, Juan. You will understand when you come to know them. Now, do you think it is possible that one wheel can be made to turn two sets of stones, and produce a greater amount of grist?"

"Yes, it looks to me like that wheel's plenty big enough to turn two buhrs. But one will be plenty, I think, going all the time; it would turn out all you could use."

"There is a great demand in the growing pueblo, from the ranchers who are settled around us, even from the other missions. We could sell our sur-


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 plus flour at good advantage, adding greatly to the revenues of the mission. You can see what a business we have here, Juan Molinero; from this elevation you can sweep our valley by a shift of the eye."

Juan Molinero had been shifting his eye, requiring no prompting to that purpose. His long experience in surroundings where lapse of care and vigilance for a moment might cost his life had trained him to acquaint himself with what lay about him, leaving no mysteries unexplored that the eye could pierce. He stood on the dam, a tall, a lean and hardy man, viewing what lay before him with wonder and admiration which grew as the details of the vast enterprise were gathered.

Padre Mateo, a little distance away, and lower by some feet in the station that he occupied, having spared himself the trouble to mount the dam to survey a scene sufficiently well known, looked up at Juan Molinero with eyes made narrow, watching for the effect their great possessions would show upon this man.

Not so clumsy, nor of such stolid strength as he appeared in his dress of hairy skins, was this Juan today, thought Padre Mateo. An admirable man, of balance like a fine rifle, thought this padre, who knew the use of a gun very well, indeed, although arms were prohibited men of his holy calling by the express decree of the king; a man of vast endurance, plain in the length of his muscular limbs, the breadth of his shoulders. Not the burly, deep


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386 from one of our party. However, it is not of any use for me to expose the deception—it affords him pleasure, and does no harm to any body. He says he never expects to run out of mementoes of St. Paul as long as he is in reach of a sand-bank. Well, he is no worse than others. I notice that all travelers supply deficiencies in their collections in the same way. I shall never have any confidence in such things again while I live.


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 chested, slow crushing strength of Borromeo, the blacksmith. This man was thin of shoulders and chest compared to Borromeo. His was strength in its refinement, strength that had the keenness of a quick mind to direct it, a leaping, bounding, swift strength that would strike and spring like a cougar away from a retaliating blow.

Strange thoughts for a priest, perhaps; unusual conclusions to register in his active mind upon his weighing of this stranger from a far-off, barbarous land. But it is not unlikely that Padre Mateo was pretty much of a business man, and a man who knew the world and the creatures that move in its ways, as many of the mission fathers were. There were other matters, also, besides spiritual, to occupy the thoughts of the mission padres in those changing days.

Juan Molinero stood looking abroad upon the mission and the mission lands, its enclosure of long, grey adobe walls, raised in prodigious labor by the hands of savage man, directed thus into the arts of peace and prosperity by the patience, the rigor, the force if necessary, of these indomitable men. The site of the dam impounding the waters of the little river was a mile or more northward of the mission buildings, close against the hills; the rise to it was considerable, affording a clear survey to one who stood upon it over-looking the mission property in the Valley of the Oaks. How marvelous, thought Juan Molinero, this work that had been accomplished here.


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 The great mission building, which fronted upon the king's road, El Camino Real of California history and romance, lay farthest away from the point where Juan Molinero, in his Spanish garb and name, stood looking down upon the scene. This building of adobe, or sun-dried bricks, was more than two hundred feet in length, rising two lofty stories, with a breadth of fifty feet. Its walls at the foundations were eight feet thick, the arches of its few and small windows seemed embrasures in a fortress. The grey adobe walls were coated with white stucco, harmonious contrast against the surrounding greenery of vineyards and fields. The roof was of tiles, soft in their dull red, a mellow dash of color to delight the appreciative eye.

A long arcade, perhaps five hundred feet in length, ran from the northeast corner of the main building to connect with the church which stood on the bank of the little river. This passage was open to the west, where the familiar arches of monastic architecture looped in graceful diversion with the general severity and simplicity of the design. Along the east side of this long passage between mission house and church, several small buildings stood. These were of uniform size and design, and were the homes of the mission's various attaches, such as the mayordomo, the artisans who raised new buildings and kept all in repair, as well as the offi' cers and soldiers stationed there to guard against a possible outbreak of the neophytes and assist in enforcing the discipline necessary to their control.


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 All these buildings were plastered with stucco that gleamed marble white in the sun, all roofed with the uniform red, soft-tinted tiles. It was a finished enterprise, to the last detail of convenience for that day, and fashioned and molded in the marvelous faith and perseverance of its builders out of the very earth on which it stood. Even a fountain was tossing a sparkling jet high among the greenery in the quadrangle that cornered between mission building and the padres' walk under the shady arcade.

The village where the neophytes lived was near the church, and close beside it the burying ground where they found rest when their struggles with civilization were at end. Many white crosses in this little field witnessed that death was a heavy tolltaker even in that scene of serenity and peace.

These Indian cabins were built of sun-dried bricks, roofed with straw thatch, arranged in neat order, mainly, with a few scattering ones as if of dissenters spreading about the edges. Poor as they appeared by contrast with the white magnificence of the mission buildings, they were luxurious to a people who had roamed almost unsheltered for centuries. It is doubtful whether the earth contained human beings of meaner accomplishments and intelligence than the California Indians were when the Spanish padres came. The never-ending marvel of it is that the priests accomplished so much with them in so short a flight of time.

But to all of this, certainly, John Miller, or Juan


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 Molinero as he must be called henceforward, was a stranger. He was so filled with admiration for the vast work that spread before him, revealed so unexpectedly in a land he had thought to find almost untouched by civilization, that the best he could do was stand there on the dam and gaze, and draw his breath in deep gusts of wonderment.

The fields were lively with bright colors where the Indians were at work, some with hoes among cabbage and turnips and potatoes, some with spades mending the embankments of ditches where the lifegiving water sparkled as it ran. Some were threshing grain by throwing it under the feet of numerous cattle yoked up four abreast and driven at a trot around a circular corral. Near them others were rendering tallow, so Padre Mateo said, in vats built of bricks and lined with plaster. In a vineyard enclosed by a high adobe wall, women and children were heaping ox-drawn carts with grapes.

"There is none of the corruption of idleness here," Padre Mateo said, pride and satisfaction in his voice.

"It's a beautiful place! There's room for a thousand farms in this valley—ten thousand, I expect," Juan Molinero replied.

"Not at this time," Padre Mateo denied. "We want no more encroachment on the mission lands. They are hemming us already, they are beginning to grumble that the mission cattle and sheep are eating up the grass. No, we do not want any more farms or towns, Juan. That is a mistake of the


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 government, which pays adventurous men a bonus and gives every one of them a gun and a leather shield to stop the Indian's arrows, inciting them to come to California and make settlements. It is a sad mistake."

"Of course, I don't know anything about the situation," Juan Molinero said, speaking slowly, as if his astonishing discovery had left him few words.

Padre Mateo clambered up the steep embankment, his brown gown lifted to disencumber his feet, discovering bare legs and sandals beneath. He stood beside the tall wayfarer, and stretched his hand out over the valley.

"It is a fair scene," he said, his pride in it well justified; "I doubt if the earth can show a fairer. But there are men who would overturn it all, Juan, snatch these lands that we have improved from rough wild places from us, turn all our poor Indians away to shift for themselves, and bring a deluge of sorrow where there is now contentment and prosperity."

"You don't tell me?" Juan exclaimed, quickly interested in this revelation. "What is it? Politics?"

"You are quick, Juan Molinero," Padre Mateo approved, but with grave face, slow-nodding head; "you are a man who can see through a wall. Yes, it is a matter of politics. They are beginning to talk secularization of the mission properties in California, of turning them over to the state, so the work of our hands may become the profit of design-


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 ing scoundrels who do not work, except in the crooked ways of evil."

"It's the same way everywhere, I guess, padre. There are some people that can't stand the sight of other folks' prosperity."

"Well, they have a long way to go before they turn us out, your mill will see a great deal of wheat go into its hopper before that day. Let us go now; you will want tools and material to begin your work. Besides, Juan, there is a sight to be seen this morning. This is the day our wine press begins its happy service—they are gathering the grapes for it now."


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N ox-drawn cart was coming into the court yard behind the imposing administration building as Juan and Padre Mateo approached. This was a solid-wheeled cart, clumsy, heavy, at which the span of oxen strained with tongues thrust out in the agony of their labor, bound horn and horn as they were by the primitive, cruel Spanish yoke that had not been improved in the slightest particular in two thousand years. Baskets of purple grapes, big as wild plums, they appeared to Juan Molinero, were piled high in the cart, behind which there walked a young Indian, a tall and graceful youth, who carried his head so high that he seemed unconscious of his feet among the broken tile, brick and sunken cobblestones with which the court was paved.

Juan Molinero's attention was fixed on the Indian following this juicy load, a figure that expressed so much of suppressed defiance and revolt in its erect carriage, its detached bearing from the enforced task, however pleasant it might seem. The young man's face was gaunt and severe, sealed and impressed with the stamp of silent repression. It


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 was the first Indian countenance marked with the quickness of intellectual nobility that Juan had met among the hundreds which he had viewed that morning.

The driver of the oxen, another Indian little older than the one who came behind, brought the load of grapes to a stand near a broad arched door in the main building, unsparing of his sharpened goad. This instrument was a peeled sapling, as thick at the butt as a man's wrist, six or seven feet long. An iron spike was inset in its smaller end, and wound about with a rawhide thong. Three-quarters of a century later, the drovers of the plains which lay in the bounds of this new Louisiana territory which the stranger at San Fernando mission had crossed, used the same kind of goad to prod up the cattle which had fallen from fatigue and thirst to the car floor, as the slow train held onward to a distant market.

"Come this way, Juan; you shall see our noble wine press," Padre Mateo beckoned, one foot within the door, the arch of which was six feet thick above his head.

"What a way to yoke oxen!" said Juan in high contempt of the crude and barbarous method that made the creatures' labor a long-drawn agony. He lingered in the court, pity in his face for the suffering brutes, on whose withers streams of blood were black-streaked in the dust, where the unsparing driver had urged and directed them as he had been taught.


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E have got so far east, now—a hundred and fifty-five degrees of longitude from San Francisco—that my watch can not “keep the hang” of the time any more. It has grown discouraged, and stopped. I think it did a wise thing. The difference in time between Sebastopol and the Pacific coast is enormous. When it is six o’clock in the morning here, it is somewhere about week before last in California. We are excusable for getting a little tangled as to time. These distractions and distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, and I am tortured with doubts and fears no more.

Odessa is about twenty hours’ run from Sebastopol, and is the most northerly port in the Black Sea. We came here to get coal, principally. The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and is growing faster than any other small city out of America. It is a free port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world. Its roadstead is full of ships. Engineers are at work, now, turning the open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor. It is to be almost inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into the sea over three thousand feet in a straight line.

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I “raised the hill” and stood in Odessa for the first time. It looked just like an American city; fine, broad streets, and


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 "Do you know a better way?" Padre Mateo inquired, with just a little slighting of contempt, perhaps, in his own tone. It was as if the old rose up in bridling hauteur to defend the unnumbered cruelties which ignorance had established and usage had fastened, blighting curses on man and beast, through the slow centuries in the land that was his own.

"A better way!" Juan derided. "Why, you couldn't think of a worse way. Who ever would imagine oxen yoked by the horns, the yoke tied to the horns with ropes? They could pull about as much with their tails!"

"And there is another way, then, Juan Molinero?" Padre Mateo's resentment at this criticism of time-established usage was falling; he was a shrewd man, a servant of an institution that had grown great on its ability to see, its readiness to employ, the cunning and the wisdom of shrewd men.

"The yoke ought to set back on the shoulders, with a bow under the necks," Juan replied. "Haven't you ever seen a yoke like that? Why, they're used in every Christian country under the sun, have been since Adam made the first one, I guess."

"That is another thing you shall show us, then, if there is any advantage in it, Juan."

"Advantage? Why, I tell you, Padre Mateo, one span of oxen can draw as much as three span hitched this way. No wonder your fields look so


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 scratched and poorly-plowed! You can't expect beasts to more than pull the hat off of your head hitched up by the horns that way."

"Then you shall show us the better way, Juan Molinero. Truly, God directed you to teach us many things. I am ashamed to show you the wine press now, that was the pride of our hearts yesterday. Perhaps you will say we are savages when you see it. But come."

Padre Ignacio himself was there, and the mayordomo, Don Geronimo, just inside the broad arched door. A broad stairway of thin bricks—the padres followed the Spanish custom, making their bricks thin and broad—led down to the wine press, which stood several feet below the ground level. At the press itself this stairway narrowed to half its upper breadth to continue into the cellar, now to become the padres' wine vault, which underlay the eastern end of the administration building.

The wine press would have passed undiscovered by Juan Molinero if he had been left to find it for himself. It was nothing more than a big bowl, made of bricks, plastered with cement, built into a corner of the passage, or area-way, into which the arched door opened. It was about as high as a man's head, six or seven feet square, tapering toward the bottom. A ledge was fashioned around the interior walls to hold a framework, or strainer, laced with strips of rawhide, a space of a foot or so between it and the bottom of the press to admit the free passage of the compressed juice, the pulp re-


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 maining on the sieve, which could be lifted out as required.

At the base of the wine press, on the side facing the door, just at the bottom of the steps, a deep basin, something like a modern bathtub, stood filled with water for washing the feet of those who were to have the joyous honor of trampling the grapes on the springy rawhide sieve. These favored ones were waiting, feet' bare, garments above the knees, six youths and six maidens, but not in any mood of great hilarity, or even subdued pleasure, that Juan could see. It was work to them, and strange work, which they approached with timid reluctance in spite of Padre Ignacio's assurance and the not so kind glances of Don Geronimo.

A line of young men, baskets of grapes on their heads, marched in and emptied their loads into the wine press; Padre Ignacio gave the word, the girls with washed feet clambered nimbly up the sides and began trampling out the wine. At first they stepped shyly on the cool rich grapes, promising little for Padre Ignacio's hopes. Presently the juice began to bubble pleasantly between their toes, bringing little exclamations of wonder, little starting smiles of pleasure. Absorbed in the new aspects of this task, moved to nimbler prancing by the reward of gushing juice, which broke in sharp little jets now and then, spraying faces and bare arms, the girls began to chatter and laugh.

"It is the same as in the days of old," Padre


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 Mateo said. "Even these poor daughters of savages shout with joy as they tread out the wine."

Padre Ignacio knew there would be no scarcity of eager feet for his wine press now.

The chief ceremony, so Padre Mateo said, was to be the drawing off of the first juice from the press. Padre Ignacio himself was to do this; no other hand was worthy the distinction of that long-waited day. At the very bottom of the wine press, in the gloom at the foot of the cellar stairs, a half cask stood under the spiggot, which was itself made of a small cedar log with the heart hollowed out, the end closed with a plug. Padre Ignacio now descended to drain off the first juice trampled out in a wine press in California.

Magdalena came from her kitchen, which opened through a narrow door into this cellar way, to see this ceremony; the young men who carried in the grapes stood with empty baskets; the girls in the wine press, their dark faces spattered with stains, leaned along the edge, looking down on Padre Ignacio's fringe of snow-white hair as he went, gown gathered between his knees, to remove the plug. Borromeo Cambon, the blacksmith, was in the door.

They gasped in pleasurable exclamation when the thick stream of dark juice poured into the deep tub. Padre Ignacio let it run until the tub was full; the juice was running strong when he replaced the plug.

"It is a fruitful year; the grape skins are stored with wine. We shall have plenty at last," he said.


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 "There are dry throats waiting for it," said Borromeo, as he turned from the door to go back to his forge.

"Geronimo, there is a messenger from the harbor of San Pedro, asking to see Padre Ignacio," Magdalena announced.

"What is this?" Father Ignacio asked, overhearing Magdalena as he came up the stair.

"He has letters for you, which he refused to put in my hand," she said.

"Don Geronimo, have the kindness to conduct him to my office," Padre Ignacio requested, hurrying away.

Padre Ignacio returned in a little while, letters in his hand, trouble furrowing his brow. He beckoned Padre Mateo; Juan Molinero saw them stand talking in the white sunlight of the court a little outside the door.

"Here is a business!" said Father Ignacio, gesticulating with the unfolded letters. "The ship has been in the harbor these two days."

"So far ahead of the time we expected it? Does it bring any news from Spain?"

"Not that I know, Brother Mateo, but it brings a woman who begs sanctuary in the mission San Fernando!"

"A woman?" Padre Mateo's eyes grew wide. "It is incredible! Is it one of these adventuring strumpets the viceroy has been solicited to send here to marry his off-cast soldiers?"

"No, not of that kind. It is the daughter of José


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 Sinova, he who had the grant to the south of us from the king for his services in the wars. José was on his way here, with all his goods, his daughter and his wife. Both of the parents died of the black vomit, which struck the ship and took many lives. Now this girl, left alone, appeals to me as one whom her father knew, to stand in a father's place, and the captain, shorn of his crew, asks men to sail his ship to Monterey."

"And she would come to San Fernando?" said Padre Mateo, full of astonishment. "Why doesn't she stay on the ship and return with it to Mexico?"

"Here is her letter," said Father Ignacio, helpless in the demand of this unprecedented business.

"So, there is nothing behind her," said Padre Mateo, having read the letter twice. "Her heart and her hope have been fixed on California; she longs to remain—perhaps there is some useful thing to which she can apply her hand—and there is the captain, who urges marriage and is not a man to be borne, and—here we have Magdalena, who could take her mother's place."

"What? You would counsel bringing her here? No, it is impossible!"

"Somebody is needed to teach the girls needle-work," Padre Mateo argued. "Magdalena has no time to instruct them in any more of the domestic arts."

"Magdalena is a jewel of inestimable value, teaching them breadmaking and the dressing of meats for the table with the patience of an angel. What


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 we should do without Magdalena I do not know."

"This may be another Magdalena, for all we know, Padre Ignacio. Her plea is piteous, it would be hard to turn her away."

"Give me the letter again—let me consider." Padre Ignacio, a man who could not refuse a plea, worthy or unworthy let the subject be, as Padre Mateo well knew, stood with head bent over the letter, feet wide apart in his spacious gown, a gathering of concentrated thought on his brow.

"Besides, it will be a difficult thing to bring her here," he said, "with this brigand Alvitre in the bosque by the road. There must be considerable gold in her possession; José Sinova was a man of the first."

"Del Valle could send half a dozen soldiers."

"There is not a soldier left at San Fernando today; we would be at the mercy of Alvitre if he came riding up in a dust with his villains at his shoulderblade." There was a note of bitterness, of resentfulness for an affront, in Padre Ignacio's voice that drew a glance from his coadjutor so sudden, so sharp, that it seemed to flash like a plowshare in the sun.

"Gone?" said Padre Mateo.

"On one pretext or another," Padre Ignacio replied, spreading his hands to illustrate complete dispersion. "Del Valle has set out for Monterey to make report to the governor he says: Sergeant Olivera and certain others are thought to be in pursuit of Alvitre, but with how much honesty in their


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 design no man knows, and the remainder have been sent to the pueblo at the request of the comisionado there. And you know what Comisionado Felix is."

"A man with red eyes and a disease," said Padre Mateo, succinct in his designation as he was quick in his decision.

"So, what is the peril of a young and comely woman sitting in a cart on a chest of gold?" Padre Ignacio asked it with a grimness of word and feature that seemed to be definite conclusion of the comely young woman's case.

"There will not be much heart in the soldiers' hunt for Alvitre, unpaid as they are, as they have been those two years," Padre Mateo said, turning that phase of it speculatively. "Yet, there might be a way."

"The only way I see is to let her stay on the ship and go to Monterey," Padre Ignacio said.

Padre Mateo turned, hands at his back, to walk a little way apart, chin up, eyes drawn small, in the attitude of a man whose determination leaps all obstacles. He turned back again.

"Del Valle sent his men away out of pique because he could not have his way with the stranger," he said.

"There is no doubt, Brother Mateo."

"Well, let them go. There is a man at hand who is equal to a company of soldiers."

"Such a man at hand?" incredibly, in kindly depreciation of the extravagant declaration.


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 "Juan Molinero himself," Padre Mateo said, beaming in the discovery of his thought.

"You have advanced well with him, to learn so much, Brother Mateo."

"He has fought the savage Indians in the forests of Kentucky, where one Indian is equal to twenty of our poor simpletons. He is a man who has dared much and suffered much, even the menace of death bound to the fiery stake. In a few words he told me of his escape, crediting it to his peculiar providence, which may be, when all is reduced, even the same providence as our own."

"But poor Juan would find Spanish soldiers far different from the naked savages of Kentucky, and let him be sufficient, even so, to the task in hand, he dare not quit the bounds of the mission lands. I suspect that Del Valle has men posted in waiting to seize him."

"Give him two pistols," said Padre Mateo, building his plan as if no breath had disturbed it, "and the beautiful long rifle that he carried when he came, and I would trust him to deliver both maiden and gold safely beneath this roof. And there is Cristóbal—see him how he stands with admiration in his eyes, looking up into Juan Molinero's face. Ha! there is a friendship already beginning there—see how our tall Juan smiles."

"See him, he gives his hand to the lad, and seems to make himself understood, although there are no words between them," Padre Ignacio marveled. "Yet there is a way of understanding when man


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 meets man that needs no words; I have marked that many times. Poor Cristóbal! I would have spared him today, but Geronimo declares he must work, in spite of the stripes on his back that made his shirt bloody. Discipline will fall without a firm hand to uphold it, our brave Geronimo declares."

"Cruelty is another thing," said Padre Mateo, "Ah! here is Geronimo! Unlucky chance!"

Don Geronimo came from the kitchen, stooping to pass the low connecting door. He stood a moment at sight of the Indian, Cristóbal, idling at his task, to step forward with admirable grace and lightness of foot, a sharp word on his tongue, the lash of his ready whip between his fingers, the thong of it about his wrist.

Cristóbal, his back ribbed and cut from the flogging of last night, did not leap away to follow the cart to the vineyard as Don Geronimo expected him to do at the first word. He fell back a step at Don Geronimo's unexpected appearance, where he stood with head up, his face set and immobile, as if he scorned to save himself the lash at the expense of his dignity in the eyes of his new friend. Don Geronimo's eyes twitched at the corners, a smile that seemed the snarl of anticipation moved his beard, baring his small white teeth. So he stood, slowly drawing the long lash of his whip between finger and thumb of his left hand, his right grasping the butt, like a fencer poising to bend his blade before throwing himself on guard.

Juan Molinero made a corner of the little triangle


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388 straight as well; low houses, (two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any quaintness of architectural ornamentation; locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they call them acacias;) a stirring, business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and every thing; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored American way. Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw only America! There was not one thing to remind us that we were in Russia. We walked for some little distance, reveling in this home vision, and then we came upon a church and a hack-driver, and presto! the illusion vanished! The church had a slender-spired dome that rounded inward at its base, and looked like a turnip turned upside down, and the hackman seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat without any hoops. These things were essentially foreign, and so were the carriages—but every body knows about these things, and there is no occasion for my describing them.

We were only to stay here a day and a night and take in coal; we consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were no sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holyday on our hands, with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy ourselves. We sauntered through the markets and criticised the fearful and wonderful costumes from the back country; examined the populace as far as eyes could do it; and closed the entertainment with an ice-cream debauch. We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess. We never cared any thing about ice-cream at home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so scarce in these red-hot climates of the East.

We only found two pieces of statuary, and this was another blessing. One was a bronze image of the Duc de Richelieu, grand-nephew of the splendid Cardinal. It stood in a spacious, handsome promenade, overlooking the sea, and from its base a


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 formed by the three figures in this quickly assembled scene. He stood about equidistant from Don Geronimo and the Indian, Don Geronimo on his left hand. Don Geronimo seemed to be measuring, the length of his whip across his chest between his outstretched arms, as a tailor measures cloth, making his dramatic pause of preparation long in his own enjoyment of it, as well as for the effect of the terror of suspense in the hearts of his assembled vassals who waited the fall of the first whistling blow. The lash was now at tip between his finger and thumb, the pliant black whip at full stretch in his outstretched arms. Don Geronimo lifted himself to tiptoe to whirl the whip, dexterous from long practice in its use.

Juan Molinero stepped in front of the mayordomo as he balanced for the blow, the gleam of his teeth widening in his beard.

"No!" said Juan Molinero, his hand lifted in stern prohibition, his body a barrier before the intended object of this inexorable arm. Don Geronimo's face grew white as the plastered wall; he let himself slowly down to his heels, the thongs of his lead-weighted whip-butt slipped from his slender wrist. Padre Ignacio came with quick stride between them, pushing them apart with outspread arms.

"He does not understand, Don Geronimo," he said. "He shall be taught that he must not interfere in your discipline."

"Very well," said Don Geronimo, his voice un-


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 shaken, although his hand trembled in his thwarted passion as he looped the long whip in his hand. "Let it be made very plain."

"Absolve poor Cristóbal his fault this morning, if he has been at fault, indeed, Don Geronimo. I will relieve you of him for a day or two; there is a work I have for him to do."

"Take him, then, Padre Ignacio," Don Geronimo yielded. He turned with what might have passed well for indifference in other eyes, and stepped lightly out to the court, where his saddled horse stood waiting in the sun.

"It is an unfortunate beginning," said Padre Ignacio, sadly; "there is murder in Don Geronimo's heart."


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ADRE MATEO rode his mule in a fashion that seemed to mark him for a belligerent man. He held his legs as stiff as posts in the stirrups, flaring them outward from the animal's sides, braced as if he sat ready to ride headlong in a charge at the first alarm, his brown gown pulled high from his shanks, which were marred by scratches from cactus and brier thorn, new and old.

All day he had ridden that wide-spread way, jaunty in spirit and ready in word, good companion for the road as ever sat in saddle at a comrade's elbow. There was no fatigue in him, hardened by his twenty years in California, where he had tramped in sandals more than once the long trail between San Diego and Monterey. But varied as his experiences had been in that land, this expedition which centered around a lady was something so strange and extraordinary in the way of duty that he found himself checking his outflying thoughts now and then to ask himself if fancy had not tricked him, and imagination contrived it all.

Padre Mateo was not displeased with his part in that outgoing expedition to the harbor of San Pedro, for even a monk may have his desire for


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 adventure as naturally and lawfully as other men. There is no doubt that he smiled quite frequently in the shadow of his broad hat as he rode at his companion's side.

This other was a man garbed in all essentials like Pedro Mateo himself, in the brown gown of the Franciscan brotherhood, the flat-crowned black hat with broad brim, the severe cord of hemp about his waist. Only this one wore long stockings with his sandals, as the upraised gown revealed. A cloak carelessly thrown over the horn of his saddle fell down the mule's withers almost to the rider's toes.

A mule-drawn cart, its wheels almost the height of a man, came behind the two monkly travelers. It was covered with a weathered canvas, which rested not on bows, but upright pieces supporting horizontal braces, making the top square instead of round, after the fashion since the first covered cart rumbled down the long white slopes of Spain. The driver was an Indian of middle age, falling about in the second generation of the padres' era in California. In front of them, scouting the way, Cristóbal rode, mounted on a young horse thin-legged and fleet, his lariat coiled at his saddle-horn, his bow and arrows, the only weapons the neophytes were permitted, ready to his hand.

It was a winding way across a broad valley that the travelers followed, where the dark green of and the brighter leaf of sycamore stood high above the grey tone of the general landscape. Shrubs grew so near the broken road through the


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 thickets in places that passing cart-hubs had marked them with black grease; again all growth but grass, which was dry now, and sere, fell away from open meadows where cattle grazed on the withered provender. Since leaving the pass through the hills, which they had crossed from San Fernando into this valley, they had not passed any habitation of civilized man, their road lying several miles westward of the Pueblo de Los Angeles. It was evening; the sun was in the tree-tops.

"Well, my good friend, how does the friar's gown feel to you by this time?" Padre Mateo inquired. He tilted his head back to look up into his comrade's face, his mule being two hands lower than the extraordinarily large animal which bore his friend.

"Not much of an outfit for hot weather, especially when a man's got these confounded tight Spanish breeches on under it," Juan Mojinero replied. "I tell you, Padre Mateo, if we meet any trouble on the road I think I'll skin out of this long brown sack. I like to have my legs free in a fight."

"No, no, Juan; no, no!" Padre Mateo said, shaking his head solemnly, greatly disturbed by the proposal. "Do as I have cautioned you if we meet soldiers, either on the road or at the Rancho Dominguez, where we shall arrive presently and spend the night. Bend your head a little, as a man in his thoughts, Juan, and pass them by without a word. If it becomes necessary to make explanations of your silence, I will do the talking, my boy. You


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 are a brother of the order, simply fray, not padre, as many Franciscans are; you come from a foreign land, you have no Spanish. I will guarantee that nobody who saw you yesterday, not even sharp old Sergeant Olivera himself, would recognize you today. This gown, your lean, ascetic face, your long jaw like the jaw of a man who has fasted—"

"Fasted I have, Padre Mateo. Did I tell you that for six days in the desert northeast of your mountains I had no meat, and only such water as I could suck out of that prickly plant with leaves like beavers' tails?"

"You did not tell me, Juan. But you have earned the right to wear the gown of a monk, at least in the cause of the distressed. But remember—silence if we meet soldiers. It will only complicate your situation in this country if you fight them, and unluckily kill one of them, Juan."

"Yes, that would be an unlucky go for me," Juan said, as grave as if the vows of the Franciscans bound him, in truth. "I'd take to the woods and run my chances rather than lift my hand against a soldier, or any officer of the law, in this or any other land."

Padre Mateo nodded, considering it silently a little way.

"Yes; just so," he said. "But we must be wise, as well as cautious, and then you shall have nothing to avoid when you meet the soldiers, if such a bad chance must come to us. I never could put myself on the same footing with Padre Ignacio


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 again if you should not return to San Fernando with me; it was harder than converting an Indian medicine man to get his consent to this masquerade. But without it you could not have ventured on the road with me. It would have been foolish to leave the mission in your own skin."

"Well, if I look as foolish as I feel, the soldiers will see through me like a spyglass."

"No soldier in the world but would take you for a friar," Padre Mateo declared.

"I'd feel suspicious if I was to meet that rawboned sergeant, Oliver, is it you call him?"

"Not even Olivera would know you," Padre Mateo insisted, his confidence profound. "Last night you were hairy as a bear; today you are clean as a fish out of the sea. Since I shaped up your hair according to the contour of your head, as a true friar's hair should be, I would see you walk with confidence within a foot of Sergeant Olivera's nose."

"Well, I hope we don't meet him; he's a feller with a mighty shrewd eye."

Day seemed to plunge its torch into the sea, the light gave way so quickly to dusk when the sun disappeared behind the low, grass-covered hills. They rode on through the twilight, Cristóbal growing dim before them. The incense of burning cedar carried faintly to them on the little wind that came rustling like a doe through the chaparral.

"I smell Fabio Dominguez' hearth-fire," Padre Mateo said. "There is the comfort of home-


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 coming in it, a sweet assurance that is as placid as an evening bell."

"Where on earth did you learn English, Padre Mateo?" Juan inquired, his wonder widening every time the priest spoke. "You know it a 'tarnal sight better than I do, or ever will."

"I learned it in Quebec, Canada, my little son, where I was carried by my parents when a little lad. Although French is more common there, the vigor of your roaring English always made my heart jump to hear. But I am neither English nor French, but a Spaniard of the bone. My father was a sea trader, who came to anchor in Quebec for its business advantages. And so it comes."

"I beg you to pardon my curiosity; I didn't mean to pry into your life."

"It is a book for any man to read," Padre Mateo said, so simply ingenuous that no man of honor could have doubted his smallest word.

"You remember it remarkably for all the years you've been where no man's got an English word in his mouth. That's all I can say for you."

"There are many Franciscan brothers who speak English; from time to time one of them has come my way these twenty years past. The last was a friar who made a survey extending our irrigating system; he remained at San Fernando almost two years. I kept his tongue going long hours. A good plan is to talk to your own ear when you are alone, but you will not have need of that in the practice of Spanish, a matter which you must begin at once.


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 That is Padre Ignacio's wish; he desires to be able to speak with you mouth to mouth."

"I guess I can pick it up, I'm handy with Indian talk."

"Spanish is not to be picked up like a savage jargon of the woods," Padre Mateo corrected him, almost severely, for he was touched in the spot where a Spaniard's skin is tenderest. "You shall learn it from the abecedario, as you would say the spelling-book, so you may hold speech with gentlemen without shame to yourself or your teachers. When we return, Juan Molinero, prepare yourself for this greatest pleasure that can come in the life of any man."

"I'll be proud to learn it, if I can twist my tongue around them little sliding-off sounds."

"You have a softness in your speech, as if southern winds had mellowed the harshness of your English throat. It is a strange thing, Juan, that the sweet-singing birds come from the lands of the south, where the speech of man is gentle and musical on the ear. Crows, with their harsh impertinence, are most commonly found in climes where the speech of man is also rough like a cough coming out of the breast. It is a thing to ponder. But as I have said, I like a roaring language which a man must open the mouth to let out of him, like rocks thrown from a volcano. So; we are approaching Pablo Dominguez' door."

"How far is it to the harbor?"

"Ten miles or so—too far to continue on tonight,


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 if that is your thought, Juan. In the morning we will take the road early, returning here for the night. The day after, with fortune that is due the valiant, we shall nestle the young bird safely in the walls of San Fernando."

The Dominguez house stood back some distance from the road, on a pleasant smooth hill where pine trees grew, making a fair setting for the low brown house. A high adobe wall enclosed the grounds to fend off the cattle which roamed hill and plain in thousands. At the double gate of solid planks, which Cristóbal had opened, Padre Mateo halted, slewed in his saddle and looked hard at Juan Molinero a little while without a word.

"Juan," he said at last, his voice serious and low, "I am afraid I have allowed a romantic, adventurous desire to bring you into peril. I fear the soldiers have been sent from the mission in the design of luring you out; it came to me only as we turned in to come to the gate. Captain del Valle is a man with an ambitious heart, jealous of his authority. Turn about then, Juan, and go back to the mission. The night will shelter you."

Juan Molinero laughed, and rode through the gate.

"But it must be considered," Padre Mateo insisted, pushing after him, drumming his mule's sides with his heels. "I am too quick to jump into something while the heat is on me; that has been a lifelong fault. Now I come on this expedition when prudence and wisdom should have been


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 heeded, bringing you to defend us against the brigands of the bosque. Captain del Valle has opened his hand, and the bird has stepped into it, woe is mine!"

"I was as keen as a hound on a frosty morning to go, Padre Mateo. Say no more."

"Something cold has come into my heart; I am afraid," Padre Mateo said.

They rode on to the dooryard, where Dominguez met them, offering the hospitality of his house. Dominguez, in the prime of his vigor, was a dark stocky man, full of words as a sack is full of wheat, for company did not come frequently to his door. Dominguez' house was not on the mission trail leading from San Diego to the north. On this harbor road there was little travel by persons of consequence, except when a ship came to San Pedro bay as now, which was perhaps not more than once a month. At other times the road was used by vaqueros riding to and from the pueblo, fishermen who came from the sea to trade their catch in the pueblo and the missions, and now and then a rancher who rode in to exchange news with his neighbor.

Dominguez held a grant from the king, as all the men of consequence who settled in California in those days were similarly favored. His house was a notable one, on account of the cedar beams which ribbed its ceilings having been brought from Mexico by ship. A woman servant was lighting many candles in the room where the Dominguez table was spread for the evening meal.


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 The rancher was astonished at sight of the tall friar, disappointed, too, that he had no understanding of Spanish, a fault that made him little better than a dumb man at the table so far as Dominguez' communication with him applied. Still there was a pleasure in having the stranger from a far country—Padre Mateo said he was an Englishman—bend his high head to enter the door of that house. Dominguez said so in as many words, and Mrs. Dominguez affirmed it with a smile that was full of broad white teeth. There was a young Dominguez of twenty or thereabout, and a daughter a year or two younger. These all sat at the long table with the two travelers, the young ones silent with that unembarrassed deference which graces the youth of well-bred Spanish and Mexican families.

Dominguez would have the whole story of their going and their object, nothing of which was kept from him but the identity of the masquerading friar. It was the best piece of news that had come in at the rancher's door in many a day; even young Dominguez listened with a sharpness that seemed to lift him out of his immature character, a flush deepening on his brown cheeks when his father turned to him in gaiety and said:

"Here is a wife coming for you at last, Guillermo!"

At which the young lady bent her head to hide a smile, and the mischievous banter of her bright brown eyes.

"You shall have Guillermo to go with you, Padre


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Rh vast flight of stone steps led down to the harbor—two hundred of them, fifty feet long, and a wide landing at the bottom of every twenty. It is a noble staircase, and from a distance the people toiling up it looked like insects. I mention this statue and this stairway because they have their story. Richelieu founded Odessa—watched over it with paternal care—labored with a fertile brain and a wise understanding for its best interests—spent his fortune freely to the same end—endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet make it one of the great cities of the Old World—built this noble stairway with money from his own private purse—and. Well, the people for whom he had done so much, let him walk down these same steps, one day, unattended, old, poor, without a second coat to his back; and when, years afterwards, he died in Sebastopol in poverty and neglect, they called a meeting, subscribed liberally, and immediately erected this tasteful monument to his memory, and named a great street after him. It reminds me of what Robert Burns’ mother said when they erected a stately monument to his memory: “Ah, Robbie, ye asked them for bread and they hae gi’en ye a stane.”

The people of Odessa have warmly recommended us to go and call on the Emperor, as did the Sebastopolians. They have telegraphed his Majesty, and he has signified his willingness to grant us an audience. So we are getting up the anchors and preparing to sail to his watering-place. What a scratching around there will be, now! what a holding of important meetings and appointing of solemn committees!—and what a furbishing up of claw-hammer coats and white silk neck-ties! As this fearful ordeal we are about to pass through pictures itself to my fancy in all its dread sublimity, I begin to feel my fierce desire to converse with a genuine Emperor cooling down and passing away. What am I to do with my hands? What am I to do with my feet? What in the world am I to do with myself?


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 Mateo, if you desire," Dominguez offered. "It is a bad business to travel these roads where every bush hides a thief, with a young lady and her treasure, and only an Indian boy with bow and arrows to stand in defense. It has been shown too often that these bandits have little respect: for a priest's gown on the road in these days of affliction."

"It is too true," Padre Mateo agreed, "But I think we shall pass without harm. If we feel the need of another arm as we return, then we shall enlist Guillermo, as you suggest."

"The soldiers passed here this afternoon, I think there is little danger," Mrs. Dominguez said, not a willing party to her husband's fine plan of placing the young lady from Mexico under obligation for ther son's defense. From the soft looks with which she caressed him it was certain the mother would meet at jealous point any attempt to beguile him from her house for a year or two yet, at least.

"The soldiers could have swept this band of robbers out of the country long ago if they had so much breath for pursuit of them as they have for drinking a man's wine," Dominguez criticized, not troubling to soften his contempt and resentment. "In the past month, Padre Mateo, this Sebastian Alvitre has stolen at least twenty of my sheep, which he devours without taking the trouble to go very far away from the roadside. If the soldiers wanted him badly they could track him almost any night by the smell of tallow dripping in the fire."

"You will have heard that he robbed two priests


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 from San Juan Capistrano not a week ago?" Padre Mateo inquired.

"May the spoil of it wither his arm!" Dominguez cursed the outlaw, his own hand lifted in solemn denunciation.

"We speak of the bandit, Sebastian Alvitre," Padre Mateo explained, turning to his companion, who attended to his meal in the thoughtful silence of a man who might have much on his heart.

"What sort of man is he?" Juan inquired, lifting his blue eyes from his plate.

"He asks what sort of man this Alvitre is, and I cannot answer him," Padre Mateo said, looking up the table where his host filled the substantial oak armchair in complacent dignity.

"For that matter, neither can I," Dominguez returned. "I have been told that he is of a vile countenance, black as a scorched loaf, but I never have seen him. Let us hope that our meeting with him, one and all of us, is far away."

"And the soldiers went this way today?" Padre Mateo inquired. "Can you tell me, doña, whether they went toward the harbor?"

"They went in that direction," Mrs. Dominguez replied, nodding her sleek black head until the long ear-pendants swung like pendulums against her neck.

"The soldiers are at the harbor," Padre Mateo said, addressing Juan, trouble clouding his hearty face. "Now, Juan when supper is over you will take the road on a fresh mule that I will procure


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 for you, and dawn will see you safely in San Fernando. It will be a load removed from my conscience and my heart."

Juan was vexed by Padre Mateo's insistence that he make himself safe at the expense of his loyalty to a friend and duty to the expedition that he felt to be as much his own personal affair as that of any other man concerned. A flood of color, as of the rush of a hot retort, came into his face, deepening the fiery coating sun and wind had given the newly shaved portion of it that day. He turned his head slowly and fixed his steady eyes on Padre Mateo's own.

"We settled that business, once and for all, out there at the gate," he said. "When the time comes for me to turn my back to soldiers, or anybody else, I don't want to be told; I just want to sneak off with my shoulders up to my ears, like a man that's whipped his wife. I'd feel that way. Now, Padre Mateo, say no more."

Padre Mateo held his eyes up under the severe rebuke from his companion of the road, although his face was ruddier for the slow, pointed words than the good food and unstinted wine of Rancher Dominguez' table warranted. A moment of silence, eye fixed on eye, as each man probed deep into the well of the other's honesty and courage. Padre Mateo laughed, and slapped his friend's brown gown until the dust of the road rose under his hearty hand.

It was a strange business between monks, Domin-


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 guez thought, watching the by-play with round eyes. He never before had seen any expression of the small sympathies of life common to other men between these severe brown-cassocked friars who went marching up and down the long white roads with rawhide sandals on their undaunted feet.

"Who sounds on the door?" Dominguez asked, starting at the rude note that broke the placidity of his hour.

"Shall I inquire, father?" the young man asked, pushing back to rise.

"Again!" said Dominguez, resentful of this rude hand that beat so loudly on his stout oak door. "No; I will go; permit me."

The dining-hall lay at one side of the broad entrance-way, into which it opened through a wide-spanned arch. Dominguez stood for a moment under this arch, grasping the velvet curtain, bending a little, straining in doubtful pose, as if he questioned the honesty of a man who came at such an hour. In a moment his hand was heard on the chain of the door.

The traveler inquired the direction and the distance to the Pueblo de Los Angeles; Dominguez replying politely as he was asked.

"Can I buy refreshment here?" the traveler inquired.

"No," said Dominguez, his caution struck down by the challenge to his hospitality. "Enter; this is not a tavern."

The stranger was brief with his thanks; he stood


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 waiting while Dominguez fastened the chain. Dominguez parted the curtains, the stranger stepped into the light. Juan Molinero and Padre Mateo were seated at the side of the table, their faces toward the arched door, giving them a close view of the stranger as he set foot within the room.

The traveler was a man of medium stature, heavy in the shoulders with ungraceful strength, like a laborer; a swart man, with rough-modeled features, his face overgrown with the stubble of a thick black beard. His nose, very short and small, had an upturned end, as if nature had pushed him aside with impatient thumb after finding him unsatisfactory when finished. He was a pig-eyed, peon type of man, his black mustaches small and bristling, a leering sneer in his countenance as of one who resented his position in human affairs while lacking either the merit to justify advancement at other hands, or the ability to contrive it with his own.

For a traveler who had no more to defend than this man apparently carried about him, the stranger was well armed. In addition to a sabre which almost touched the floor as he stood, he carried four pistols, two on each side, in holsters attached to the broad belt buckled around his middle over the soiled yellow sash with green stripes, which hung in frayed tassels to his thigh. There was dust on his peaked sombrero, which he kept with ill-mannered boorishness on his head, dust on his embroidered short jacket, and in the creases at the knees of his tight-fitting buff velvet pantaloons, cut


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 so broad at the bottoms as to almost hide his feet, strapped beneath his insteps and fastened with silver buckles. He evidently had been in the saddle a long time.

"You are late on the road," said Dominguez.

"It is a habit with me," the other replied.

"Will you sit at the table, gentleman?" Dominguez put his obligation as host above the affront this coarse fellow offered himself, his family and his guests. He placed a chair beside Juan Molinero, inviting with graceful cordiality the visitor to sit to his refreshment.

"A man doesn't sit down to the business I have come for, Dominguez," the stranger replied. He snatched a pistol, with the quick movement of a man aroused to sudden passion, and presented it at Dominguez' breast. "Steady, Dominguez! One little movement and you are with the dead. So, you have not met Sebastian Alvitre? Have a good look at him, then, so you can tell the next slipfoot priest that comes to your door the color of his eyes."

Dominguez stood with shoulders squared, head erect, a little paler for the menace of the pistol, but in dignity greater than his fear.

"Alvitre, you are a coward, then, as well as a thief, to enter a man's house on this false pretense," Dominguez said.

"That will be enough, little man!" Alvitre warned, his scowl black in the threat of death. "No, sit in the chair, your hands on the table, boy,"


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 he ordered young Dominguez, who was half-risen in some design of his own courageous young heart.

Padre Mateo commanded the young man down with frantic hand, for he could see, as plainly as if the price stood printed on Alvitre's face, the cheap valuation he set on a human life.

"What is this?" Juan Molinero asked, hands on the table-edge as if to rise.

"It is the thief of whom we spoke but a little while ago," Padre Mateo whispered. "God save us now!"

"When you speak nothing good of a man, shut your window, Dominguez, and see that your shutters are closed so tight one little word cannot pass," the outlaw said, making a meaning gesture with his shoulder toward the open casement. "A man might ride on if he heard a kind word fly out, but what is to be expected of priests who make slaves of helpless Indians, and fat farmers who get gifts from the king? So I sound on your door, Dominguez; I step into your house to take from you a thousand dollars. Your wife will bring it to me, while you stand here ready to be killed if one little hair raises on your head."

"I haven't so much money, not a tenth of it," Dominguez said.

"That is a lie!" Alvitre charged. "You have sold hides and tallow lately. There is money in your chest."

"A little, only a very little," Dominguez pro-


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 tested, whether in truth or in desperate subterfuge perhaps only himself knew.

"In such case I will take the young lady away with me, the young dove that sits yonder. She will do instead of money, if it will please you better, Dominguez."

Young Dominguez leaped to his feet at the threat, laying hold of his heavy chair to strike the outlaw down. A second more and he would have worked his brave intention, but Alvitre, quicker than the youth, drew another pistol with his left hand. Grinning with a coyote snarl he aimed not at young Dominguez, but at the mother of the family, who sat only a little more than the length of his arm from where he stood.

Alvitre stood across the table from Juan Molinero, who sat in his place, hands on the edge of the board, the sleeves of his brown gown wide as grain sacks on his arms. On the outlaw's right hand, two feet or so beyond the pistol pointed at his breast, Dominguez stood; on his left, the son of the family had crouched down in his chair at the double command of outlaw and priest, where he sat alert and determined, palpitating in his wrath which burned in his cheeks and eyes. And there stood the obscene Alvitre, his arms in a manner outspread to aim his pistols at the hostages whom he had chosen to enforce his will upon that house.

So Juan Molinero sat, hands on the cloth, this scene fixed in his perception like the figures in a carving. There Dominguez stood, pale, watchful,


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 ready to put his life down in vain effort to protect his own; at the foot of the table, his wife, terror in her distended eyes; near her hand the daughter of the family, a flame of resentment for this treacherous invasion, this insolent demand; and young Dominguez, straining like a poised panther, ready to leap to his own destruction in the fierce anger of his courageous heart. All this Juan Molinero saw, down to the detail of the lightest breath. Padre Mateo put out a vain hand to stay him as he rose from his place, and leaped full into the outlaw's arms.

They had the sight of that brown-clad man, whom all but one in that company thought to be a friar, his arms spread as if to embrace Alvitre, the moment before pistol-shots roared and the smoke of the discharge made confusion of the struggle. Alvitre was lying insensible on the floor at the next sight; bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling between the brown cedar beams where the bullets had struck. Juan Molinero was unbuckling sword and pistols from the outlaw's body, one substantial foot in broad sandal set on the prostrate form to guard against a sudden revival.

Dominguez shouted to the others to put out the lights, thinking at once of Alvitre's men, fearing their fire through the window. The candles on the table were blown out in a breath; mother and daughter sprang to puff out the others which stood on the sideboard across the room.

"Leave one candle burning till we bind him fast


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 for the soldiers!" Padre Mateo called, his voice strong and loud.

"He will be held, never doubt," Dominguez panted, his knees on Alvitre's shoulders where he lay face to the floor.

Juan Molinero fastened the outlaw's pistol belt around him, and took the sabre in his hand.

"I'll see to the others," he said to Padre Mateo.

"God speed you, my son!" Padre Mateo replied. "Here," jerking off the hemp rope that was his girdle, holding it out to Dominguez, "this will hold him—bind him well."

Dominguez made a quick loop of the stout rope around Alvitre's arm, leaned over, reaching for the other one. Juan Molinero was at the door; the sharp clink of the heavy chain was in their ears. And Sebastian Alvitre, fox that had scorned and beaten the traps of many men, leaped to his feet, flinging those who clung to him aside as a man in the harvest flings sheaves of wheat. A spring, and he was on the low sill of the open window; a leap through the unfastened shutter, and he was gone in the dark.

Dominguez shouted; the last candle was blown out. They stood waiting; silent, expectant. Juan Molinero returned after a little while, to find them scarcely breathing in the dark house, where Dominguez had drawn them out of the range of windows behind his thick adobe walls.

"He was alone," Juan reported; "all I got was his horse. He slipped past me in the bushes."


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 Dominguez made a light, and exclaimed in amazement, and lifted his candle high.

"What is this?" he asked, turning in astonishment to Padre Mateo. "A monk went out, a cavalier returns! God save us! what is this?"

There Juan Molinero stood, in his short jacket and tight pantaloons which his long gown had hidden, Sebastian Alvitre's pistols strapped around him, the robber's sabre at his side. Close at his heels the young Indian, Cristóbal, was standing, a gleam of white teeth in his dark face, the long brown gown across his arm.

"I stripped it off, Padre Mateo, so I'd be free in case of a fight," said Juan.


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OMINGUEZ had waited at his gate since Padre Mateo and his party left his house early in the morning, his pistols in his belt, his gun on his shoulder. It had been his expectant fear that Alvitre, the brigand, would return as soon as Padre Mateo and his valiant companion took the road, to revenge the humiliation he had suffered in that house.

The rancher had watched this bright-haired stranger ride away on Sebastian Alvitre's famous horse, his brown monk's gown tied to the cantle of his saddle. No amount of argument, protestation or entreaty on Padre Mateo's part had been enough to induce him to envelop his limbs in the disguise again. Dominguez did not understand the words of his reply to Padre Mateo, but his bearing and his manner seemed easily interpreted. In effect, the disguise would appear a coward's subterfuge, something that men might say was put on because he feared to meet Alvitre by day.

It was very true, thought Dominguez. He was generous and hearty in his acknowledgment of service to the stranger, but there was something bigger than a little doubt in him that this long-strid-


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 ing man could have leaped and grappled the outlaw without getting a bullet in his eye if he had not been shrouded in a monk's disguise. Sebastian Alvitre did not expect to meet violence in that quarter; he had not looked for a monk to leap on him like a cougar and strip him at once of his dignity and his arms. Although it was a fortunate leap for that house, and all within it, Dominguez owned without reservation, it was almost certain to result in reprisals and acts of vindictive revenge which might not leave a rafter over his head.

Now this stranger with the barbarous speech on his tongue that only Padre Mateo, of all men, could understand, was riding boldly on Alvitre's horse, Alvitre's sword and pistols at his hand, and other pistols at his saddle-horn, to say nothing of the strange long rifle in the cart. Ten men might fall in the fiery rain this man could set loose from his hands without reloading a single pistol. Well, he would need all his pistols, and more, Dominguez thought with grave foreshadowing of disaster in his breast, when Alvitre and his men leaped out of the bosque and laid hold of the reins.

It was now midafternoon; the travelers had not come in sight on their return from the harbor, although they had been gone long enough, and time to spare. Dominguez feared that Alvitre already had taken his revenge.

Dominguez knew the story of John Miller, although he did not attempt to remember a name of such alien sound; Padre Mateo had told him, with-


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 out reservation, how this strange wanderer was himself an outlaw from the very fact of his presence in California. The priest had relied on the rancher's sense of justice and gratitude to keep the stranger's identity to himself if Sergeant Olivera and his men should chance that way. Dominguez respected a man who moved boldly with a peril over his head; it was his profound hope that Juan Molinero should reach the safety of the mission without mischance.

Dominguez was considering sending his wife and daughter to the mission along with Padre Mateo's cavalcade, where they would be safe from the vengeance of Alvitre, which was certain to center particularly on that house. Alvitre would not rest until he had adjusted his account of humiliation and disgrace in his followers' eyes by some notoriously cruel and outrageous deed against the Dominguez family. It was a time when men of consequence, such as Dominguez, stood alone on their defense against such as Alvitre, the military force being small, the civil government weak and indifferent, full of dissensions and jealousies. A rancher in those early times gathered his own forces about him, like a baron in his fastness, and stood or fell as he might.

Twenty men could have been summoned to stand at arms in defense of the Dominguez mansion, as it was called, but that would have left the cattle on the range unprotected. It was a very good measure of the mettle in the early Californians that Domin-


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 guez considered himself sufficient for all corners, give him his pistols and his gun.

Alvitre, the bandit, was notable in his brief day for his escape from a Mexican prison, his long ride to California on the very horse that Juan Molinero had captured, and his contempt for both church and state. He would rob a priest as readily as he would a rancher, but the poor he let pass, a provision of his code which had won him great respect and many friends, as similar exemptions have won for other bandits, before and since, among those whom it does not pay to rob.

This Alvitre had his lair in the Pueblo de Los Angeles, in that year of 1806 but a poor collection of refugees, banished ones, retired and brokendown soldiers, and such as had been induced by the government bounty offered to settlers in the California pueblos, to take up life there. The town was an unattractive and shiftless place, built around the plaza, an irrigation ditch leading water through it from the little river that ran near by. There were a few small mercantile establishments, many cantinas, or retail liquor stores, and goats and pigs, and crumbling adobe bricks, under the feet at every turn.

Here Alvitre and his four or five attendants came to spend the proceeds of their excursions upon the king's highway; here they were safe, for every hut was a refuge, and the comisionado, an ex-sergeant, was not notable as a disciplinarian in civil life, no matter what he had been in military.

All these things Dominguez had for his consid-


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 eration as he stood at his gate between his eight-feet-high adobe walls. He had little hope, little confidence, that this new man, Sergeant Olivera, would do more than those who had gone before him the past year at the mission. Up to this time Alvitre had not preyed on the ranches, except to take such sheep and cattle as he wanted for food, collecting his tribute from the many travelers who passed up and down between the north and south. It appeared now that his methods were changing. The time had come to put this Alvitre down. Well, they had come within a breath of doing it. If that stranger had not gone to the door and left them alone with the wily scoundrel! But it was done; Alvitre was waiting his hour.

Padre Mateo's company arrived when the sun was resting its rim on the tiles of Dominguez' house. The young woman on whose account this expedition had been made, alighted from the covered cart when it came to a stand under the pinetrees near the door.

Dominguez was disappointed in her at first sight because he found her lacking in the voluptuousness of figure, the sprightly vivaciousness of face, such as he accounted beauty in a woman. True, she came down out of the cart with a spring in her step, and no fear of breaking her leg when she landed. Dominguez liked her for that. She was nimble and slim and fair, even fair of hair like an Andalusian, with brown eyes of a softness that fine chamois skin is to the hand. Dominguez liked her very well for


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E anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago. To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with pines—cloven with ravines—here and there a hoary rock towering into view—long, straight streaks sweeping down from the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche of former times—all these were as like what one sees in the Sierras as if the one were a portrait of the other. The little village of Yalta nestles at the foot of an amphitheatre which slopes backward and upward to the wall of hills, and looks as if it might have sunk quietly down to its present position from a higher elevation. This depression is covered with the great parks and gardens of noblemen, and through the mass of green foliage the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there like flowers. It is a beautiful spot.

We had the United States Consul on board—the Odessa Consul. We assembled in the cabin and commanded him to tell us what we must do to be saved, and tell us quickly. He made a speech. The first thing he said fell like a blight on every hopeful spirit: he had never seen a court reception. (Three groans for the Consul.) But he said he had seen receptions at the Governor-General’s in Odessa, and had often listened to people’s experiences of receptions at the Russian and other courts, and believed he knew very well what sort of ordeal we were about to essay. (Hope budded again.) He said we were many; the summer-palace was small—a mere


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 that. She was thin, according to Dominguez' thought of what a woman should be, almost as flat of the bosom—not quite, certainly, to be sure—as Guillermo himself, and she was twenty-five if she was a day. For this Dominguez did not like her at all.

"She will not do for Guillermo," he said to his wife as the guest entered the door, speaking with great politeness behind his hand, regretful that the exigency demanded the warning. "It must not be encouraged."

Dominguez expressed his disappointment in her to Padre Mateo as they sat smoking in the patio after supper.

"I had hoped she would do for Guillermo, but it is not to be considered," he sighed. "She would be a grandmother by the time he was thirty."

"Nothing is so far from her thought as a husband," Padre Mateo replied. "Her first confidence to me was that she wanted to become a nun. But that, of course, cannot be. There are no convents, no nuns, in California. Poor Gertrudis! I think she will have to marry somebody, in the end."

"Doña Magdalena will be a mother to her at the mission, and Don Geronimo a second father," Dominguez said. "She is going to a life as serene as if she had become the bride of Our Señor, indeed, but what use a poor pale thing like that will be to you there I cannot imagine. She looks as if she lived on the whites of eggs."

"There is great endurance, and great souls, very