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68 startled by a sudden knocking at her chamber door, and the voice of Senor Lopez, who bade her close the casement immediately and retire to her couch. Reluctantly obeying the imperious mandate, she waved a grateful acknowledgment to the handsome cavalier, who bowed with ardent respect as she vanished from his sight ; and then she sought her couch-but not to sleep. Her thoughts had now a more agreeable subject for meditation, and she reflected upon it with sanguine and delightful anticipations. A new life seemed dawning upon hera life of love and happiness, in which is comprised woman's chief existence ; and a still small voice whispered to her heart that its yearnings were not all in vain-that it might yet pour out its treasures without reserve, and receive a grateful return, while the world would be no longer to her so lonely and dreary as it had ever seemed since her mother's death.

Slumber at length closed her eyelids, and her dreams were of a most blissful nature, for they imaged forth visions of love and lovers singing and playing amid rosy bowers, while her unknown " Velasco" appeared to be their king, and still paid all homage to her-choosing her out from among the loveliest to be his bride and queen. Her breast seemed thrilling with an almost suffocating feeling of rapture, and her heart swelling full, nearly to bursting with the intensity of its joys, until arriving as it were at the summit of bliss, those bright fancies were suddenly dissipated by the entrance of a hideous dragon amidst that fairy scene to fright her from its enjoyment. She awoke, and her thoughts reverted back to the incidents of the evening previous, while they seemed almost too delightful for reality, and she could hardly convince herself that they were not also a portion of her dream. But there lay the rose withering upon her toilet, to which she ran and read over and over again the sweet confession that " Velasco ! loved her with all his heart !" She was satisfied that had been no delusion, and with an indescribable expression of delight and wonder blendingly depicted upon her sunny features, she pressed the mute messenger to her coral lips, and smiled as if its very fragrance breathed of love.

"He loves me ! he loves me !" she exclaimed in the exuberance of her joy, which was, however, immediately checked by a more serious reflection. "But who is it that loves me ?" she musingly asked herself. "Who is Senor Velasco ?" She could not imagine whom he might be, for she had never heard the name, and was therefore unable to conclude whether he was a noble, or hidalgo-though he must be a perfect gentleman, or he would never have devised such an exquisitely romantic mode of expressing his passion to her. " And does he really love me ?" She mused ; but this, the more she reflected upon it, seemed as puzzling as the rest, for how was she to determine whether he intended it all as some mere passing act of gallantry, or was sincere in his professions ? Yet even then it was bliss to believe the doubtful equivocation, that “ lies like truth."

From morn till night, the image of that handsome cavalier, and the flattering words of his song, so occupied her mind that she could think of little else ; while she sat humming over, the pleasing air, and gazing upon the place where she last saw him wafting kisses toward her on the wings of night, and as intently as if he were still visible to her sight. Her wakeful fancies now conjured up dreams again similar to her midnight vision ; but they were also doomed to be dispelled by a phantom equally as horrible and appearing more like reality than the former.

Three days afterwards, Senor Lopez congratulatingly informed her that she was a betrothed bride ! and that her marriage would take place in the course of a few short weeks! She was astonished ! aye, utterly confounded by the unexpected intelligence ; and sooth there was indeed ample reason, for this was the first intimation she had received of such being a probable occurrence. However, after the first shock of the startling communication had passed over, she began to console herself with the reflection that it must be " Velasco" who had thus suddenly proposed for her ; but as her guardian continued, she nearly fainted with the sudden reaction which chilled her hopes.

"You see, my dear, Don Emanuel, who is a nobleman at Madrid, has written to me, soliciting the honor of your hand in marriage. Knowing well his state and importance, I returned him my consent immediately.'

" But you could not give him my consent !" said she in a tone of deep reproach.

" Oh, no ! you will give that as a matter of course !" he replied, laughing, without appearing to think that she could have the slightest objection to so advantageous a match.

Dona Constanza felt ready to weep with indignation ; but womanly pride sustained her, and she returned in a tone that was intended to signify her firmness, though her voice was tremulous with emotion. " Then, Senor, as a matter of course, I will not give my consent ; but will rather enter a convent than marry Don Emanueleven though he were the king himself!" And she turned quickly from the presence of her mercenary guardian toward her chamber, there to give relief to her sorrows and vexation by a flood of tears. She was very angry with him for such impertinent officiousness ; as indeed what young maiden would not have been, thus to be disposed of, like a horse or a slave- to have a husband selected and agreed upon, and her own approval and consent to an arrangement, usually the most important of any in woman's life, deemed of very little account -but to follow, however, as a " matter of course." She knew nothing of Don Emanuel, except that his name


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Rh or wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay—as, "The Bed-Post: Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary—" The Window-Blind: Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things, on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but any one else may do it better, if any one else will only try.

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A Piece of Chalk

REMEMBER one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays, when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on B

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 the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. JI explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for

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 instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. 'The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful, As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of

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 angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves

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 clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When (so to speak) your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

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 Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. Ina word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and noncommittal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver satin, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies. Which is not the case.

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly

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 stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled mere miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on: it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilization; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.

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7 of the sick woman, until daylight began to dawn.

Then the three watchers thought there was a change. Her lips moved, unintelligent sounds escaped them, life seemed to be re- turning — life without reason. Presently her voice was louder, her utterance more distinct. Her mind wandered, not in the ravings of madness over troublous events and painful times, but rather seemed to roam over the scenes of her infancy, in country places and green fields.

Her speech was not coherent, many of her words were unintelligible to those about her bed, but ever and anon her voice rose and became painfully distinct. She called " Father !" now ; now, at her mother's knee, a little child again, she said, in a low sweet voice, which one at least of those three watchers never for- got, scraps of hymns her baby voice had doubtless often sung in peace, and far, far away. And she was very young now, and very fair, with long flaxen hair and delicately chiselled features, and a form of perfect symmetry.

Softer and softer her voice became, and she spoke at longer and longer intervals, till, in the early dawn of the New Year's-day, she lay calm and composed, and her blue eyes were closed in sleep.

Seeing this, the nurse left the room: the surgeon and the landlady watched by the pillow of the sufferer still.

She slept about an hour. When her eyes unclosed, she seemed to have recovered her senses, for she looked wistfully about her. Her wishes were understood — they placed her baby by her side: she gave it one gentle caress, one long loving look from her large tearful blue eyes, then murmuring in a low, sweet voice —

"Through life's long day, through death's dark night, Oh! gentle Jesus, be our light" —

she sank upon her pillow into a soft slumber.

When the grim nurse returned, her Spirit had departed from Earth.

The same pale cold daylight of the New Year's morn that penetrated into the chamber of death, in Wilderness Row, streamed in through the casements of Robert Mortimer's chamber, in Grosvenor Square.

The dawn of New Year's-day is a holy time and should give birth to holy thoughts; not such were his. He had spent the night in un- righteous vigil — the unrumpled bedclothes plainly told that he had not sought his couch; wrapped in a dressing-gown, and seated before the fire in an easy-chair, his hands held a book before him, but his thoughts were not on the volume; — he sat like Richelieu awaiting François' packet.

Pale, anxious, agitated, his careworn face displayed the perturbed working of his mind; every nerve was racked, every sensibility stretched to the furthest compass; no need now to maintain the appearance of composure—nobody could see him: he sat listening to every sound, as the wild animal caught in a snare listens to the approaching footsteps of the trapper. With aching head, parched lips, moist brow, and trembling damp hands, he sat and listened.

At the sound of wheels in the street he rose with a start, drew back his curtains, and stared out.

The busy world was Avaking to life and action. He put out his lights and continued to stand at the window. It was such a morning as New Year's morning should be, bright, clear, and frosty; but its brightness brought no cheer to him. The milkman was leaving his milk at a neighbouring house, and saluting a rosy-cheeked kitchen maid on the area-steps with a hearty "Wish you a happy new year, my lass." Robert Mortimer closed his window with a growl. It was chilly, and he sat down again before his fire. At length the church clocks struck nine. A quick light footstep was heard on the stair. Mortimer opened the door, and admitted Brady.

"Well, what news?"

"Dead, sir."

Robert Mortimer clasped his brow with his hands and seated himself on his bed.

"Died at eight this morning, sir," Brady continued, after a brief silence.

"Her brat? " said Mortimer, looking up and darting an eager glance at Brady.

"Doing well enough, I believe, sir," replied his imperturbable servant.

There was another brief interval of silence. Then Mortimer started up from his seat and began to unfasten the girdle of his dressing-gown.

Brady advanced to the door of the chamber.

"Say nothing of all this, Brady," said his master, slowly and emphatically. " You know something of my reasons; more of my purposes than I have told you. There is nothing lost by being trustworthy in my service; of that

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 The Secret of a Train

WILL not say that this story is true: because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no conclusion; itis, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them. What we call its triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were of them), but Iam not making up the atmosphere or the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they were truly as I shall now describe.

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12 sometimes gently hint, with a sigh, how essential his late friend the General had considered early male superintendence, in forming the character and habits of a boy—of a future soldier, especially. "It is a pity you could not get over very natural prejudices, Lady Osborne, and make, at least for your boy's sake, the acquaintance of our American neighbour."

When her blunt adviser had left her, Mabel, pursuing the train of thought which he had conjured up, fell into a reverie, the subject of which, of course, was the unvarying kindness and lofty character of him whose loss she so truly still deplored. The evening was wet and stormy, the boy, forbidden to enjoy it out of doors, had gone early to bed ; and his mother, unable to settle to any of her ordinary occupations, bethought her of an often deferred task, to which now, however, she felt unaccountably prompted to devote her solitary hours; viz., the opening of a heavy foreign wood escritoire belonging to the late Sir Jasper; which, packed up with other bulky articles by the lawyer who superintended the hurried removal from B——, had, with these, been deposited in the first instance at the Hall, and only found its way with the portraits, and other personals, quite lately, to the Hollies.

Had it been by her in the early times of her bereavement, to open and look over the treasures in the handwriting of her lost one, which it might possibly contain, would have seemed easy and natural; nay, it had even been soothing to feelings concentrated on one subject, and incapable of admitting any other. But when time has invested with a sort of awful solemnity the relics it would once have been luxury to handle and weep over, nature shrinks from reopening the scarce cicatrized wound, and rifling, with world-stained hands, the repositories of departed affection. An irresistible impulse, however, now prompted Mabel to conquer this idle repugnance, and interrogate on topics, perhaps of vital importance, to her boy, the hitherto unconsulted oracle.

The key habitually used by the owner had somehow or other been mislaid, and Mabel recollected that while force had been necessary to get at some of the other packages, her mind had revolted from the idea of breaking open her husband's private escritoire. Still disinclined to such a mode of attaining her object (one unattainable, had she wished it, till the following day), she began that idle desultory review of her own keys which, on such occasions is resorted to, with slight hope, and less chance of success.

A delicate little Bramah, with whose precise appearance she was not familiar, struck her as likely to suit the lock. But when on being applied it not only fitted the intricate wards, but had evidently been made for them, it flashed on her grateful recollection that on purchasing the desk, within a few months of their happy marriage, her husband, with the chivalrous gallantry of his nature, had presented his wife with the duplicate key; which, had she been endowed with the aggregate curiosity of Blue Beard's seven wives, that very confidence would have precluded her from using.

This delicate touch of tender trustfulness did not tend to nerve her hand while unlocking, with almost a feeling of sacrilege, the escritoire, which she now recollected had been hastily closed and removed from the invalid's bed on a sudden attack of faintness; and though once or twice afterwards eagerly asked for, the request, as implying undue exertion, had been gently evaded.

It was, therefore, probably the owner's last earthly sentiments and wishes, which his faltering hands had imperfectly sought to trace ; and by them, before going further, Mabel had resolved, nay, even prayed, to be guided. This resolution was not the less fervently reiterated, that the first object which met her eye on opening the desk was her own picture — a lovely, full-length miniature — done in the palmy days of that well-nigh superseded art, by the first artist of the day, in all the bloom of youth and glow of early animation at the age of nineteen — the year in which Cecil Cunlifife's long vacation had been passed at the Hall. The original oil painting from which it was taken had been done for her father; and her brother (whose projected grand tour would, had it taken place, have separated him from his family) had stipulated for a miniature copy, all to himself, of his darling sister.

Thus doubly endeared to memory as the sole heirloom of one lost loved one, it had been transferred, on his death, to Sir Jasper, in whose eyes it had thus acquired an enhanced value ; while, to the sad survivor of both, it attained a preciousness she little thought any "counterfeit presentment" of herself could ever acquire. She put it, however, hastily aside, as she did a long fair tress of her still redundant hair, which lay beside the picture, and which she remembered had been cut off on receiving the latter by her husband, with the feint of jealousy (assumed to conceal tenderer feelings, implied in his saying— "this, at least, will be my very own!"

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Rh notice referred to in subsection (1) owns, possesses, controls or holds any interest in any property which is excessive, having regard to his present or past emoluments and all other relevant circumstances, such officer of the Commission may by written direction require him to furnish a statement on oath or affirmation explaining how he was able to own, possess, control or hold such excess and if he fails to explain satisfactorily such excess, he commits an offence and shall on conviction be liable to—
 * (a) imprisonment for a term not exceeding twenty years; and
 * (b) a fine which is not less than five times the value of the excess, if the excess is capable of being valued, or ten thousand ringgit, whichever is the higher.

(4) Every person to whom a direction is sent by such officer of the Commission under subsection (3) shall, notwithstanding any written law or rule of law to the contrary, comply with the terms of the direction within such time as may be specified in the direction, and if such person willfully neglects or fails to comply with such direction, he commits an offence and shall on conviction be liable to—
 * (a) imprisonment for a term not exceeding twenty years; and
 * (b) a fine which is not less than five times the value of the excess, if the excess is capable of being valued, or ten thousand ringgit, whichever is the higher.

(5) Every person to whom a notice or direction is sent by an officer of the Commission of the rank of Commissioner and above under this section shall be legally bound to state the truth and shall disclose all information which is within his knowledge, or which is available to him, or which is capable of being obtained by him.

(6) Where any person discloses an information or produces any accounts, documents or records, in response to a notice under subsection (1), such person, his agent or employee, or any other person acting on his behalf or under his direction, shall not, by reason only of such disclosure or production, be liable to prosecution for any offence under or by virtue of any law, or to any proceeding or claim by any person under or by virtue of any law or under or by virtue of any contract, agreement or arrangement, or otherwise.


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42 (7) Subsection (6) shall not bar, prevent or prohibit the institution of any prosecution for any offence—
 * (a) as provided by this section;
 * (b) of giving false evidence in relation to any statement on oath or affirmation furnished to an officer of the Commission of the rank of Commissioner and above pursuant to this section; or
 * (c) provided for in section 27.

Order not to part with, deal in, movable property in bank, etc.

37. (1) Where the Public Prosecutor is satisfied on information given to him by an officer of the Commission that any movable property, including any monetary instrument or any accretion thereto, which is the subject matter of an offence under this Act or evidence in relation to the commission of such offence, is in the possession, custody or control of a bank, he may, notwithstanding any other written law or rule of law, by order direct the bank not to part with, deal in, or otherwise dispose of such property or any part thereof until the order is revoked or varied.

(2) A bank or any agent or employee of a bank shall not, on account of such compliance, be liable to any prosecution under or by virtue of any law or to any proceeding or claim by any person under or by virtue of any law or under or by virtue of any contract, agreement, or arrangement, or otherwise.

(3) A person who fails to comply with an order of the Public Prosecutor under subsection (1) commits an offence and shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding two times the amount which was paid out in contravention of the Public Prosecutor’s order or fifty thousand ringgit, whichever is the higher, and to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

Seizure of immovable property

38. (1) Where the Public Prosecutor is satisfied on information given to him by an officer of the Commission that any immovable


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HITE as a dove that had come to rest in that green valley with her breast against the warm fair earth, the mission of San Fernando Rey de España appeared to one approaching from the north, its small grey adobe buildings nestling around it like an unfledged brood. From the south, along the Camino Real, or royal road, the traveler came upon it in a manner unexpected, there in its place called the Valley of the Encinas, that is to say, the evergreen oaks. But come to it from what direction one might, white-plastered adobe walls and soft-red tiles partly hidden behind green boughs of oak and willow, the savor of its kitchen came on the wind to greet him like the word of a hearty host.

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 the day to the broad doors of the hospice, from which none departed unfed. Here Magdalena Lozano, cook extraordinary to the mission fathers and all who put feet beneath their plenteous table, reigned in dignity, with hams and bacon hanging on the joists which crossed the deep chamber midway between floor and roof, the unctuous condensations of countless dinners caked black and thick upon her walls.

There was no chimney to Magdalena's grill, where meats were roasted and broiled above the living coals, and vast cauldrons hung on giant cranes to boil and mingle their savory contents. It was not the fashion of the Franciscan padres who built their thick-walled missions in Alta California to trifle with such vain comforts as chimneys in kitchens. An arch thrown against the kitchen wall to confine the coals, and perhaps shunt the smoke out over the cook's head, diffuse and spread it better among the hams and bacon hung to cure and keep in the weevil-discouraging atmosphere, was all a right-minded cook, duly grounded in the faith, could require. So it had been in Spain for a thousand years; so it was in Mexico, whence the padres marched to the conquest of souls in Alta California. It was enough. The baking was done outdoors, in the great cave of an oven that looked like a cistern standing above ground.

The kitchen in itself was a chimney, some thirty feet high from tiled floor to the eaves of tiled roof, and was not so smoky and stifling as one might


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 think, judging from the appearance of the walls, except in falling weather and times when the santanas blew from the northeast, carrying clouds of sand. Then one must shut the door to fend off the pestiferous drafts, and the smoke was sluggish between walls, and slow to find its way out under the rafters and through the tiles.

And a pleasant smoke it was which came from the dry cedar under Magdalena's grill, sweet with the incense of old romances; blowing down, it seemed, from the camp fires of the beginning, when mankind was young on the mountains and in the green forest glades. There is a mystery in the scent of sweet cedar blazing lazily on an open fire, a reminiscent melancholy, a quickening of strange, dear things which struggle in the recollection for voices, yet all of them commingled and obscure, woven in the fibre of mind and memory, indefinable, unknown. No other smoke will move such outreaching, vain soft gropings in the human mind. It is the incense of romance.

Magdalena, wife of Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, was not so much interested in the company gathered at table in the great dining-hall that autumn evening as she was in the company at hand: two men who sat under her smoky joists with a candle between them, feeding from the sheep's haunch set for their refreshment. Her eyes were more than half for them as she stood before her grill where a saddle of mutton was sputtering over the coals, her ears wholly for them,


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 eager for the refreshment of news which seldom came to her kitchen from the far places of Alta California and the world beyond. The usual route of news was by way of the great front doors and the dining-hall, through the ears of the padres, with a word here and there which splashed over that one might pick up like a bird catching drops from a fountain. Only such news as the padres believed would not disturb the tranquillity and decorum of the mission ever passed to the kitchen and the mayordomo's quarters in the quad behind the vast building. Padres as censors of the news were most unsatisfactory creatures, as Magdalena would have told anyone who would have permitted her his ear.

It was no hard matter, either, for Magdalena to secure auditors, for she was a comely woman, with a sweet tongue in her teeth. Tall, under forty, supple and quick; her face not rounded and short in the general Spanish mold, but rather spare, as with Gipsy leanness, which lent sympathy and seriousness to her look; dark, with eyes brown and clear as polished agate, small even teeth, white as mother-of-pearl, which quickened her face like a light when she parted her serious calm lips in an unexpected smile.

Handsome, this Magdalena, to have come so far from the gaieties of life, the never-ending marvel of travelers who were so fortunate as to behold her at the kitchen door. When she served the grill, as now, she bound her smooth black hair under a red and yellow kerchief, drawing it tight


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Rh property is the subject matter of an offence under this Act or evidence of the commission of such offence, such property shall be liable to seizure and the seizure shall be effected—
 * (a) by the issue of a Notice of Seizure by the Public Prosecutor setting out therein the particulars of the immovable property which is seized in so far as such particulars are within his knowledge, and prohibiting all dealings in such immovable property;
 * (b) by publishing a copy of such Notice in two newspapers circulating in Malaysia one of which shall be in the national language and the other in the English language; and
 * (c) by serving a copy of such Notice on the Land Administrator or the Registrar of Titles, as the case may be, in Peninsular Malaysia, or on the Registrar of Titles or Collector of Land Revenue, as the case may be, in Sabah, or on the Director of Lands and Surveys or the Registrar responsible for land title, as the case may be, in Sarawak, of the area in which the immovable property is situated.

(2) The Land Administrator, the Collector of Land Revenue, the Director of Lands and Surveys, the Registrar of Titles or the Registrar responsible for land title, as the case may be, referred to in subsection (1) shall immediately upon being served with a Notice of Seizure under subsection (1) endorse the terms of the Notice of Seizure on the document of title in respect of the immovable property in the Register at his office.

(3) Where an endorsement of a Notice of Seizure has been made under subsection (2), the Notice shall have the effect of prohibiting all dealings in respect of the immovable property, and after such endorsement has been made no dealing in respect of the immovable property shall be registered, regardless whether it was effected before or after the issue of such Notice or the making of such endorsement.

(4)	Subsection (3) shall not apply to a dealing effected by an officer of a public body in his capacity as such officer, or otherwise by or on behalf of the Government of Malaysia or the Government of a State, or a local authority or other statutory authority.


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 across her forehead and knotting it behind. This added to the Gipsy piquancy of her dark face, the Gipsy mystery of her melancholy eyes, which seemed always to speak so much and yet to say so little that men could understand.

One of these men at Magdalena's kitchen table—the legs of it were hewn from cedar beams, it would have upheld an elephant—was a familiar figure in that smoky room. Borromeo Cambon, this was, a man who could beat out on his anvil any tool or instrument of metal that the need of man required, let it be a fishhook or hoe, copper cauldron or griddle-iron, scythe or sword. Borromeo was a man of great stature and strength, a man whose broad hands were the endowment of generations of men grown mighty in the wrestle with stubborn metals. His black beard was short and curly, his face red-brown, like a tile.

The other man taking refreshment from Magdalena's bounty wore a soldier's garb; a beardless lean and weathered man. His sword-belt and brassbound pistols hung on his chair-post close to his hand, as if he had compromised between the exactions of hospitality and the demands of duty, not going very far in either direction, This soldier appeared worn from many years afield; his brindled hair was shaggy, rough and long, but there was a merry light in his quick grey eyes, a smile that came easily to his close-fitting lips. The hardships and sacrifices of the wilderness, long association with austere and exacting men, had not caused him to


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 forget that even a good soldier may laugh now and then and be better for such indulgence.

Sergeant Miguel Olivera had arrived only that evening at San Fernando, riding in at the head of ten troopers, brought to reënforce the command of Captain del Valle, officer in charge of the king's dignity within the jurisdiction of the Pueblo de Los Angeles. There was a business in the bosque, as Magdalena said, calling these soldiers down from Monterey, a business that these two men were discussing as they made their supper from the great loaf and the red haunch of sheep.

"You'll never catch him," said Borromeo Cambon, rolling his big head with an air of confidence that was almost defiance in the soldier's face. "Sebastian Alvitre is not a man to be approached while he lies asleep in the canyon."

"Who knows?" said Sergeant Olivera, indifferent, it seemed. He cut himself more meat from the reddest portion of the joint. "Who knows?" said he again, after a little while.

"I know that gold is scarce on the road since Sebastianito came riding here from Baja California with his wild black devils," Borromeo said. "No more than two days ago he came down like an eagle upon a lamb and carried off no man knows how many thousand dollars from two fathers who were traveling from Capistrano to San Gabriel. It was a thing to make a man laugh, the four soldiers who were along with the fathers to protect them. It is said they flew away like sparrows."


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 "Then the king must lift the ancient law and permit the priests to carry arms," the sergeant said, unmoved by the jeer at the valor of his kind.

"Or send women to guard them," the blacksmith suggested.

"When you have been in California as long as I have," Sergeant Olivera reproved him, pausing with knife upended in one hand on this side of his plate, fork clasped in like manner on the other, "you will be kinder in your judgment of all men, including soldiers. It is a hard way, comrade; a man has to be deeper than the crown of a hat to know it all."

"Eight years ago I came to this mission," said Borromeo, resenting the implication of unseasoned judgment, "marching from Baja California in the track that Brother Padre Serra himself made across the wilderness when he came to found the king's missions in this land for the reclamation of the gentiles' souls. Yes."

"It is a distinction to come in the footsteps of Father Junipero," Sergeant Olivera declared, nodding seriously. "You are honored to follow in the path of that sanctified man."

"I don't know that I'm honored more than old Padre Serra," Borromeo contended, bristling like a boar from his manner of drawing the skin of his forehead down toward his eyes, throwing his short-clipped stiff hair erect on his crown. "He was the king's priest; I am the king's blacksmith."

"That is well said, blacksmith," Sergeant Oli-


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 vera nodded, "every man for his own calling. But people will have their own opinions, for all of that."

"What is a soldier's opinion of any man? A soldier is a slave!"

"It is a question," Sergeant Olivera returned. "But there is no question about artisans who come to Alta California to teach these savage neophytes their craft. They are men from the prisons, given parole on condition; they are thieves."

"Some of them may be thieves, little soldier, but I am no thief!" Borromeo's voice was a rumble in his chest, a cloud seeming to sweep a darker shadow over his fire-reddened face. "No, I will not permit any man to call me thief. I killed a man in Sinaloa, and I am ready to kill another one!"

"I implore your pardon, friend killer," Sergeant Olivera said, with sarcasm that was softened by a humorous kindling in his eyes. "It is a much greater distinction. But I am not ready to be killed my first night in San Fernando; there are several things that I want to live on a little while to see."

"You will not live to catch Sebastian Alvitre, anyhow, if God gives you two hundred years."

"Maybe not, Vulcan."

"No names, no names!" Borromeo leaned over the table to warn against such liberty, his great arms spread to reach and clasp the table's edges, a hand on either side.

"I make you a compliment," the soldier laughed, not disturbed by the blacksmith's savage squaring


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 off as for a leap the length of the board. "What, man! have you never heard of Vulcan? He was the god of ancient blacksmiths, as well as blacksmith of the ancient gods; all of your tribe came from him, he was the father of them all. He was lame in a leg, he went with a hobble."

"Devil take him! he was no father of mine if he was lame, I say. All of my people came into the world sound, no matter if some of them left it in pieces. No, you will never live to catch Sebastianito."

"What does it matter, as long as I live to see the first wine run from the only press in Alta California? I hear they are to trample out the first grapes tomorrow. After that, let me die."

Magdalena smiled, and turned quickly to her roast as if to snatch away from the soldier's eyes the delight they seemed to have discovered that moment in her face. Borromeo Cambon also smiled, his thick beard spreading back from the crease of his wide lips.

"What you or I, or any other man, gets out of that vintage he will pay for," he said. "These lean-shanked priests are not loose-handed men, comrade; they are the kind to make money grow on the top of a rock."

"There is much dependent on them," the soldier said, considerately, "all these poor devils of Indians, ignorant animals who would starve if turned loose to make their way without a hand over them now."


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 "They are no good, they are not worth the meat they eat," the blacksmith declared with strong contempt. "As for salt, they do not eat any. Comrade, they are not worth a curse. They have been long enough under the fathers' teaching to forget the way of making a living in the woods, but not long enough to know how to get it out of the ground like civilized men."

"That is why the priests have to watch the dollars, Vulcan. Well, when they get to making wine and brandy the money will come easier."

"I have made them a still," the blacksmith nodded his head in solemn confirmation of his word, "of two hundred gallons depth. There will be brandy enough as soon as the wine is ripe."

"I can see it isn't going to be such a melancholy life for a soldier to be stationed at this mission," the sergeant said, his eyes following Magdalena as she bent to baste the roast.

"There is but one Magdalena," the blacksmith complained, "and a man might as well expect favors from Our Señora by the side of the altar."

"I am sure you speak a true word," the soldier returned. If Magdalena heard she did not turn up an eye. She pushed the dripping-pan under the roast and dipped up the rich liquid, in which pepper pods swam, and the cloves of garlic, and laved the brown savory meat.

"As for these Indian women, they are animals. The fathers say they are Christians, but consider a man married to a woman who eats bugs!"


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44 (5) Any person who contravenes subsection (2) or (3) or does any act which results in, or causes, a contravention of subsection (2) or (3) commits an offence and shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding twice the value of the property in respect of which the Public Prosecutor’s order had been contravened, or fifty thousand ringgit, whichever is the higher, and to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

(6) Where a Notice of Seizure has been issued under subsection (1) it shall be an offence for the registered proprietor of the immovable property which is seized under such Notice, or for any other person having any interest in such immovable property, who has knowledge of such Notice, to knowingly enter into any agreement with any person to sell, transfer, or otherwise dispose of or deal with, the whole or any part of such immovable property.

Prohibition of dealing with property outside Malaysia

39. Where the Public Prosecutor is satisfied that any property is the subject matter of an offence under this Act or was used in the commission of the offence, and such property is held or deposited outside Malaysia, he may make an application by way of an affidavit to a Judge of the High Court for an order prohibiting the person by whom the property is held or with whom it is deposited from dealing with the property.

Forfeiture of property upon prosecution for an offence

40. (1)	In any prosecution for an offence under this Act, the court shall make an order for the forfeiture of any property which is proved to be the subject matter of the offence or to have been used in the commission of the offence where—
 * (a) the offence is proved against the accused; or
 * (b) the offence is not proved against the accused but the court is satisfied—
 * (i) that the accused is not the true and lawful owner of such property; and


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 "Cheer up, then comrade," the soldier encouraged him. "What? Haven't you heard the news?"

"News?" the blacksmith rolled his eyes, turning the whites of them like an ox straining at the yoke, ill-favored at the thought of being chaffed. "What neophyte has run away to get brandy from the soldiers at Buena Ventura? What rancher is complaining now against the mission sheep? Friend soldier, such news as this is all that tickles a man's ears in San Fernando."

"I would be the last one to laugh at a lonely man sick for the smile of a Christian woman. Haven't you heard the word our governor sent to the viceroy at the capital?"

"The walls of San Fernando are thick," said Magdalena, her wistful eyes on the soldier's face.

"The governor is a wise man in his day, according to my opinions," Sergeant Olivera said, "his clerk is a man from my own street in the capital, a man I know well. I had this from his clerk, but it is no state secret, it is a thing for everybody to know."

The soldier shifted his chair from the table-end, his meal finished, the scabbard of his long sabre scraping the tiles. Magdalena was quick with a blazing splinter for his cigarette; he rose to receive it from her, bending low in his acknowledgment of the favor, hand upon his breast.

"Well, it takes you a devil of a while to get it out of your mouth!" the impatient blacksmith grumbled. "What was it this famous governor


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E left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed through the beautiful Bosporus and far up into the Black Sea. We left them in the clutches of the celebrated Turkish guide, “,” who will seduce them into buying a ship-load of ottar of roses, splendid Turkish vestments, and all manner of curious things they can never have any use for. Murray’s invaluable guide-books have mentioned Far-away Moses’ name, and he is a made man. He rejoices daily in the fact that he is a recognized celebrity. However, we can not alter our established customs to please the whims of guides; we can not show partialities this late in the day. Therefore, ignoring this fellow’s brilliant fame, and ignoring the fanciful name he takes such pride in, we called him Ferguson, just as we had done with all other guides. It has kept him in a state of smothered exasperation all the time. Yet we meant him no harm. After he has gotten himself up regardless of expense, in showy, baggy trowsers, yellow, pointed slippers, fiery fez, silken jacket of blue, voluminous waist-sash of fancy Persian stuff filled with a battery of silver-mounted horse-pistols, and has strapped on his terrible scimetar, he considers it an unspeakable humiliation to be called Ferguson. It can not be helped. All guides are Fergusons to us. We can not master their dreadful foreign names.

Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or any where else. But we ought to be pleased with it, nevertheless, for we have been in no country yet where we have been so kindly received, and where we felt that to be Americans


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 said to the viceroy, which your so-good friend peeped into and read, my brave soldier? Come now; give it to us."

Sergeant Olivera looked at Magdalena and smiled. He offered cigarettes to the complaining man, who spurned them with repellent hand.

"Cigarettes?" said Borromeo. "No, I don't favor the little things. There's only a mouthful of smoke in one of them for a man, and they burn his beard besides. If you've got a long cigar about you, let me have it. Very well; my pipe is better, anyhow. And the governor wrote to the viceroy on a matter, heh?"

"In effect, it was this: Padres with Indian neophytes gathered around their missions are all very well, but padres and Indians never will develop the glorious possibilities of Alta California. It will take," said the wise governor in his letter to the viceroy, "at least a hundred years to bring the Indians up to a state of even crude civilization."

"Four hundred!" Borromeo declared. "There is not one man in five hundred of them with sense enough inside his head to learn how to make a shoe for a mule."

"I think the governor was nearer the truth, for I have seen many Indians of the second and third generation under the padres who are skilled in the crafts of hand."

"It is the young ones," the blacksmith agreed, nodding his head slowly; "the old ones can mix


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 mud for adobes, and that is all. So the governor said?"

"The man who has the love of land in his heart, the man who makes a home, and spreads green fields and vineyards around him, he is the man to build a colony to the king's glory. There are such men in California, the governor wrote, good soldiers, valiant men, faithful servants of the king, many of them retired from age and wounds, but not too stiff to plant a vineyard, not too old to be the fathers of families. But to have a family, even a soldier must first have a wife. Send me, then, the governor requested of the viceroy, a shipload of women, to be wives to my soldiers in Alta California."

"What a fool!" said Magdalena.

"And his blacksmiths, his masons, his tilers—let them go to the devil! said the governor."

"No, I think there was a general provision, with soldiers first, certainly soldiers first. When the ship comes, I am sure you will get your lady, Mr. Blacksmith, along with the rest of us."

"What a fool!" said Magdalena again. "As if any women would leave Mexico to come to this wild country only to marry men!"

"But you are here," the sergeant said, "and it appears you are married to a man, one to be envied by all men, by the garment of Our Señor!"

"It is another thing, "Magdalena returned, bending her head, pleased with the vehement compliment.


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 "I was married before I came; I was not sent like a hen to the market."

"And the ship?" Borromeo inquired eagerly; "you spoke of a ship. Is it on the way?"

"It is expected at San Pedro bay within a week."

"If it brings one lady, only one, Mr. Soldier, she is for the blacksmith of San Fernando. Let any man step between us, and I will crack his head with my hammer as I would crack an egg."

"You are a valiant man," said Sergeant Olivera, lifting a shoulder in a strangely expressive little shrug, not so complimentary as Borromeo might have wished.

"I killed a man in Sinaloa for stealing my wife, Mr. Soldier; that is the kind of a man I am. Well, I killed the woman too, if anybody wants to consider that worth thinking about. I cut their necks like rabbits and left them where I found them. That is why I am here. Ask Magdalena; she can tell you what kind of a man I am."

"Even the testimony of the beautiful is not required to give character to the brave," Sergeant Olivera said. He did not turn his eyes from the red coals under Magdalena's grate, which he seemed to contemplate with visionary gaze, as if he saw the ship of which he had spoken there, the lady of his longing on its deck. The contempt that underlay the suavity of his words vain, boastful Borromeo seemed too dull to catch or understand.

"Remember your last penance, Borromeo," Magdalena cautioned him. Her eyes were gentle


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 with him as she turned to where he sat, his rough bare arms folded across his breast.

"But if there is one woman on that ship, she is mine," Borromeo stolidly persisted.

"What does a soldier want with a wife at his heels, following him from mission to mission?" Magdalena inquired, turning to Sergeant Olivera. "That is no life for a woman, at least for a woman fit to be the wife to a gentleman like you, Sergeant Olivera."

"I shall retire from the service in another year, if God spares me that long, doña. Then a ranch with a stream of living water through it, a herd, a flock of sheep. That would be paradise for a man, I think, doña, if he had a woman to hold his head when he is weary."

"What a man!" said Magdalena.

"It's safer to have a woman here than in Mexico," Borromeo reflected, "there are not so many men to put poison in her ears while her husband is at work at his anvil. Give me a chance with another one, I say, and I'll keep her till her teeth fall out."

"Devils!" said Sergeant Olivera, dodging, striking with his hand as at an insect that annoyed him. "What is it dripping down on a man in your kitchen, Doña Magdalena? Surely the rains have not begun in September?"

"It is the fathers' ham," the blacksmith enlightened him, laughing to see the spreading grease-spot on the soldier's sleeve. "This time of the year they


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 drip like an olla of cold water hung in the door."

Sergeant Olivera looked overhead. Hams and bacon hung thick on the joists fifteen feet above him, dim in the smoke and shadows.

"There's many a sweet morsel there, heh, soldier?" Borromeo licked his lip, his hunger moved by the piquant thought, full as he was of mutton, turning his broad face up to see, his curling short beard crisp as charcoal. More Jove than Vulcan he appeared in the candle's light.

"It would take a long arm to reach them, anyhow," the sergeant laughed. "Well, I have fared heartily at your table, Doña Magdalena," Sergeant Olivera rose, preparing to depart, laying hand on his sword-belt. "I do not envy the fathers their hams."

"It is nothing," said Magdalena, throwing out her hospitable hands.

"Tomorrow I shall not fare so well, doña; I shall eat a soldier's supper in the company of soldiers; there will be ashes on my bread."

"You would be welcome every day to this table, Sergeant Olivera. The house is yours, and all that is in it."

"And the fathers' hams, and the fathers' wine casks in the cellar—all yours, soldier; help yourself." Borromeo laughed, rolling back in his chair as the thought enlarged in him, smiting the table with his big sledge fist until the platters jumped. "And your bed, doña—of course that is his, also, at least half"


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 "Silence, fool!" Magdalena commanded, more a Gipsy now than before as she scowled at the blacksmith with eyes drawn small, her forehead wrinkled in an angry threat.

Take the sergeant to the kitchen, Borromeo, and sit with him at the table,' Geronimo said to me. I leave my olla of beans with the wild onions from the hills, I come to guard the honor of the mayordomo's house, and what does the doña offer me? 'All is yours,' she tells the soldier, leaving the blacksmith with his finger in his mouth."

Borromeo roared again, throwing his head back, his mouth stretched so wide that one of the hams must have gone down his great gullet if it had broken its rawhide thong and dropped. Sergeant Olivera looked at him with dry humor wrinkling about his eyes, his nimble fingers drawing his sword-belt snug around his spare soldierly body.

"Vulcan, your wit is heavier than your hand," he said. "Will you come with me? Doña, I kiss"

"Ha! here is little Geronimo," the blacksmith said.

Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, overseer of nine hundred neophytes, as the Indian converts to Christianity were called by the priests, stepped into the light of the kitchen door as if the blacksmith's word had commanded him up from the night. He paused a moment in the door, hand lifted in grave and courteous salute to the guests of his fireside.


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Rh ::(ii) that no other person is entitled to the property as a purchaser in good faith for valuable consideration.

(2) Where the offence is proved against the accused but the property referred to in subsection (1) has been disposed of, or cannot be traced, the court shall order the accused to pay as a penalty a sum which is equivalent to the amount of the gratification or is, in the opinion of the court, the value of the gratification received by the accused, and any such penalty shall be recoverable as a fine.

Forfeiture of property where there is no prosecution for an offence

41. (1) Where in respect of any property seized under this Act there is no prosecution or conviction for an offence under this Act, the Public Prosecutor may, before the expiration of eighteen months from the date of the seizure, apply to a Sessions Court Judge for an order of forfeiture of that property if he is satisfied that such property had been obtained as a result of or in connection with an offence under this Act.

(2) The Judge to whom an application is made under subsection (1) shall cause to be published a notice in the Gazette calling upon any person who claims to have an interest in the property to attend before the Court on a date specified in the notice, to show cause as to why the property should not be forfeited.

(3) Where the Judge to whom an application is made under subsection (1) is satisfied—
 * (a) that the property is the subject matter of or was used in the commission of an offence under this Act; and
 * (b) there is no purchase in good faith for valuable consideration in respect of the property,

he shall make an order for the forfeiture of the property.

(4) Property in respect of which no application is made under subsection (1) shall, at the expiration of eighteen months from the date of its seizure, be released to the person from whom it was seized.


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 The mayordomo wore a hat with high peaked crown and broad, pliant brim, a short jacket with wide collar, dark velvet pantaloons, tight fitting as his own skin, and boots which struck him at the knees. There was a glinting of white metal at the heels of his boots, a click of spurs when he stepped over the threshold upon the tiled kitchen floor. Geronimo Lozano was a tall man, taller even than Sergeant Olivera, and lean and sinewy as the ascetic priests themselves, bearded after the fashion of that time among those who made pretensions to consequence or filled stations of authority. One remembered his nose, high and thin, and his eyebrows, short tufts of thick blackness which set obliquely toward his nose. He wore flaring gauntlets which reached to his elbows.

"Sergeant Olivera, a thousand pardons for this late appearance," the mayordomo begged. "There was a business that held me. No, you must not go before emptying a goblet or two. A soldier should never go to battle unshrived nor to bed without wine."

"It's a good maxim," said the soldier. He stood with hand on his chair, his long sword at his side, his brass-lined pistols shining in their scabbards, his plumed hat in his hand.

"And a blacksmith, a blacksmith can go to the devil without even his apron to his legs!" Borromeo said, with great feeling of resentment.

The mayordomo clapped him genially on the shoulder, laughing at his surly complaint. Magda-


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 lena was bending over the roast that she had basted and browned with such exquisite care, lifting it to a platter with a great two-tined fork that had been beaten out by Borromeo's cunning hand.

"There will be a sup for you, Borromeo, old dog," Geronimo declared. He stripped the thong of a whip from his wrist, and reached to hang it on a crude, hand-hammered nail driven into the doorframe almost the height of his head from the floor. The whip was made of rawhide strips, finely cut, closely braided. It was pliant as from much use and careful oiling; its long lash touched the floor as it swung from the nail.

"Yes, there was a business of a young man who stole a horse and tried to run away," the mayordomo said. He smiled, ran his hand down the lissom whip, rolling the lash of it, damp as if from dragging over grass wet with dew, between his fingers.

"So?" said Sergeant Olivera, looking at him with keen questioning.

"He had an ambition to make a bandit of himself, to join Sebastian Alvitre, but he is wiser now," the mayordomo said.


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ORROMEDO was not the man to refuse a cut from the fresh roast when the mayordomo and Magdalena sat down to supper, although Sergeant Olivera could not be tempted to exceed the limit of decorum and comfort. Geronimo brought a pitcher of wine from the cellar; there was laughter at the kitchen table, in which the rumble of great Borromeo's mirth bore the basso profundo like a boisterous wind.

"Savage!" said Geronimo, cutting again a thick portion of mutton ribs, which he tossed to the blacksmith's plate with his immense fork as if serving a dog. He was diverted by the blacksmith's appetite, which he encouraged both in goblet and in plate.

"If I could eat like one of these Indians I might be called a brave man at the platter," Borromeo said. "Beside even an old Indian woman with a poor appetite I am nothing but a child."

"That is almost true," Geronimo admitted, turning to the soldier with a smile. "Have you had experience in feeding Indians, Sergeant Olivera?"

"That is a singular duty I have been spared," the soldier replied. "From what I have seen of them,


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 and that is not a little after twelve years in this country, vultures are nice creatures, abstemious animals, compared to these neophytes that our padres conserve with such solicitous hands."

"That is true, there is no filling them. Here at San Fernando we have nine hundred of them, old and young, who gobble up between them twenty beeves a day. This is on top of the corn, and the wheat bread they are beginning to relish with fearful appetite. I tell you, Sergeant Olivera, I have known a group of Indians to devour twenty-five pounds of beef to the head in one day. Here at a fiesta not long ago, sixty of them put three beeves into their paunches in a single night."

"There is a pleasure in life when a man can eat like that!" Borromeo sighed.

Sergeant Olivera shook his head, expressive of depreciation of such inhuman voracity, but his thought appeared to be on something else. He sat in abstraction beside the table, his half-empty goblet at his hand, his eyes on the open door in the manner of a man whose thoughts had drawn him away. Magdalena watched him with growing approval in her eyes. He appeared to be an abstemious man.

"So, he would have joined Alvitre?" said the sergeant presently, nodding his head gravely, speaking in a manner to himself as if his thought had slipped its leash and gone wandering.

Geronimo started, lifting his head. One would have thought somebody had called him unseason-


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 ably; there was a look of questioning perplexity in his face.

"He speaks of Cristóbal," Magdalena said, in voice deferential and low.

"Oh, Cristóbal!" The mayordomo laughed, relieved of his perplexity.

"I am curious about him," Sergeant Olivera confessed, turning to face his host. "That is a strange notion for an Indian, a strange and civilized notion, to ride highwayman up and down the land."

"He is one of the young ones," the mayordomo explained, "one who is able to read. I always have contended with the fathers that it is wrong to teach savages to read, Christian or pagan. Nothing good can come of it but insubordination against authority, wild and wicked thoughts of liberty such as this young man has. Well, when one of them such as this Cristóbal cuts a padre's throat, then they will be convinced of their own error. A little learning in the head of one of these fellows is equal to giving him a gun."

"What sort is this Cristóbal? You will forgive my curiosity, since I may have to deal with him, or others like him, who may chance to step out from the bounds of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction."

"Surely it is your right to know, as one who holds the king's law in his hands," the mayordomo returned. "Cristóbal is a young scoundrel who has been flogged all his life, first by the fathers for his impious defiance, later by me for insubordination in the fields. Now he breaks out like a wild colt


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 from the corral and comes to this end. I considered hanging him. I would have done it if Father Ignacio had been a minute later. It is an admirable thing the way that man hears and knows all that goes forward on this estate; you will come to be astonished at his cunning, Sergeant Olivera. If ever a man could hear the grass grow, Father Ignacio is that man."

"It is a strange story," said the soldier, reflectively. "I did not know that an Indian would have the nobility of mind to contrive a thing like that, for you will admit, Don Geronimo, that the sentiment of liberty is noble, let the man who carries it be as humble as a worm."

"Rebellion against authority is another thing," Geronimo contended, sharp in his correction. His face grew stern, the color of his gaiety drained out of it, as if the speech of the soldier had displeased him almost to the point of resentment and open anger.

"True," the soldier nodded, "there must be no flouting of authority. Still, it is a strange case."

"Perhaps he has not always been understood," Magdalena said softly. "I know there is no water he would not cross for one he likes."

"I will not have the thief defended by one of my own house!" said Don Geronimo, his anger flashing suddenly. "It is enough, woman!"

Borromeo's heavy head had fallen to his arm, flung carelessly upon the table among the bones of the feast, his senses cloyed in the satisfaction of


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 meat and wine. Now he raised his face, startled from his sleep by the mayordomo's sharp words, making a foolish grimace with long-drawn lip to stretch his sleepy eyes open.

"Woman?" he repeated, turning his head as if seeking to lay a challenge. "If there is one woman, she is for the blacksmith of San Fernando, by the sacred wood!"

Sergeant Olivera laughed, but with such a sound of good nature in it that no man could take offense.

"You have had a dream, friend Borromeo," he said.

"Dream? No, it is no dream, soldier. Don Geronimo, is it a dream, I ask you, that a ship is coming with a hundred good women on it for wives to the men of this cursed, lonely country?"

"I have not heard of any such thing," the mayordomo returned.

"Then the soldier was having his joke with me," Borromeo sighed, turning to his goblet for solace.

"What is it you have been telling him?" Don Geronimo demanded, with ill favor in his handsome, unsympathetic face.

"Surely you have heard of the governor's request to the viceroy, Don Geronimo?"

"This seems to be a matter on which I lack information," Don Geronimo replied crabbedly.

Sergeant Olivera went over his tale again, Borromeo wide awake now, such pleasure in his forge-burned face as if the simple repetition of the story


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 had magic in it like a witch's wind that hastened the desired ship upon its way.

"It is a matter of common report, there is no secret in it," Sergeant Olivera said. "I am already under orders to march to San Pedro bay and wait the arrival of the ship. Surely you have heard that a ship is almost due?"

"I know there is a ship coming with supplies for the missions, the president of the missions has informed me of this. There are ingots of iron on board for us, your holiday for lack of something to hammer, Borromeo, will soon be at its end. But as for the women, I cannot believe that the secular governor would be so simple as to ask the viceroy to send them here, even fool that I grant the man to be. Women! what sort of women would come on such an expedition as this?"

"It is a question," said Sergeant Olivera, meditatively.

"What kind have come to the Pueblo Los Angeles? Black women, coyote women, greasy and ignorant sows such as no man of decency would have. We are better off without that kind of women."

"Not all of them," Olivera denied; "I was through the pueblo as much as three years ago, and saw many families happily on the way to prosperity there, with their little vineyards and flocks around them."

"Men and women alike, all of them in the pueblo are swine," Don Geronimo protested in high con-


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 tempt. "This land belongs to the fathers, who came into a wilderness full of dumb savages and brought it to both spiritual and material fruitfulness. The secular government looks on this prosperity with jealous eyes, and thinks of colonies. But where is it to establish these colonies? There must be water for the orchards and herds, and that is to be found only in rivers. Every river has its mission, there are no rivers unoccupied. What would the government do? Rob the missions of water and starve them? Certainly, there is not room for any more pastoral and agricultural enterprises in this country; already this miserable pueblo below us is complaining that we have shut the water of the river from them behind our dam. Well, let them complain. It is our water; we had it first."

"The Pueblo de Los Angeles complains, then, that you cut off the water?"

"They have threatened to break down our dam," Don Geronimo said, resentful of their necessity. "Well, our herds must drink."

"How many cattle run on your ranges, Don Geronimo? if a soldier may ask."

"Not more than forty thousand, while San Gabriel has a hundred thousand, I am told. Our sheep are but a mouthful, eight or nine thousand. You can see that we are poor, Sergeant Olivera, and if the pueblo continues to increase we shall be poorer, our little river divided to give it water."

"And there is the stubble of grain in the big field behind the adobe wall," the sergeant said.


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382 was a sufficient visé for our passports. The moment the anchor was down, the Governor of the town immediately dispatched an officer on board to inquire if he could be of any assistance to us, and to invite us to make ourselves at home in Sebastopol! If you know Russia, you know that this was a wild stretch of hospitality. They are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a complicated passport system. Had we come from any other country we could not have had permission to enter Sebastopol and leave again under three days—but as it was, we were at liberty to go and come when and where we pleased. Every body in Constantinople warned us to be very careful about our passports, see that they were strictly en regle, and never to mislay them for a moment: and they told us of numerous instances of Englishmen and others who were delayed days, weeks, and even months, in Sebastopol, on account of trifling informalities in their passports, and for which they were not to blame. I had lost my passport, and was traveling under my room-mate’s, who stayed behind in Constantinople to await our return. To read the description of him in that passport and then look at me, any man could see that I was no more like him than I am like Hercules. So I went into the harbor of Sebastopol with fear and trembling—full of a vague, horrible apprehension that I was going to be found out and hanged. But all that time my true passport


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 "That comes to maturity with the rains, it calls for no water," the mayordomo explained.

"There must have been a great amount of wheat, thousands of quintales, in that field," the soldier speculated.

"We had eleven thousand quintales above our needs this harvest," the mayordomo proudly confessed. "We sold it to the north, where their yield was poor. But it is only a mouthful when a man thinks of it, a very little, indeed."

"It appears to me," said the soldier, still in his subdued, speculative way, "that so many horned cattle, so many sheep, so much grain that God brings to ripeness with the rains of heaven, would bring prosperity and happiness to a great many people. It is only a soldier's thought."

"The country bears all the weight of population it can carry," the mayordomo declared, with heat that seemed unreasonable, considering the friendliness of the discussion. "We want no colonists in Alta California, we want no"

"Geronimo! there is a stranger in the door," Magdalena said, her hand on her husband's arm.

Don Geronimo turned quickly to the broad door that swung open to the night. A man stood just beyond the threshold, timid, hesitant, it seemed, as some creature from the mountains that pauses a moment in the camp fire light. He was a tall man, as barbarous a figure as any in the mission kitchen had beheld in many a year. His pantaloons were of deerhide with the hair on, save where it had been


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 rubbed off by wear; his coat, tattered and in shreds, was evidently part of a military uniform, the two brass buttons which remained on it bright in the candle beam. His boots of raw deerhide, hair outward, came to his knees; his cap, cut from the skin of a mountain lion, was crude and ill-fitting, large on his head as an oriental turban. It came down low on his forehead; an eagle feather was stuck into a slit with an attempt at the jaunty and debonnaire altogether ludicrous.

For all but the pale blue of the faded coat, the man appeared all hair. His beard was a golden flare on his brown cheeks, rippled like water that runs in shallows over a sunlit bar; his hair, of a strange fairness in the eyes of those who beheld him in amazement, fell to his shoulders in curls. He carried a gun with graceful lightness, the muzzle downward, the stock under his arm.

Borromeo Cambon leaned forward, hands on his thighs, mouth open, swallowing the wonder of this unaccountable stranger; Magdalena, still with hand clutching her husband's arm fearfully, stared with big eyes, her cheeks of a cold hue, her breath a gasp in her parted lips; Sergeant Olivera put his hand to his chin, where fingers and thumb stroked as if they felt for a beard, no emotion apparent in him but that of speculation on the reason for such a wild figure that seemed to have sprung out of the night. Don Geronimo rose, deliberately as became a dignified man at his own table, and went forward to speak to the man in the door.


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 The stranger, seeing a woman' before him, removed his hairy head cover, hat or cap or whatever it might be, revealing his long hair in tangled ringlets over his ears.

"Look!" said Magdalena, touching the soldier's arm; "his hair is bright as an angel's. There is no harm in him."

"Who knows?" said Sergeant: Olivera, still feeling his chin like a man who, trammeled in meditation, puts his finger in his beard.

"What is this?" Don Geronimo inquired, standing well within the door, hand lifted a little as if to guard a sudden assault. "Who are you? What do you want?"

The stranger replied, with courtesy and gentleness, aS was apparent to all, but in a tongue that none of them could understand.

"What savage!" said Borromeo. "If he prays, God can't understand such a tongue."

"He makes a sign that he is hungry," said Magdalena, compassion in her soft voice. "Bring him in, Geronimo; there is no harm in his face."

"He is carrying a rifle; it is forbidden," said Don Geronimo. "But how to make such a wild animal understand?"

"Ha! he understands Spanish after all," said Borromeo. "See? he is giving Don Geronimo his gun. How admirable! what a little man with hair on him this one is!"

"He is as gentle as a dove," said Magdalena, rising to place a chair for the stranger at the great


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 oak table, where the savory roast was cooling, the iron fork standing in it like a harpoon in the back of a whale.

"What giant!" Borromeo said, with a sound of wonderment out of his pursed lips, like a man blowing to cool his soup. "He is nearly as big as I am, he is a man to lock arms with the blacksmith of San Fernando for a fall in the sand!"

Don Geronimo stood the rifle against the doorfacing where his whip hung, far out of the stranger's reach, conveying by his act that the weapon was not to be returned immediately, at least. This did not appear to concern the hairy traveler, who stood looking about him with respectful, but keen, interest in the kitchen and all it contained, which evidently was as strange to him as he was to his surroundings.

"He has found the fathers' hams already," Borromeo whispered, loud as a wind in corn, his hand beside his mouth to make a secret of it.

"I regret, sir," said Don Geronimo, coming around the table from placing the rifle beyond its owner's reach, "that you haven't the Castilian speech on your tongue, but that is not the favor of Providence to all men. Sit, and eat; after that we shall see."

Don Geronimo, like all of his blood, was almost as interpretative with gesture as with word. The stranger readily understood the invitation, spread so broadly with sweep of the hand, with slight inclination of the supple, slender body. He bowed,


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 not ungracefully, and seated himself in the offered chair.

Magdalena placed the trencher of meat before him; the others watched him curiously, as if they expected him to pick it up like an Indian and set his teeth into it with a growl. Strangely, the man's interest was not in the meat, but the broken great loaf of bread that lay on the bare board of the table near Magdalena's place. He reached for the loaf, which he held a moment before his eyes as a man lifts a relic which brings him recollections of a happier day, then put it down almost reverently, clasped his hands on the table edge and bowed his head.

"He thanks God for bread!" Borromeo whispered. "So, he must be a Christian, and not a gentile out of the wilderness."

"His eyes are blue, blue as the little flowers on the hills in April," Magdalena said.

"There is no strength in a man with light eyes," Borromeo declared.

"He probably is German; only the Germans have hair the color of fool's gold," Don Geronimo said.

"It is his fast day," Borromeo said, in his great gusty whisper. "See, he eats nothing but bread."

"What is your opinion of him, Sergeant Olivera?" Don Geronimo inquired.

"I think he is a Russian; that nation has country to the north of Alta California, I am told."

"Now he cuts meat, he feeds himself like a gentleman," Magdalena spoke with a certain triumph as if she had assumed the defense of the strange


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 man against the prejudices and perils that awaited him in that peaceful place, and must bring forward and magnify each small circumstance of his good behavior.

"But he drinks no wine," Borromeo accused with severity. "He is nothing but a woman with a beard."

"They may not have wine in his country, it is likely that he doesn't know what it is," Magdalena contended. "See—I will show him that it is to drink."

She took the goblet that stood brimming at the stranger's hand just as she had filled it for him, lifted it with a smile, sipped, and offered it to him. He received it from her with his face aglow in the smile that moved his beard, bowed over it as if he stooped to kiss her hand, lifted it high, and drained it in one stiff swig.

"Ha-a-a!" Borromeo let his breath go in a sigh of admiration; "after all, he drinks like a Christian and a man!"

"He is not such a barbarian, he salutes with his goblet like any gentleman," Don Geronimo said. He sat across from the stranger, Magdalena at his side, Sergeant Olivera at the table-end, Borromeo at the other. The stranger smiled in friendly encouragement, as he might have smiled on children who had drawn near him timidly, one foot lifted to dash away at the first alarm.

"Not once has he lifted meat with his fingers," Magdalena said.


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 "Look at him! he eats salt!" Borromeo declared in excited wonder. "What admirable barbarian!"

"What is to be done with him?" Sergeant Olivera inquired.

"That is a question for Father Ignacio," Don Geronimo replied. "Well, my brave bear, if you have finished your supper, attend me."

The stranger was pushing back from the table, his face glowing in the satisfaction of repletion. He rose, spread his hands as if he surrendered all the gratitude of his breast for their hospitality, and bowed to the little company in turn.

"Attend me, then," Don Geronimo repeated, taking him by the arm to pilot him into the presence of Father Ignacio. "Sergeant Olivera, do me the favor to march behind, and see that your pistols are loaded."

"It is a shame!" Magdalena protested. "There is no wickedness in the man; his heart is as soft as a peach."


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APTAIN DEL VALLE, commander of the military forces in the jurisdiction of Pueblo de Los Angeles, whose headquarters was at the Mission San Fernando Rey de Epaña, sat alone at table with Padre Ignacio in the lofty dining-hall that night. There had been other company at an earlier table, some of whom had taken the road again, others being that moment seated on the benches which ran along the wall outside under the long colonnade of arches, where they smoked and passed the news of the king's road that linked mission with mission from San Diego to Monterey.

Padre Ignacio was a man who came late to the table at evening, for he carried a multitude of cares. The office of host usually was filled by his younger assistant, Padre Mateo, who liked the chatter of drovers and traders, and such as were becoming more common on the roads of Alta California every day, such as every ship from Mexico added numbers to. Padre Ignacio was made sad by this invasion which had been increasing so rapidly through the past ten years. There was a forecast in it that disturbed him, a thing that had given him many a sleepless hour and set him pacing the length of his


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 vast chamber overhead. These men were as the dust that came ahead of the rising storm of change that Padre Ignacio knew in his heart soon would sweep the old order away in Alta California. But to a man who was younger, who had come after the trails were worn broad, the last adobe long since laid in the last mission walls, the last tile fixed, it did not signify so much. A younger man could bear it better, having no memories to be wrenched away.

Padre Ignacio had come down from his chamber only a little while before, to join in meat with Captain del Valle. The padre's room, spacious as the quarters of a king, and bare as if its occupants had deserted it and carried everything of value away, extended across the width of the mission building in the east end. It was floored with tiles, in which the feet of Padre Ignacio and those who had gone before him had worn little channels, or paths through the hard surface down to the softer core, which appeared tracings of duller red on the red-brown of the fire-baked adobe.

From door to altar, from altar to window, from window to the low, hard, austere couch, these little markings of sandaled feet were traced; and down the length of the room in its very center, the broadest and deepest line. Here Padre Ignacio wore down his troubles, spent his meditations, worked out the welfare of the hundreds, wild men and women but a little while before, who were gathered there under his hand.

A mighty cedar beam, the mark of the broadax in


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 its squared sides, bridged the room across its width, not quite the height of Padre Ignacio's head from the floor. A man must remember this beam, as he must have in mind forever and unceasingly the obstacles of life, and not dash without a thought for his chamber door in the dark. He must have it in mind when he paced, hands at his back, head bowed in somber meditation, like a-penance which he could not for a moment forego. It was an obstacle in the current of serenity which a man forgot at his peril.

Now, as Padre Ignacio sat at supper with Captain del Valle, there was a red welt across his forehead, as if some one had given him a blow. Captain del Valle said nothing, although his eyes made inquiry with curious insistence. Padre Ignacio wet a napkin in wine and held it to the flaming excoriation.

"I forgot the beam that crosses my chamber," he said, contritely as if he had been discovered in some humiliating case. "I should have remembered, but a thing happened this evening that caused me great perturbation, and I inflict my own punishment, as a man must suffer always for his remissions."

Padre Ignacio smiled, dabbing the wet napkin to his hurt. A spare, tall man, almost frail, he seemed, in spite of the amplitude of his long brown gown of coarse serge which magnified his form. His face was long and narrow, and he was brown as sun and wind could turn him, even to the tonsure of his


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 crown which time had broadened so that a razor was no longer called for there.

"I heard that Don Geronimo had been putting the scorpion on somebody's back," Captain del Valle said.

"Yes, it was a youth called Cristóbal, a quick-minded lad who is not understood by Geronimo, I fear. The poor fellow, in some sort of wild resentment, got on a horse and tried to run away, to join this fellow Alvitre, Geronimo says, but I think there is only fancy in such a charge. Geronimo grows too severe; I must ask our president to put a restriction on him."

Captain del Valle looked up sharply, as if he had heard a discord in the rendition of a maestro. He was a short and puffy man, grown fat from idleness and much feeding at this mission post and that; a man of middle age, whose brown hair was cut close to his well-shaped head, whose pointed brown beard was penciled with streaks of silver-grey. It was his habit to fill his cheeks with breath in any period of astonishment, expectation, small crisis or small climax of his rather inconsequential life, which gave him the appearance of a squirrel carrying acorns.

He knew that Padre Ignacio referred to the president of the missions when he spoke of having a restriction put on the mayordomo of San Fernando. Captain del Valle was a man who had run counter to ecclesiastical authority in California dur-


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 ing his day; there was no love in him for the president of the missions.

"Is Padre Tápis expected, then?" he asked.

"He will come on his periodical inspection in a few days, unless delayed in the south. What is this?" Padre Ignacio rose as Don Geronimo appeared at the door which led through the butler's pantry into the kitchen.

Captain del Valle, his back in that direction, squirmed in his chair to see. "What is this parade, Geronimo?"

"It is this savage from no man knows where," Don Geronimo replied. "He appeared at the door a little while ago as if he had dropped from the clouds, carrying a rifle under his arm. I have brought him for your disposal."

Padre Ignacio went forward, brows drawn in his sharp scrutiny of the crudely garbed stranger, severe, unfriendly to behold.

"Where do you come from?" Padre Ignacio asked.

The stranger leaned forward in his eagerness to grasp the meaning of the words, a keen look of intelligent concentration in his eyes. He shook his head slowly, disappointment coming over him like a shadow.

"He doesn't understand Castilian," Don Geronimo explained.

Padre Ignacio was not much of a linguist, outside the Indian dialects and the Latin he had used so long that it had become more as a natural endow-


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 ment than an accomplishment. He tried the stranger in the Indian tongues of the several tribes spread up and down the California coast, winning only a deepening of the look of perplexity; tried him with medieval Latin, only to see a baffled look come into the man's eyes, and an expression of intense confusion rise in his face that seemed to cloud his intelligence like a smoke.

"We'll get nowhere with him at this," Padre Ignacio said. "What languages do you know, Captain del Valle?"

"Only Portuguese besides my own, father."

"If he understood one he would catch something of the other; that will not help us any. See how the poor creature looks from face to face, gentle giant that he seems to be, as if seeking even some modulation of expression that he can interpret. Let us give him the countenance of friends, at least."

"We have fed him, he has been kindly received," Don Geronimo said.

"You have done well, Geronimo. Let us have Father Mateo at him; he is master of many modern tongues."

Padre Ignacio went to the door to summon his coadjutor from his gossip with the travelers, and the enjoyment of his pipe, also, it must be confessed, for Padre Mateo was a man who wisely plucked as many of life's comforts, which he found blossoming along his way, as he could carry. He came quickly at his superior's summons, followed by several of the guests for the night, who had glimpsed


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 the stranger's remarkable presence through the open door.

"Behold this wanderer from God knows where, Brother Mateo. See if you can get anything out of him with the modern tongues; I can do nothing with him."

"What is this, now?" said Padre Mateo, clapping the stranger heartily on the shoulder, smiling assuringly. "You look like a German; let us try you in that voice. Can you speak German, friend?" he inquired in that tongue.

The stranger's face beamed at the sound; the light of a smile leaped in his eyes.

"Nein, nacht, nicht," he stammered; "Ich vas—Ich bin—American—United Stateser."

"Oh, American. Then English is your tongue," said Padre Mateo, with the greatest ease of transition, addressing him in the idiom that he understood.

The stranger was so pleased to hear intelligible sounds issue again from a human mouth that he almost leaped. He grasped Padre Mateo's hand, unawed by the priest's strange dress, strange to him, no doubt, as his own barbarous covering of hairy skins was to them.

"Padero, you don't know how glad I am to meet somebody that can talk God's own language!" he said.

"What does he say?" Padre Ignacio inquired.

Padre Mateo translated the words, at which varying expressions of disgust, disdain, astonishment


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 and even mirth, passed over the faces of those who stood around to hear. But it was only on the face of Padre Ignacio that the smile was to be seen.

"So much for the vanity of the Spaniard, who says his tongue is the only one fit to address the Almighty in," he said. "Take him aside where he will be at ease, Brother Mateo; give him tobacco, if he wants it, and draw his story from him. When I have finished my supper I will hear the account. Well," looking the stranger over again with gentle humor in his brown dry face, "you are a big bird to fly so far from home."

Don Geronimo and Sergeant Olivera attended the stranger and Padre Mateo to the bench on the arched portico beside the door. Padre Ignacio had finished his supper long since, and was sitting with his goblet of sour wine before him, enfolded in meditation, the stranger probably far out of his thought, when Padre Mateo and his charge returned.

"It is a strange tale that he tells," Padre Mateo said, a coldness, a doubt, a withdrawing as of suspicion, in his manner. He bore himself like a man who wanted to believe what he had heard, yet feared the judgment of others in the light of its improbability.

Padre Mateo stood by with thumb hooked in the cord that gathered his rough gown about his middle, a florid man of good stature, with sturdy, well-borne shoulders, and good-natured, rather rustic face. He seemed hesitant over his beginning. The