ed the town. Father Gaspara's house was at the end of a long, low
adobe building, which had served no mean purpose in the old Presidio
days, but was now fallen into decay; and all its rooms except those
occupied by the Father, had been long uninhabited. On the opposite
side of the way, in a neglected, weedy open, stood his chapel,--a
poverty-stricken little place, its walls imperfectly whitewashed,
decorated by a few coarse pictures and by broken sconces of
looking-glass, rescued in their dilapidated condition from the
Mission buildings, now gone utterly to ruin. In these had been put
handle-holders of common tin, in which a few cheap candles dimly lighted
the room. Everything about it was in unison with the atmosphere of the
place,--the most profoundly melancholy in all Southern California. Here
was the spot where that grand old Franciscan, Padre Junipero Serra,
began his work, full of the devout and ardent purpose to reclaim the
wilderness and its peoples to his country and his Church; on this very
beach he went up and down for those first terrible weeks, nursing
the sick, praying with the dying, and burying the dead, from the
pestilence-stricken Mexican ships lying in the harbor. Here he baptized
his first Indian converts, and founded his first Mission. And the only
traces now remaining of his heroic labors and hard-won successes were a
pile of crumbling ruins, a few old olive-trees and palms; in less than
another century even these would be gone; returned into the keeping of
that mother, the earth, who puts no head-stones at the sacredest of her
graves.

Father Gaspara had been for many years at San Diego. Although not a
Franciscan, having, indeed, no especial love for the order, he had been
from the first deeply impressed by the holy associations of the place.
He had a nature at once fiery and poetic; there were but three things he
could have been,--a soldier, a poet, or a priest. Circumstances had made
him a priest; and the fire and the poetry which would have wielded the
sword or kindled the verse, had he found himself set either to fight or
to sing, had all gathered into added force in his priestly vocation.
The look of a soldier he had never quite lost,--neither the look nor the
tread; and his flashing dark eyes, heavy black hair and beard, and
quick elastic step, seemed sometimes strangely out of harmony with his
priest's gown. And it was the sensitive soul of the poet in him which
had made him withdraw within