e heavy earthquake that
in 1812 ruined other Missions. Here the Indians raised large crops
of wheat and herded many cattle. Over a thousand Indians, it is said,
attacked this church in 1822, but the priest in charge frightened them
away by firing guns. This warlike conduct so displeased the Padres,
who wished the natives ruled by kindness, that the poor priest was
sent away from the Mission.

One of the early Missions was San Luis Obispo, where services are
still held. It was specially noted for a fine blue cloth woven by
the Indians from the wool of the Mission flocks of sheep. The Indians
there also wove blankets, and cloth from cotton raised upon their own
lands.

San Juan Bautista, or St. John the Baptist, north of Monterey, had a
splendid chime of nine bells said to have been brought from Peru and
to have very rich, mellow tones. San Miguel had a bell hung up on a
platform in front of the church, and now at Santa Ysabel, sixty miles
from San Diego, where the Mission itself is only a heap of adobe
ruins, two bells hang on a rude framework of logs. The Indian
bell-ringer rings them by a rope fastened to each clapper. The bells
were cast in Spain and much silver jewellery and household plate were
melted with the bell-metal. Near them the Diegueno Indians worship in
a rude arbor of green boughs with their priest, Father Antonio, who
has worked for thirty years among the tribe. They live on a rancheria
near by and are making adobe bricks, hoping soon to build a church
like the old Mission long since crumbled away.

The last of the Missions was built in 1823 at Sonoma, and proved very
active in church work, some fifteen hundred Indians having been there
baptized.

Father Junipero Serra died at more than seventy years of age, at San
Carlos. During all his life in America he endured great hardships
and suffering to bring the gospel to the heathen as he had dreamed of
doing in his boyish days. A monument to his memory has been erected
at Monterey by Mrs. Stanford, but the Missions he founded are his best
and most lasting remembrances.

BEFORE THE GRINGOS CAME

This is the story Senora Sanchez told us children as we sat on the
sunny, rose-covered porch of her old adobe house at Monterey one
summer afternoon. And as she talked of those early times she worked
at her fine linen "drawn-work" with bright, dark eyes that needed no
glasses for all her eighty years and snow-white hair.

"When I was a girl, Californ