Sharp! We are to have a long, delightful day together. Mother will not
be home before nightfall and I am to do everything I can to make you
happy. As if I wouldn't, even without being bidden! But what shall it
be first? Where would you like to walk or ride? Or would you rather
rest and read?"

"First, I would like to walk around to that curious hedge yonder, that
you told me before had been planted by the old padres. Everything
about these ancient missions interests me."

"Oh! I love them, too, and I'm so glad we live on one, or the place
where one used to be. That hedge is prickly-pear and was meant to keep
the Indians out of the inclosure, if they were ugly. But it's a
hundred years old, and Pedro could remember when it was ever so much
smaller than now."

It was a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled
branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of
thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The
hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still
green on top, but too unlovely to have been preserved for any reason
save its antiquity and history. One end of it was close to the kitchen
part of the house, and the other reached beyond the fall of the
farthest old adobe.

"A formidable barrier, indeed! It reminds me of some of Dore's
fantastic pictures," said the reporter.

"Doesn't it? My mother has books with his drawings in, and I have
thought that, too. It is a trouble sometimes, because anybody coming
across the field from yonder must go either way around the quarters or
all along the back of the house, before he can get in here; when if
it weren't there at all, it wouldn't be two steps. But we will never
have it cut down because my father said so. He wouldn't have anybody
break a single leaf, if he could help it, and--oh, oh!"

Mr. Sharp lifted his head from his close examination of a branch that
had particularly interested him and saw Jessica pointing in
astonishment at the very heart of the great hedge.

"What is it? Something especially curious?"

"Curious! It's--it's--dreadful! You can see right through it! Somebody
has ruined it!"

The reporter stooped and followed the direction of her guiding finger
and saw that a strange thing had indeed been done. For a considerable
length the terrible barrier had been literally tunneled, though the
fact was not easily discernible. Walls of the bare and twisted
branches were still lef