, a youth spent under the shade of those
pear trees, even then venerable as now. He was thinking of his youthful
dreams of heathen conquest, emulating the sacrifices and labors of
Junipero Serra; a dream cut short by the orders of the archbishop, that
sent his companion, Brother Diego, north on a mission to strange lands,
and condemned him to the isolation of San Carmel. He was thinking of
that fierce struggle with envy of a fellow creature's better fortune
that, conquered by prayer and penance, left him patient, submissive, and
devoted to his humble work; how he raised up converts to the faith, even
taking them from the breast of heretic mothers.

He recalled how once, with the zeal of propagandism quickening in the
instincts of a childless man, he had dreamed of perpetuating his work
through some sinless creation of his own; of dedicating some virgin
soul, one over whom he could have complete control, restricted by no
human paternal weakness, to the task he had begun. But how? Of all the
boys eagerly offered to the Church by their parents there seemed none
sufficiently pure and free from parental taint. He remembered how one
night, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin herself, as he
firmly then believed, this dream was fulfilled. An Indian woman brought
him a Waugee child--a baby-girl that she had picked up on the sea-shore.
There were no parents to divide the responsibility, the child had no
past to confront, except the memory of the ignorant Indian woman, who
deemed her duty done, and whose interest ceased in giving it to the
Padre. The austere conditions of his monkish life compelled him to the
first step in his adoption of it--the concealment of its sex. This was
easy enough, as he constituted himself from that moment its sole nurse
and attendant, and boldly baptized it among the other children by the
name of Francisco. No others knew its origin, nor cared to know. Father
Pedro had taken a muchacho foundling for adoption; his jealous seclusion
of it and his personal care was doubtless some sacerdotal formula at
once high and necessary.

He remembered with darkening eyes and impeded breath how his close
companionship and daily care of this helpless child had revealed to him
the fascinations of that paternity denied to him; how he had deemed it
his duty to struggle against the thrill of baby fingers laid upon his
yellow cheeks, the pleading of inarticulate words, the eloquence of
wonder-seeing and mutely