sea and shore were
impenetrable. Yet at times the air was softly moved and troubled, the
surrounding gloom faintly lightened as with a misty dawn, and then was
dark again; or drowsy, far-off cries and confused noises seemed to grow
out of the silence, and, when they had attracted the weary ear, sank
away as in a mocking dream, and showed themselves unreal. Nebulous
gatherings in the fog seemed to indicate stationary objects that, even
as one gazed, moved away; the recurring lap and ripple on the shingle
sometimes took upon itself the semblance of faint articulate laughter
or spoken words. But towards morning a certain monotonous grating on the
sand, that had for many minutes alternately cheated and piqued the ear,
asserted itself more strongly, and a moving, vacillating shadow in the
gloom became an opaque object on the shore.

With the first rays of the morning light the fog lifted. As the undraped
hills one by one bared their cold bosoms to the sun, the long line of
coast struggled back to life again. Everything was unchanged, except
that a stranded boat lay upon the sands, and in its stern sheets a
sleeping child.

CHAPTER I.

The 10th of August, 1852, brought little change to the dull monotony
of wind, fog, and treeless coast line. Only the sea was occasionally
flecked with racing sails that outstripped the old, slow-creeping
trader, or was at times streaked and blurred with the trailing smoke of
a steamer. There were a few strange footprints on those virgin sands,
and a fresh track, that led from the beach over the rounded hills,
dropped into the bosky recesses of a hidden valley beyond the coast
range.

It was here that the refectory windows of the Mission of San Carmel had
for years looked upon the reverse of that monotonous picture presented
to the sea. It was here that the trade winds, shorn of their fury and
strength in the heated, oven-like air that rose from the valley, lost
their weary way in the tangled recesses of the wooded slopes, and
breathed their last at the foot of the stone cross before the Mission.
It was on the crest of those slopes that the fog halted and walled
in the sun-illumined plain below; it was in this plain that limitless
fields of grain clothed the fat adobe soil; here the Mission garden
smiled over its hedges of fruitful vines, and through the leaves of fig
and gnarled pear trees: and it was here that Father Pedro had lived for
fifty years, found the prospect good, and ha