f." As he reached the higher plateau he could see the afternoon
sea-fog--presently to obliterate the fair prospect--already pulling
through the gaps in the Coast Range, and on a nearer slope--no less
ominously--the smoke of a recent but more permanently destructive
Yankee saw-mill was slowly drifting towards the valley.

"Get up, beast!" said the father, digging his heels into the
comfortable flanks of his mule with some human impatience, "or art
THOU, too, a lazy renegade? Thinkest thou, besotted one, that the
heretic will spare thee more work than the Holy Church."

The mule, thus apostrophized in ear and flesh, shook its head
obstinately as if the question was by no means clear to its mind, but
nevertheless started into a little trot, which presently brought it to
the low adobe wall of the courtyard of "The Innocents," and entered the
gate. A few lounging peons in the shadow of an archway took off their
broad-brimmed hats and made way for the padre, and a half dozen equally
listless vaqueros helped him to alight. Accustomed as he was to the
indolence and superfluity of his host's retainers, to-day it
nevertheless seemed to strike some note of irritation in his breast.

A stout, middle-aged woman of ungirt waist and beshawled head and
shoulders appeared at the gateway as if awaiting him. After a formal
salutation she drew him aside into an inner passage.

"He is away again, your Reverence," she said.

"Ah--always the same?"

"Yes, your Reverence--and this time to 'a meeting' of the heretics at
their pueblo, at Jonesville--where they will ask him of his land for a
road."

"At a MEETING?" echoed the priest uneasily.

"Ah yes! a meeting--where Tiburcio says they shout and spit on the
ground, your Reverence, and only one has a chair and him they call a
'chairman' because of it, and yet he sits not but shouts and spits even
as the others and keeps up a tapping with a hammer like a very pico.
And there it is they are ever 'resolving' that which is not, and
consider it even as done."

"Then he is still the same," said the priest gloomily, as the woman
paused for breath.

"Only more so, your Reverence, for he reads nought but the newspaper of
the Americanos that is brought in the ship, the 'New York 'errald'--and
recites to himself the orations of their legislators. Ah! it was an
evil day when the shipwrecked American sailor taught him his uncouth
tongue, which, as your Reverence knows, is only fit for beast