s has
never been heard in California yet. But my people are so poor and so
few! And some day I shall have passed from them, and it will be too
late."

"Perhaps," ventured Felipe, "the Americanos--"

"They care nothing for us, Felipe. They are not of our religion--or of
any religion, from what I can hear. Don't forget my Dixit Dominus."
And the padre retired once more to the sacristy, while the horse that
carried Temptation came over the hill.

The hour of service drew near; and as he waited, the padre once again
stepped out for a look at the ocean; but the blue triangle of water lay
like a picture in its frame of land, empty as the sky. "I think, from
the color, though," said he, "that a little more wind must have begun
out there."

The bell rang a last short summons to prayer. Along the road from the
south a young rider, leading one pack-animal, ambled into the mission
and dismounted. Church was not so much in his thoughts as food and, in
due time after that, a bed; but the doors stood open, and as everybody
was going into them, more variety was to be gained by joining this
company than by waiting outside alone until they should return from
their devotions. So he seated himself at the back, and after a brief,
jaunty glance at the sunburnt, shaggy congregation, made himself as
comfortable as might be. He had not seen a face worth keeping his eyes
open for. The simple choir and simple fold gathered for even-song, and
paid him no attention on their part--a rough American bound for the
mines was no longer anything but an object of aversion to them.

The padre, of course, had been instantly aware of the stranger's
presence. For this is the sixth sense with vicars of every creed and
heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the worshippers few and seldom
varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new book to be read. And a
trained priest learns to read shrewdly the faces of those who assemble
to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants, with no thoughts
save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for their
speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation
for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the
intoning, he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain
and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit Dominus. He
listened to the tender chorus that opens "William Tell"; and as the
Latin psalm proceeded, pictures of the past ros