appreciate it, for he eyed the box suspiciously, and showed a disposition to kick when the blind was removed. By unusual good fortune a driver of a buckboard happened to be going our route, and for a consideration was induced to take me to the foot of the mountain; that is, as far as it is possible to go in any kind of conveyance. My driver, like my mounted escort, was Spanish, or Spanish-Mexican, and spoke even less English than the latter. He was of a different type, however, being stern and stubborn looking, while he of the horse was smiling and meek, and apparently childlike, though one now and then suspected a latent spiritual kinship to Bret Harte's heathen Chinee. We had gone ten miles westward, when we came upon the ruins of the old San Antonio Mission, founded one hundred and fifteen years ago, and one of the most picturesque missions in California. It stands on a large plain, skirted on three sides by mountains. Six thousand Indians once belonged to this mission, and the remains of their adobe dwellings dot the plain in every direction. A few gnarled apple and pear trees have survived the general decay, and seem almost animate with their weight of memories. The American spectator cannot escape the fancy that they contemplate him with a sad and reproachful look. "Where are the priests, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Indians?" they seem to demand. Swept away,- crowded out of existence, the few that remain pushed into the mountains, or into the hovels of their old towns, degraded in character and physique, soured into sullenness, or forced into cringing and cunning. Even the remains of their civilization are fast vanishing, and will soon be a thing of wood, and furnish the bazaar stores of the past. No thought seems to be taken to prevent the old mission from falling to pieces, a neglect one can scarcely regret when he contemplates the irredeemable badness of some "restored" California missions. Occasionally an artist with an eye for effective ruins happens along, and paints these old sanctuaries. Many daubers put them on shells and bits of California watering places with "souvenirs of California," to sell to the gullible Eastern tourist for fifty cents. But the average Californian is a creature of the present. He looks forward, and not back; he has no time for reminiscence, and is in general a stranger to the sentiment of reverence for the old and traditional. An hour before noon we drove up to an adobe house, the home of " Hidalgo," there was not the least evidence of a the driver. Evidently he was a bachelor, road. Another house marked the point for there was no sign of women or chil- where horseback travel became a necesdren. A tall, Apache-like Indian ap- sity, but this one was built of redwood peared and cooked tortillas, and made "shakes," and its entire surroundings coffee, which with melons formed the seemed thriving and progressive. Its meal of the host. I had brought my owner came up on horseback,-a young lunch, and while I ate this, and shared man, half American and half German, the melons, Baptiste changed the horses. and wholly modern and alert. There I said there was no evidence of the immediately ensued between him and Photo by Sanford Robinson, from a Painting by Mrs. S. H. St. John. presence of women, and I believe the my driver a lively quarrel as to the ownership of the land and house. The former had the good nature of secure possession, and flourished in his opponent's face the proof in the shape of a legal document. He appealed to me as the only competent and disinterested party present to read the proof of his homestead. With the help of free translation by himself and Baptiste, Hidalgo was probably more convinced than was We had ridden five miles under a burning sun when another adobe appeared. It was the home of Baptiste's mother, and the last house on this side of the mountains. We were glad to dismount and rest under the old vine covered porch, while the mother cooked the dinner, and one of Baptiste's boys drove up fresh horses from the pasture. As these appeared on the gallop Baptiste stood ready, there was a whir, and one of the animals stood still, having learned from experience not to struggle against the riata. pleasant, for he mounted his buckboard down the cañon sides, when too heavily and drove off in high dudgeon, threat- loaded, to the destruction of their own ening divers sorts of summary ven- lives and the contents of the pack. geance. Many times the path lay over immense bowlders, where our horses had to choose their footing with the utmost care. It was necessary to use two cinches to hold our saddles in place. Sometimes the ascent was actually fortyfive degrees, and I found it necessary to hold on to the front of the saddle to prevent falling backward. At times the saddle itself would seem almost to separate from the horse, as he made a steeper pull than usual, and I was fain to cling with one hand to his mane. Guidance was unnecessary, and an unwise interference with an animal that understood its business better than its rider did. There were places where the path turned in unexpected and acute angles, and places so steep in descent that I wished that mane grew behind, as well as before the saddle. At such places my feet were often on a level with my horse's ears, and I seemed to be sitting on his neck. The conservatism of these Spanish families is remarkable. Here was this house built of adobe, just as the old Californian homes of one hundred years ago were built. The old Mission grapevines knotted and coiled themselves over the porch. Chickens and little pigs shared the shade with Baptiste's children, just as other chickens and little pigs had shared the shade of other adobes with the muchachitos of a century ago. Here was a grown-up brother of Baptiste's, probably twenty-five years old, who spoke no English, not having been allowed to go to school for fear of contracting American habits, and being led away from the religion of his fathers. When the dinner came there were tortillas, and rice, and beans. If the ghost of Baptiste's great-great-grandfather could have appeared, he would probably have forgotten the airy nothingness of his present constitution, and have fallen to with a natural appetite. When we mounted again it was to begin the actual ascent of the higher ridges of the Santa Lucia. It would have been dangerous, and well near impossible, except with horses well trained to such climbing. Even the pack mules born and bred in these mountains sometimes lose their footing, and tumble VOL. XX- 40. After the partial ascent of the first peak the view was magnificent, but there was little time to look backward or sidewise, for fear of being dragged off my horse by a pine limb, or having my eyes scratched out by the chapparal. Nature seemed rather indifferent to our admiration, and perhaps regarded man's invasion here in the light of hostility. Even my feet were not safe, for the trail sometimes became an incipient and roofless tunnel, from whose narrow sides projected threatening bowlders. Once Baptiste turned, and said something. about "mal camino"; I knew little Spanish, but understood this intuitively, and answered "Si, señor," with energy. To the right a gigantic system of cleavage, extending for many miles, cutting through several ranges, and interrupted by the intervening cañons, had a raw, new look, as though it had occurred too recently for the healing us, and it was easy to understand how baffled and world-troubled spirits of all ages, and those too finely strung for the world's discords, have been drawn to such places as a refuge. It was when emerging from such a cañon to the corresponding ridge that the ocean first burst upon us. Yet hardly the ocean itself, for it was entirely overlaid by a soft white haze. We were now actually at the top, an elevation of five thousand feet, and the descent began to be pretty rapid. over process to have begun. But Nat- spring, the peace of Nature fell upon ure hereabouts, whether new or old, seemed sternly uncompromising and contemptuous of softer beauty. The peaks were thrown in rough and fantastic outlines. Some of them were formed of huge, bare bowlders thrown loosely on top of one another. The whole scene seemed either the rough playground or battlefield of some great, lawless, and irresponsible powers of nature. To the front and left the skyline of the great ridge was outlined by large, spear-like pines, some of them shaggy from age. Some had entirely lost their bodily drapery, and stood forth to the sky, white and staring skeletons. One of these was especially ghostly, a smooth and silvery white, with gaunt arms thrown upward as if in denunciation or prophecy. On the sides of many of the peaks were great stretches and clefts of bare reddish land, as though unfinished by Nature, or scarred by conflict. Nature is almost too absolute, too consciously triumphant here, and too fierce. She understands you, in an aloof and selfcontained way, even too well, for she knows your secret; but she does not regard you as "a man and a brother," or admit you to any confidence. You feel alien and shriveled. She is haughty and self-sufficient. If you have sinned she has no comfort for you, no sympathy with your frailty. She is something of Leonardo's Mona Lisa,-she is the law of Moses. Sometimes in the sunless depths of a cañon the trail would lead us to some gentler retreat, where a cool spring was surrounded by bending ferns, and graceful alders, and clumps of young redwoods. Here we would stop to breathe our horses, and drink from the spring; and as we watched the loosened leaves float down from the alders, soundless, and the dusky light in the tops of the redwoods, and the notched leaves of the fern above the still dark water of the For the rest of the way the trail followed a pine-covered ridge. The cañons below were dark and green with redwoods. As we descended the short slopes the ocean was now and again lost to view, only to reappear through the framework of pines as we went forward on the alternating level spurs of the ridge. The animals seemed to have forgotten their weariness, and now traveled well as we were nearing their home. Finally we came to the last descent, a great, rugged, gorge-broken series of declivities that formed the mountain side. Below us lay the blue level of the ocean, from which the haze had lifted, the white, curving surf-line which was shut out by the cliffs directly in front, visible many miles on our left, far away to Point Gordo. The sun had set, and beyond the water lay great bands of rainbow colored mist. The ocean swelled and wrinkled in the dusky purple light. The unappeased crescendo of its long roar first broke far to the north, and was then slowly caught up and crashed from point to point past me, at last dying away to the south in far echoing and unreconciled regret. Then from the nearer caves the theme of the dying refrain arose again in subdued reverberations of unrest, swelled, and went whispering through the caves in search of it knew not what, then died away again in accusing murmurs and low sea mutterings |