. The walls, which are six feet thick,
consist of irregular sandstone blocks, and are further strengthened by
solid stone buttresses measuring nine by nine feet. The towers to a
height of thirty feet are a solid mass of stone and cement twenty feet
square. A narrow passage leads through one of these to the top, where
the old bells still call the faithful to service as of yore. Doubtless
the Santa Barbara Mission church is the most solid structure of its
kind in California. It is 165 feet long, forty feet wide and thirty feet
high on the outside. Like the monastery, the church is roofed with tiles
which were manufactured at the Mission by the Indians."

The report for 1800 is full of interest. It recounts the activity in
building, tells of the death of Padre Paterna, who died in 1793, and was
followed by Estevan Tapis (afterwards padre presidente), and says that
1237 natives have been baptized, and that the Mission now owns 2492
horses and cattle, and 5615 sheep. Sixty neophytes are engaged in
weaving and allied tasks; the carpenter of the presidio is engaged at a
dollar a day to teach the neophytes his trade; and a corporal is
teaching them tanning at $150 a year.

In 1803 the population was the highest the Mission ever reached, with
1792. In May, 1808, a determined effort lasting nine days was made to
rid the region of ground squirrels, and about a thousand were killed.

The earthquakes of 1812 alarmed the people and damaged the buildings at
Santa Barbara as elsewhere. The sea was much disturbed, and new springs
of asphaltum were formed, great cracks opened in the mountains, and the
population fled all buildings and lived in the open air.

On the sixth of December, in the same year, the arrival of Bouchard,
"the pirate," gave them a new shock of terror. The padres had already
been warned to send all their valuables to Santa Ines, and the women
and children were to proceed thither on the first warning of an expected
attack. But Bouchard made no attack. He merely wanted to exchange
"prisoners." He played a pretty trick on the Santa Barbara comandante in
negotiating for such exchange, and then, when the hour of delivery came,
it was found he had but one prisoner,--a poor drunken wretch whom the
authorities would have been glad to get rid of at any price.

In 1824 the Indian revolt, which is fully treated in the chapters on
Santa Ines and Purisima, reached Santa Barbara. While Padre Ripoll was
absent at the presidio, t