melancholy broods over the
entire place. The mountains, gazing down upon it in stony silence,
are haggard and forbidding; below it lies the modern town; while from
a neighboring hillside the inmates of a villa look directly into the
monastery garden, on which the earlier Fathers little dreamed a
female eye would ever rest. A little life, however, was still visible
about this Santa Barbara Mission. Two brown-robed monks were hoeing
in the field; occasionally, visitors came and went; and, just as I
was leaving, one of the priests, in obedience to a summons, hurried
away to minister to the sick; yet over all there hung an atmosphere
of unreality and sadness. I felt myself the guest of an anachronism.

[Illustration: DREAMING OF OTHER DAYS.]

A fashionable city has risen at the feet of these old monks, but they
regard it not. A trolley car brings curious tourists to their doors;
but the ways of the Santa Barbara Fathers are those of long ago. Like
aged pilgrims, dreaming by their firesides, they seem to be living in
the past; they certainly have no present worthy of the name; and when
I sought to draw forth from my priestly guide some idea of their
future, he answered me by pointing to a grave.

[Illustration]

GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO RIVER

[Illustration]

While the Old World is better able than the New to satisfy the
craving of the mind for art and history, no portion of our globe can
equal the North American continent in certain forms of natural
scenery which reach the acme of sublimity. Niagara, the Yosemite, the
Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Canon of the Colorado in
Arizona are the four great natural wonders of America. Niagara is
Nature in the majesty of liquid motion, where, as the outlet of vast
inland seas, a mighty river leaps in wild delirium into a gorge two
hundred feet below, and boils and seethes tumultuously till its
heart is set at rest and its fever cooled by the embrace of Lake
Ontario. The Yosemite is Nature pictured, in a frame of granite
precipices, as reclining on a carpet woven with a million flowers,
above which rise huge trees three centuries old, which, nevertheless,
to the spectator, gazing from the towering cliffs, appear like waving
ferns. The Yellowstone Park is the arena of an amphitheatre in which
fire and water, the two great forces which have made our planet what
it is, still languidly contend where formerly they struggled
desperately for supremacy. But t