Santa Barbara, kneeling on the stone pavement
in the church, and praying ceaselessly from midnight till dawn, he had
often had visions vouchsafed him of a new dispensation, in which the
Mission establishments should be reinstated in all their old splendor
and prosperity, and their Indian converts again numbered by tens of
thousands.

Long after every one knew that this was impossible, he would narrate
these visions with the faith of an old Bible seer, and declare that they
must come true, and that it was a sin to despond. But as year after year
he journeyed up and down the country, seeing, at Mission after Mission,
the buildings crumbling into ruin, the lands all taken, sold, resold,
and settled by greedy speculators; the Indian converts disappearing,
driven back to their original wildernesses, the last traces of the noble
work of his order being rapidly swept away, his courage faltered, his
faith died out. Changes in the manners and customs of his order itself,
also, were giving him deep pain. He was a Franciscan of the same type as
Francis of Assisi. To wear a shoe in place of a sandal, to take money in
a purse for a journey, above all to lay aside the gray gown and cowl for
any sort of secular garment, seemed to him wicked. To own comfortable
clothes while there were others suffering for want of them--and
there were always such--seemed to him a sin for which one might not
undeservedly be smitten with sudden and terrible punishment. In vain the
Brothers again and again supplied him with a warm cloak; he gave it away
to the first beggar he met: and as for food, the refectory would have
been left bare, and the whole brotherhood starving, if the supplies had
not been carefully hidden and locked, so that Father Salvierderra could
not give them all away. He was fast becoming that most tragic yet often
sublime sight, a man who has survived, not only his own time, but
the ideas and ideals of it. Earth holds no sharper loneliness: the
bitterness of exile, the anguish of friendlessness at their utmost,
are in it; and yet it is so much greater than they, that even they seem
small part of it.

It was with thoughts such as these that Father Salvierderra drew near
the home of the Senora Moreno late in the afternoon of one of those
midsummer days of which Southern California has so many in spring. The
almonds had bloomed and the blossoms fallen; the apricots also, and the
peaches and pears; on all the orchards of these fruits had