his enthusiasm, and looking farther into futurity, he beheld a
new Spain rising on these savage shores. He already saw the spires of
stately cathedrals, the domes of palaces, vineyards, gardens, and
groves. Convents, half-hid among the hills, peeped from plantation of
branching limes; and long processions of chanting nuns wound through the
defiles. So completely was the good Father's conception of the future
confounded with the past, that even in their choral strain the
well-remembered accents of Carmen struck his ear. He was busied in these
fanciful imaginings, when suddenly over that extended prospect the
faint, distant tolling of a bell rang sadly out and died. It was the
_Angelus_. Father Jose listened with superstitious exaltation. The
Mission of San Pablo was far away, and the sound must have been some
miraculous omen. But never before, to his enthusiastic sense, did the
sweet seriousness of this angelic symbol come with such strange
significance. With the last faint peal, his glowing fancy seemed to
cool; the fog closed in below him, and the good Father remembered he had
not had his supper. He had risen and was wrapping his _serapa_ around
him, when he perceived for the first time that he was not alone.

Nearly opposite, and where should have been the faithless Ignacio, a
grave and decorous figure was seated. His appearance was that of an
elderly _hidalgo_, dressed in mourning, with moustaches of iron-gray
carefully waxed and twisted around a pair of lantern-jaws. The monstrous
hat and prodigious feather, the enormous ruff and exaggerated
trunk-hose, contrasting with a frame shrivelled and wizened, all
belonged to a century previous. Yet Father Jose was not astonished. His
adventurous life and poetic imagination, continually on the look-out for
the marvellous, gave him a certain advantage over the practical and
material minded. He instantly detected the diabolical quality of his
visitant, and was prepared. With equal coolness and courtesy he met the
cavalier's obeisance.

"I ask your pardon, Sir Priest," said the stranger, "for disturbing your
meditations. Pleasant they must have been, and right fanciful, I
imagine, when occasioned by so fair a prospect."

"Worldly, perhaps, Sir Devil,--for such I take you to be," said the Holy
Father, as the stranger bowed his black plumes to the ground; "worldly,
perhaps; for it hath pleased Heaven to retain even in our regenerated
state much that pertaineth to the flesh, yet