f every traveler. But all that the eye rested on was ruined,
worn, and crumbling. The adobe houses were cracked by the incessant
sunshine of the half-year-long summer, or the more intermittent
earthquake shock; the paved courtyard of the fonda was so uneven and
sunken in the center that the lumbering wagon and faded diligencia stood
on an incline, and the mules with difficulty kept their footing while
being unladen; the whitened plaster had fallen from the feet of the two
pillars that flanked the Mission doorway, like bandages from a gouty
limb, leaving the reddish core of adobe visible; there were apparently
as many broken tiles in the streets and alleys as there were on the
heavy red roofs that everywhere asserted themselves--and even seemed to
slide down the crumbling walls to the ground. There were hopeless gaps
in grille and grating of doorways and windows, where the iron bars had
dropped helplessly out, or were bent at different angles. The walls of
the peaceful Mission garden and the warlike presidio were alike lost in
the escalading vines or leveled by the pushing boughs of gnarled
pear and olive trees that now surmounted them. The dust lay thick and
impalpable in hollow and gutter, and rose in little vapory clouds with a
soft detonation at every stroke of his horse's hoofs. Over all this dust
and ruin, idleness seemed to reign supreme. From the velvet-jacketed
figures lounging motionless in the shadows of the open doorways--so
motionless that only the lazy drift of cigarette smoke betokened their
breathing--to the reclining peons in the shade of a catalpa, or the
squatting Indians in the arroyo--all was sloth and dirt.

The Rev. Stephen Masterton felt his throat swell with his old
exhortative indignation. A gaudy yellow fan waved languidly in front of
a black rose-crested head at a white-curtained window. He knew he was
stifling with righteous wrath, and clapped his spurs to his horse.

Nevertheless, in a few days, by the aid of a letter to the innkeeper,
he was installed in a dilapidated adobe house, not unlike those he had
seen, but situated in the outskirts and overlooking the garden and part
of the refectory of the old Mission. It had even a small garden of its
own--if a strip of hot wall, overburdened with yellow and white roses, a
dozen straggling callas, a bank of heliotrope, and an almond tree could
be called a garden. It had an open doorway, but so heavily recessed
in the thick walls that it preserved