the great undulating sea
of the wild-oat plains had gone down and was at rest. It was at this
hour, one afternoon, that, with the released scents of the garden, there
came to him a strange and subtle perfume that was new to his senses. He
laid aside his book, went into the garden, and, half-unconscious of his
trespass, passed through the Mission orchard and thence into the little
churchyard beside the church.

Looking at the strange inscriptions in an unfamiliar tongue, he
was singularly touched with the few cheap memorials lying upon the
graves--like childish toys--and for the moment overlooked the papistic
emblems that accompanied them. It struck him vaguely that Death, the
common leveler, had made even the symbols of a faith eternal inferior to
those simple records of undying memory and affection, and he was for a
moment startled into doubt.

He walked to the door of the church; to his surprise it was open.
Standing upon the threshold, he glanced inside, and stood for a moment
utterly bewildered. In a man of refined taste and education that bizarre
and highly colored interior would have only provoked a smile or
shrug; to Stephen Masterton's highly emotional nature, but artistic
inexperience, strangely enough it was profoundly impressive. The heavily
timbered, roughly hewn roof, barred with alternate bands of blue and
Indian red, the crimson hangings, the gold and black draperies, affected
this religious backwoodsman exactly as they were designed to affect the
heathen and acolytes for whose conversion the temple had been reared. He
could scarcely take his eyes from the tinsel-crowned Mother of Heaven,
resplendent in white and gold and glittering with jewels; the radiant
shield before the Host, illuminated by tall spectral candles in the
mysterious obscurity of the altar, dazzled him like the rayed disk of
the setting sun.

A gentle murmur, as of the distant sea, came from the altar. In his
naive bewilderment he had not seen the few kneeling figures in the
shadow of column and aisle; it was not until a man, whom he recognized
as a muleteer he had seen that afternoon gambling and drinking in the
fonda, slipped by him like a shadow and sank upon his knees in the
center of the aisle that he realized the overpowering truth.

HE, Stephen Masterton, was looking upon some rite of Popish idolatry! He
was turning quickly away when the keeper of the tienda--a man of sloth
and sin--gently approached him from the shadow of a