mbling, others built
about a court; all were surrounded by a high wall, enclosing a garden
where the Castilian roses grew even more luxuriantly than at the
Presidio. The walls, like the houses, were white, and on those of Don
Juan Moraga, a cousin of Dona Ignacia Arguello, the roses had been
trained to form a border along the top in a fashion that reminded
Rezanov of the pink edged walls of Fiesole.

The white red-tiled church and the long line of rooms adjoining were
built of adobe with no effort at grandeur, but with a certain noble
simplicity of outline that harmonized not only with the lofty reserve
of the hills but with the innocent hope of creating a soul in the
lowest of human bipeds. The Indians of San Francisco were as
immedicable as they were hideous; but the fathers belabored them with
sticks and heaven with prayer, and had so far succeeded that if as yet
they had sown piety no higher than the knees, they had trained some
twelve hundred pairs of hands to useful service.

On the right was a graveyard, with little in it as yet but rose trees;
behind the church and the many spacious rooms built for the consolation
of virtue in the wilderness was a large building surrounding a court.
Girls and young widows occupied the cells on the north side, and the
work rooms on the east, while the youths, under the sharp eye of a lay
brother, were opposite. All lived a life of unwilling industry:
cleaning and combing wool, spinning, weaving, manufacturing chocolate,
grinding corn between stones, making shoes, fashioning the simple
garments worn by priest and Indian. Between the main group of
buildings and the natural rampart of the "San Bruno Mountains" was the
Rancheria, where the Indian families lived in eight long rows of
isolated huts.

In spite of vigilance an Indian escaped now and again to the mountains,
where he could lie naked in the sun and curse the fetich of
civilization. As the Russians approached, a friar, with deer-skin
armor over his cassock, was tugging at a recalcitrant mule, while a
body-guard of four Indians stood ready to attend him down the coast in
search of an enviable brother. The mule, as if in sympathy with the
fugitive, had planted his four feet in the earth and lifted his voice
in derision, while the young friar, a recruit at the Mission, and far
from enamored of his task, strained at the rope, and an Indian pelted
the hindquarters with stones. Suddenly, the mule flung out his heels,
th