gan to return; then
out of the lap of the valley along the yellow uplands, where the men
that rode among the cattle paused, looking down like birds at the map
of their home. Then the sound widened, faint, unbroken, until it met
Temptation in the guise of a youth, riding toward the Padre from the
South, and cheered the steps of Temptation's jaded horse.

"For a day, one single day of Paris!" repeated the Padre, gazing through
his cloisters at the empty sea.

Once in the year the mother-world remembered him. Once in the year,
from Spain, tokens and home-tidings came to him, sent by certain beloved
friends of his youth. A barkentine brought him these messages. Whenever
thus the mother-world remembered him, it was like the touch of a warm
hand, a dear and tender caress; a distant life, by him long left behind,
seemed to be drawing the exile homeward from these alien shores. As the
time for his letters and packets drew near, the eyes of Padre Ignacio
would be often fixed wistfully upon the harbor, watching for the
barkentine. Sometimes, as to-day, he mistook other sails for hers, but
hers he mistook never. That Pacific Ocean, which, for all its hues and
jeweled mists, he could not learn to love, had, since long before his
day, been furrowed by the keels of Spain. Traders, and adventurers,
and men of God had passed along this coast, planting their colonies and
cloisters; but it was not his ocean. In the year that we, a thin strip
of patriots away over on the Atlantic edge of the continent, declared
ourselves an independent nation, a Spanish ship, in the name of Saint
Francis, was unloading the centuries of her own civilization at the
Golden Gate. San Diego had come earlier. Then, slowly, as mission
after mission was built along the soft coast wilderness, new ports
were established--at Santa Barbara, and by Point San Luis for San Luis
Obispo, which lay inland a little way up the gorge where it opened among
the hills. Thus the world reached these missions by water; while on
land, through the mountains, a road led to them, and also to many more
that were too distant behind the hills for ships to serve--a rough road,
long and lonely, punctuated with church towers and gardens. For the
Fathers gradually so stationed their settlements that the traveler might
each morning ride out from one mission and by evening of a day's fair
journey ride into the next. A lonely, rough, dangerous road, but lovely,
too, with a name like music--El C