mpathetic holiday-makers, you
may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any
other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years
of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they
have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin
so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The
pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. "In
saecula saeculo-hohorum," they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every
additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with
joy than the faces of these Indian singers. It was to them not only the
worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated
better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew
of art and letters was united and expressed. And it made a man's heart
sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to
reap, to read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which
they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed
away from all authority and influence in that land--to be succeeded by
greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may
our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of
Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in
this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2]
exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the
railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable
toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey
is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at
railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the
little town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the
flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen
of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire
vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] 1879.

II

SAN FRANCISCO

The Pacific coast of the United States, as you may see by the map, and
still better in that admirable book, "Two Years before the Mast," by
Dana, is one of the most exposed and shelterless on earth. The
trade-wind blows fresh; the huge Pacific swell booms along degree after
degree of an unbroken line