PACHANGO INDIANS AT HOME.
A CHRISTIANIZED INDIAN.
THE MISSION BELLS.
The old town of San Diego, four miles north of the present city, is now almost abandoned. Only a dozen adobe buildings kept in fair repair, and as many more in ruins, mark the site. The little chapel is still used for worship, and from an uncouth wooden frame outside its walls hang two of the old Mission bells which formerly rang out the Angelus over the sunset waves. My guide carelessly struck them with the butt of his whip, and called forth from their consecrated lips of bronze a sound which, in that scene of loneliness, at first seemed like a wail of protest at the sacrilege, and finally died away into a muffled intonation resembling a stifled sob. Roused by the unexpected call, there presently appeared an Indian who looked as if he might have been contemporary with Methuselah. No wrinkled leaf that had been blown about the earth for centuries could have appeared more dry and withered than this centenarian, whose hair drooped from his skull like Spanish moss, and whose brown hands resembled lumps of adobe.
AN AGED SQUAW.
"I am glad to have you see this man," said the guide, "for he has rung these bells for seventy years, and is said to be more than a hundred years old."
I could not obtain a portrait of this decrepit bell-ringer, for many Indians are superstitiously opposed to being photographed; but I procured the picture of an equally shriveled female aged one hundred and thirty who might have been his sister.