Through the indefatigable energy of the President and the two priests, the few buildings of the Mission were completed within a year. The adobe church was unusually large and well built, as one can see to-day. The tower, the base of which is strongly fortified, is still standing, though the roof of the church has long since fallen to the earthen floor. Little trace now remains of the less important buildings, for the Mission was abandoned thirty years after its establishment, and the property passed into the hands of its present owner, Mr. Ralph Almsford, some fifteen years before the opening of our story.
A century has elapsed since that day when the Fathers planted the cross amidst the stately aisles of madrone trees; the Mission is now almost forgotten, but the San Rosario Ranch is well known for its famous breed of cattle, and for its fine dairy, which supplies the San Francisco market with choice butter and cream.
The two priests--he of the hard-favored countenance, and he of the gentle eyes--lie side by side at the foot of the crumbling altar. The Indians who were reclaimed by them from barbarism have gone to their happy hunting-grounds, and the brilliant future prophesied by Father Junipero is proven to be a dream and nothing more.
CHAPTER II.
"Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!
No city airs or arts pass current here.
Your rank is all reversed: let men of cloth
Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls."
Millicent Almsford awoke early on the morning after her arrival. "What is the matter?" she asked.
No one answering her question, she put another.
"Why do we not go on, what are we stopping for?" this still in a semi-somnolent voice. On opening her eyes and finding that she was not in the berth of the palace car, where she had for a week past always found herself, she laughed outright and then gave a deep sigh.
Her long journey, from the Palazzo Fortunio in Venice to the San Rosario Ranch in California, was at an end; and here she was, to use her own phrase, "planted in the wilderness for a year to come."
"Heavens! how can I bear it?" she cried, tossing restlessly to the other side of her wide bed; "it is all so new, so raw, so crude, so terrible,--just like this cotton sheet, which has chafed my chin so badly that I would rather have slept without one."