for action, he held it of no account. Only the year before his death, being then seventy years old, and very lame, he had journeyed on foot from San Diego to Monterey, visiting every mission and turning aside into all the Indian settlements on the way. At this time there were on the Santa Barbara coast alone, within a space of eighty miles, twentyone villages of Indians, roughly estimated as containing between twenty and thirty thousand souls. He is said to have gone weeping from village to village because he could do nothing for them.

He reached San Carlos in January, 1784, and never again went away. The story of his last hours and death is in the old church records of Monterey, written there by the hand of the sorrowing Palon the second day after he had closed his friend's eyes. It is a quaint and touching narrative.

Up to the day before his death, his indomitable will upholding the failing strength of his dying body, Father Junipero had read in the church the canonical offices of each day, a service requiring an hour and a half of time. The evening before his death he walked alone to the church to receive the last sacrament. The church was crowded to overflowing with Indians and whites, many crying aloud in uncontrollable grief.

Father Junipero knelt before the altar with great fervor of manner, while Father Palon, with tears rolling down his cheeks, read the services for the dying, gave him absolution, and administered the Holy Viaticum. Then rose from choked and tremulous voices the strains of the grand hymn "Tantum Ergo."

Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur cernui,

Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui;
Præstet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

Genitori genitoque

Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque
Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab utroque

Compar sit laudatio.

A startled thrill ran through the church as Father Junipero's own voice, "high and strong as ever," says the record, joined in the hymn. One by one the voices of his people broke down, stifled by sobs, until at last the dying man's voice, almost alone, finished the hymn. After this he gave thanks, and, returning to his cell-like room, spent the whole of the night in listening to penitential psalms and litanies, and giving thanks to God: all the time kneeling or sitting on the ground supported by the loving and faithful Palon. In the morning, early, he asked for the plenVOL. XXVI.-3.

ary indulgence, for which he again knelt, and confessed again. At noon, the chaplain and the captain of the bark St. Joseph, then lying in port at Monterey, came to visit him. He welcomed them, and, cordially embracing the chaplain, said, "You have come just in time to cast the earth upon my body." After they took their leave, he asked Palon to read to him again the Recommendations of the Soul. At its conclusion he responded earnestly, in as clear voice as in health, adding, "Thank God, I am now without fear." Then with a firm step he walked to the kitchen, saying that he would like a cup of broth. As soon as he had taken the broth, he exclaimed, "I feel better now; I will rest"; and, lying down, he closed his eyes, and without another word or sign of struggle or pain, ceased to breathe; entering indeed into a rest of which his last word had been solemnly prophetic.

Ever since morning the grief-stricken people had been waiting and listening for the tolling death-bell to announce that all was over. At its first note they came in crowds, breathless, weeping, and lamenting. It was with great difficulty that the soldiers could keep them from tearing Father Junipero's habit piecemeal from his body, so ardent was their desire to possess some relic of him. The corpse was laid at once in a coffin which he himself had ordered made many weeks before. The vessels in port fired a salute of one hundred and one guns, answered by the same from the guns of the presidio at Monterey -an honor given to no one below the rank of general. But the hundred gun salutes were a paltry honor in comparison with the tears of the Indian congregation. Soldiers kept watch around his coffin night and day till the burial, but they could not hold back the throngs of the poor creatures who pressed to touch the hand of the Father they had so much loved, and to bear away something, if only a thread, of the garments he had worn.

His ardent and impassioned nature and his untiring labors had won their deepest affection and confidence. It was his habit when at San Carlos to spend all his time with them, working by their side in the fields, making adobe, digging, tilling, doing, in short, all that he required of them. Day after day he thus labored, only desisting at the hours for performing offices in the church. Whenever an Indian came to address him, he made the sign of the cross on his forehead, and spoke to him some words of spiritual injunction or benediction. The arbitrariness, or, as some of his enemies called it, haughty self-will, which brought Serra at times into conflict with the military authorities when their purposes or views clashed with his own, never came to the

surface in his spiritual functions, or in his relation with the Indian converts. He loved them, and yearned over them as brands to be snatched from the burning. He had baptized over one thousand of them with his own hands; his whole life he spent for them, and was ready at any moment to lay it down if that would have benefited them more. Absolute single-heartedness like this is never misunderstood by, and never antagonizes equally single-hearted people, either high or low. But, to be absolutely single-hearted in a moral purpose is almost inevitably to be doggedly one-ideaed in regard to practical methods, and the single-hearted, one-ideaed man, with a great moral purpose, is sure to be often at swords' points with average men of selfish interests and mixed notions. This is the explanation of the fact that the later years of Serra's life were marred by occasional collisions with the military authorities in the country. No doubt the impetuosity of his nature made him sometimes hot in resentment and indiscreet of speech. But, in spite of these failings, he yet remains the foremost, grandest figure in the missions' history. If his successors in their administration had been equal to him in spirituality, enthusiasm, and intellect, the mission establishments would never have been so utterly overthrown and ruined. Father Junipero sleeps on the spot where he labored and died. His grave is under the ruins of the beautiful stone church of his mission-the church which he saw only in ardent and longing fancy. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful, though not the grandest of the mission churches, and its ruins have to-day a charm far exceeding all the others. The fine yellow tint of the stone, the grand and unique contour of the arches, the beautiful star-shaped window in the front, the simple yet effective lines of carving on pilaster and pillar and door-way, the symmetrical Moorish tower and dome, the worn steps leading up to the belfry,—all make a picture whose beauty, apart from hallowing associations, is enough to hold one spell-bound. Reverent nature has rebuilt with grass and blossoms even the crumbling window-sills, across which the wind blows free from the blue ocean just beyond; and on the day we saw the place, golden wheat, fresh reaped, was piled in loose mounds on the south slope below the church's southern wall; it reminded me of the tales I had heard from many aged men and women of a beautiful custom the Indians

had of scattering their choicest grains on the ground at the friars' feet, as a token of homage. The roof of the church long ago fell in; its doors have stood open for years; and the fierce sea-gales have been sweeping in, piling sands until a great part of the floor is covered with solid earth on which every summer grasses and weeds grow high enough to be cut by sickles. Of the thousands of acres which the Mission Indians once cultivated in the San Carlos valley, only nine were finally decreed by the United States Government to belong to the church. These were so carelessly surveyed that no avenue of approach was left open to the mission buildings, and a part of the land had to be sold to buy a right of way to the church. The remnant left makes a little farm, by the rental of which a man can be hired to take charge of the whole place, and keep it, if possible, from further desecration and ruin. The present keeper is a devout Portuguese, whose broken English becomes eloquent as he speaks of the old friars whose graves he guards.

"Dem work for civilize," he said, "not work for money. Dey work to religion."

In clearing away the earth at the altar end of the church, in the winter of 1882, this man came upon stone slabs evidently covering graves. On opening one of these graves, it was found to hold three coffins. From the minute description, in the old records, of Father Junipero's place of burial, Father Carenova, the priest now in charge of the Monterey parish, became convinced that one of these coffins must be his. On the opposite side of the church is another grave, where are buried two of the earliest governors of California.

It is a disgrace to both the Catholic Church and the State of California that this grand old ruin, with its sacred sepulchers, should be left to crumble away. If nothing is done to protect and save it, one short hundred years more will see it a shapeless, wind-swept mound of sand. It is not in our power to confer honor or bring dishonor on the illustrious dead. We ourselves, alone, are dishonored when we fail in reverence to them. The grave of Junipero Serra may be buried centuries deep and its very place forgotten, yet his name will not perish, nor his fame suffer. But, for the men of the country whose civilization he founded, and of the Church whose faith he so glorified, to permit his burial-place to sink into oblivion, is a shame indeed!

H. H.