"Not one is left," was the reply. "Though once the Mission counted
them by thousands, they are all dead and gone. There are their
monuments," he added, pointing to the fragments of a mill and one or
two industrial shops.

[Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA.]

I looked and saw the remnants of a giant wheel which formerly had
been turned by water, brought from the hills to feed the Fathers'
lands. The water was still flowing, but the wheel lay, broken,--symbolic
of the link which bound the Mission to the vanished past.

The first Roman Catholic Bishop of California and some of the early
Fathers are buried in the chapel of the monastery, but interments are
now made in a neighboring cemetery, strictly reserved for members of
the Mission, each of whom has there his predestined place. Yet even
in this humble Campo Santo life will not yield entirely to death. The
hum of droning insects breaks the stillness of the empty cloisters;
occasionally a lizard darts like a tongue of flame along the walls;
grasses and trailing plants adorn impartially the ground containing
human dust, and that which still awaits an occupant; while round a
stately crucifix, which casts its shadow like a benediction on the
sleeping dead, sweet wild flowers bloom throughout the year, and from
their swinging censers offer incense to the figure of the Saviour
with each passing breeze. The hush of melancholy broods over the
entire place. The mountains, gazing down upon it in stony silence,
are haggard and forbidding; below it lies the modern town; while from
a neighboring hillside the inmates of a villa look directly into the
monastery garden, on which the earlier Fathers little dreamed a