as one gazed, moved away; the recurring lap and ripple on the shingle
sometimes took upon itself the semblance of faint articulate laughter
or spoken words. But towards morning a certain monotonous grating on the
sand, that had for many minutes alternately cheated and piqued the ear,
asserted itself more strongly, and a moving, vacillating shadow in the
gloom became an opaque object on the shore.

With the first rays of the morning light the fog lifted. As the undraped
hills one by one bared their cold bosoms to the sun, the long line of
coast struggled back to life again. Everything was unchanged, except
that a stranded boat lay upon the sands, and in its stern sheets a
sleeping child.




CHAPTER I.


The 10th of August, 1852, brought little change to the dull monotony
of wind, fog, and treeless coast line. Only the sea was occasionally
flecked with racing sails that outstripped the old, slow-creeping
trader, or was at times streaked and blurred with the trailing smoke of
a steamer. There were a few strange footprints on those virgin sands,
and a fresh track, that led from the beach over the rounded hills,
dropped into the bosky recesses of a hidden valley beyond the coast
range.

It was here that the refectory windows of the Mission of San Carmel had
for years looked upon the reverse of that monotonous picture presented