have been, it was of course altogether powerless to breathe fresh life
into a system already in the last stages of decay. The mission-buildings
were crumbling into ruins. Their lands were neglected; their converts
for the most part dead or scattered. The rule of the padres was over.
The Spanish missions in Alta California were things of the past.

In these late days of a civilization so different in all its essential
elements from that which the Franciscans laboured so strenuously to
establish on the Pacific Coast, we may think of the fathers as we will,
and pass what judgment we see fit upon their work. But be that what it
may, our hearts cannot fail to be touched and stirred by the pitiful
story of those true servants of God who, in the hour of ultimate
disaster, firmly refused to be separated from their flocks.

Among the ruins of San Luis Obispo, in 1842, De Mofras found the oldest
Spanish priest then left in California, who, after sixty years of
unremitting toil, was then reduced to such abject poverty that he was
forced to sleep on a hide, drink from a horn, and feed upon strips of
meat dried in the sun. Yet this faithful creature still continued to
share the little he possessed with the children of the few Indians who
lingered in the huts about the deserted church; and when efforts were
made to induce him to seek some other spot where he might find refuge
and rest, his answer was that he meant to die at his post. The same
writer has recorded an even more tragic case from the annals of La
Soledad. Long after the settlement there had been abandoned, and when
the buildings were falling to pieces, an old priest, Father Sarría,
still remained to minister to the bodily and physical wants of a handful
of wretched natives who yet haunted the neighborhood, and whom he
absolutely refused to forsake. One Sunday morning in August, 1833, after
his habit, he gathered his neophytes together in what was once the