sounding blows as they work up old iron into needed farm utensils. The
soap maker's caldron sends up a cloud of ill-smelling steam. At one side
carpenters are at work trimming and cutting square holes in logs for the
beams of new buildings which the padres wish to put up. Saddle makers,
squatted on the ground, are busy fashioning saddletrees, carving, and
sewing leather. The shoemaker is hard at work with needle and awl. These
and many other trades are all going on at once. These courts, which are
called patios, were generally several acres in extent and at the most
flourishing period of the missions each settlement often gave shelter to
over a thousand people.

Behind the central court is the home of the unmarried women. This, and
the rooms for their work, open on a separate square where there is shade
from orange and fig trees and a bathing pond supplied by the zanja, or
water ditch. Here square-figured, heavy-featured Indian girls are busy
spinning and weaving thread into cloth. Others are cutting out and
sewing garments. Some, squatted on the ground, are grinding corn into a
coarse meal for the atole, or mush. At the zanja several are engaged in
washing clothes. Here these girls live under the care of an old Indian
woman, and unless she accompanies them they may not, until they are
married, go outside these walls. Near the mission we visit a long row of
small adobe buildings, the homes of the families of the Christian
Indians; a neat, busy settlement where the little ones, comfortably
clothed, play about attended by the older children, while the mothers
work for the padres four or five hours daily.

Leaving San Diego and traveling northward along "El Camino Real," the
highway which leads from mission to mission, we reach San Luis Rey,
"King of the Missions," as it is sometimes called. Its church is the
largest of all those erected by the padres, being one hundred and sixty