feet long, fifty-eight feet wide, and sixty feet high. Its one square,
two-story tower has a chime of bells, the sweet clear tones of which
reached our ears while we were yet miles from the mission. Counting the
arches of the long corridor, we find there are two hundred and
fifty-six. This mission became very wealthy. At one time it had a
baptized Indian population of several thousand, owned twenty-four
thousand cattle, ten thousand horses, and one hundred thousand sheep,
and harvested fourteen thousand bushels of grain a year.

Its prosperity was due in a great measure to good Padre Peyri, who had
charge of it from its beginning. Many years afterwards, as we shall see,
the padres were ordered by the Mexican government to leave their
missions, the wealth they had gathered, and the Indians they had taught
and cared for. Father Peyri, knowing how hard it would be for him to get
away from his Indian children, as he called them, slipped off by night
to San Diego. In the morning the Indians missed him. Learning what had
happened, five hundred of them mounted their ponies in hot haste and
galloped all the way to San Diego, forty-five miles, to bring him back
by force. They arrived just as the ship, with Padre Peyri on board, was
weighing anchor. Standing on deck with outstretched arms, the padre
blessed them amid their tears and loud cries. Some flung themselves into
the water and swam after the ship. Four reached it, and, climbing up its
sides, so implored to be taken on board that the padre consented and
carried them with him to Rome, where one afterwards became a priest.

The next link in our chain, the most beautiful of all the missions, is
that of San Juan Capistrano. It was founded in 1776, the year of our
Declaration of Independence, but in 1812 it was destroyed by an
earthquake, the massive towers and noble arch falling in on the Indians,
who were assembled in the church for morning prayers. Many of them were