Padre Urbano's Umbrella



Padre Urbano, priest in charge of the Mission of San Diego, was in a bad
humor. If he had been asked what was the most necessary article in the
cargo of the supply ship Santiago on the first of her half-yearly visits
in the year 1830, he would almost certainly have said, the umbrella. The
candles were important, no doubt; so was the new altar-cloth, for the
present one had become shockingly worn under the unskillful treatment of
the Indian lavanderas; so were the seeds, all the more so because he had
included in the list seeds for an onion-bed, and onions were a delicacy
to which his soul had long been a stranger. And many others of the
articles he had named in his requisition had passed from a state of
shortage into one of absolute vacancy on the storeroom shelves. But
foremost in his thoughts was the umbrella. He had specified it with
care,--such an umbrella as he had used in Spain, before ever he came to
this destitute and heathen land; the size, a vara and a half across; the
material, silk; the color, yellow; and as the warm spring sun smote ever
more fervently upon his tonsured head, his thoughts had daily turned
with yearning towards the good, ample quitasol that was to shield him
from the fiery persecutions of his enemy, the prince of the power of the
air.

Well, the vessel had come that day, and with it the umbrella; and now,
most cruelly dashing his long-cherished hopes, one of his Indians had
stolen it! Moreover, to-morrow he was to start on his annual visitation
of the outlying stations, and he had especially relied for comfort, on
that long, hot, dusty round, upon the umbrella,--the fiend fly away
with the miscreant who had taken it! thought the Father in his wrath.