journeying and ministering to whoever desires their offices. As for these Catalan priests who are coming in here, I cannot abide them. No Catalan but has bad 5 blood in his veins!'

her handsome Felipe, had been buried while they were yet infants. In the General's time, while the estate was at its best, and hundreds of Indians living within its borders, there was many a Sunday when the scene to be witnessed there was like the scenes at the Missions, the chapel full of kneeling men and women; those who could not find room inside kneeling on the garden walks out- 10 and cowl had been familiar to her eyes,

There was every reason in the world why the Señora should be thus warmly attached to the Franciscan Order. From her earliest recollections the gray gown

and had represented the things which she was taught to hold most sacred and dear. Father Salvierderra himself had come from Mexico to Monterey in the same ship which had brought her father to be the commandante of the Santa Barbara Presidio; and her best-beloved uncle, her father's eldest brother, was at that time the Superior of the Santa Barbara

side; Father Salvierderra, in gorgeous
vestments, coming, at close of the serv-
ices, slowly down the aisle, the close-
packed rows of worshipers parting to
right and left to let him through, all 15
looking up eagerly for his blessing, women
giving him offerings of fruit or flowers,
and holding up their babies that he might
lay his hands on their heads. No one but
Father Salvierderra had ever officiated in 20 Mission. The sentiment and romance of

the Moreno chapel, or heard the con-
fession of a Moreno. He was a Francis-
can, one of the few now left in the
country; so revered and beloved by all
who had come under his influence, that 25
they would wait long months without the
offices of the Church, rather than con-
fess their sins or confide their perplexi-
ties to any one else. From this deep-
seated attachment on the part of the In-30
dians and the older Mexican families in
the country to the Franciscan order, there
had grown up, not unnaturally, some jeal-
ousy of them in the minds of the later-
come secular priests, and the position of 35
the few monks left was not wholly a
pleasant one. It had even been rumored
that they were to be forbidden to con-
tinue longer their practice of going up
and down the country, ministering every- 40
where; were to be compelled to restrict
their labors to their own colleges at
Santa Barbara and Santa Inez. When
something to this effect was one day said
in the Señora Moreno's presence, two 45
scarlet spots sprang on her cheeks, and be-
fore she bethought herself, she exclaimed,
That day, I burn down my chapel!'
Luckily, nobody but Felipe heard the
rash threat, and his exclamation of un- 50
bounded astonishment recalled the Señora
to herself.

I spoke rashly, my son,' she said. The Church is to be obeyed always; but the Franciscan Fathers are responsi- 55 ble to no one but the Superior of their own order; and there is no one in this land who has the authority to forbid their

her youth were almost equally divided between the gaieties, excitements, adornments of the life at the Presidio, and the ceremonies and devotions of the life at the Mission. She was famed as the most beautiful girl in the country. Men of the army, men of the navy, and men of the Church, alike adored her. Her name was a toast from Monterey to San Diego. When at last she was wooed and won by Felipe Moreno, one of the most distinguished of the Mexican generals, her wedding ceremonies were the most splendid ever seen in the country. The right tower of the Mission church at Santa Barbara had been just completed, and it was arranged that the conservation of this tower should take place at the time of her wedding, and that her wedding feats should be spread in the long outside corridor of the Mission building. The whole country, far and near, was bid. The feast lasted three days; open tables to everybody; singing, dancing, eating, drinking, and making merry. At that time there were long streets of Indian houses stretching eastward from the Mission; before each of these houses was built a booth of green boughs. The Indians, as well as the Fathers from all the other Missions, were invited to come. The Indians came in bands, singing songs and bringing gifts. As they appeared, the Santa Barbara Indians went out to meet them, also singing, bearing gifts, and strewing seeds on the ground, in token of welcome. The young Señora and her bridegroom, splendidly clothed, were seen

sources for entertaining his distinguished guests, caused to be driven past the corridors, for their inspection, all the poultry belonging to the Mission. The proces5 sion took an hour to pass. For music, there was the squeaking, cackling, hissing, gobbling, crowing, quacking of the fowls, combined with the screaming, scolding, and whip-cracking of the excited Indian marshals of the lines. First came the turkeys, then the roosters, then the white hens, then the black, and then the yellow, next the ducks, and at the tail of the spectacle long files of geese, some strut15 ting, some half flying and hissing in resentment and terror at the unwonted coercions to which they were subjected. The Indians had been hard at work all night capturing, sorting, assorting, and guarding the rank and file of their novel pageant. It would be safe to say that a droller sight never was seen, and never will be, on the Pacific coast or any other. Before it was done with, the General and his bride had nearly died with laughter; and the General could never allude to it without laughing almost as heartily again.

and fierily a Catholic, and a lover of the Franciscans.

'Would thou wert a man, Felipe,' she exclaimed again and again in tones the child never forgot. Would thou wert a man, that thou might go also to fight these foreigners!'

Any race under the sun would have been to the Señora less hateful than the American. She had scorned them in her girlhood, when they came trading to post after post. She scorned them still. The idea of being forced to wage a war with peddlers was to her too monstrous to be believed. In the outset she had no doubt that the Mexicans would win in the contest.

During the height of the despoiling and plundering of the Missions, under the Secularization Act, she was for a few 5 years almost beside herself. More than once she journeyed alone, when the journey was by no means without danger, to Monterey, to stir up the Prefect of the Missions to more energetic action, 10 to implore the governmental authorities. to interfere, and protect the Church's property. It was largely in consequence of her eloquent entreaties that Governor Micheltorena issued his bootless order, re- 15 storing to the Church all the Missions south of San Luis Obispo. But this order cost Micheltorena his political head, and General Moreno was severely wounded in one of the skirmishes of the 20 to her dead, killed in the last fight the insurrection which drove Micheltorena out of the country.

'What!' she cried, 'shall we who won independence from Spain, be beaten by these traders? It is impossible!'

When her husband was brought home

Mexican forces made, she said icily, 'He would have chosen to die rather than to have been forced to see his country in the hands of the enemy.' And she was 25 almost frightened at herself to see how this thought, as it dwelt in her mind, slew the grief in her heart. She had believed she could not live if her husband were to be taken away from her; but she found 30 herself often glad that he was dead,— glad that he was spared the sight and the knowledge of the things which happened; and even the yearning tenderness with which her imagination pictured him among the saints, was often turned into a fierce wondering whether indignation. did not fill his soul, even in heaven, at the way things were going in the land for whose sake he had died.

In silence and bitter humiliation the Señora nursed her husband back to health again, and resolved to meddle no more in the affairs of her unhappy country and still more unhappy Church. As year by year she saw the ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties melting away, like dew before the sun, in the hands of dishonest administrators and politicians, the Church powerless to contend with the unprincipled greed in high places, her beloved Franciscan Fathers driven from the country or dying of 35 starvation at their posts, she submitted herself to what, she was forced to admit, seemed to be the inscrutable will of God for the discipline and humiliation of the Church. In a sort of bewildered resigna- 40 tion she waited to see what farther sufferings were to come, to fill up the measure of the punishment which, for some mysterious purpose, the faithful must endure. But when close upon all this dis- 45 comfiture and humiliation of her Church followed the discomfiture and humiliation of her country in war, and the near and evident danger of an English-speaking people's possessing the land, all the smoth- 50 ered fire of the Señora's nature broke out afresh. With unfaltering hands she buckled on her husband's sword, and with dry eyes saw him go forth to fight. She had but one regret, that she was not the 5 monk in the Moreno chapel. mother of sons to fight also.

Out of such throes as these had been born the second nature which made Señora Moreno the silent, reserved, stern, implacable woman they knew, who knew her first when she was sixty. Of the gay, tender, sentimental girl, who danced and laughed with the officers, and prayed and confessed with the Fathers, forty years before, there was small trace left now, in the low-voiced, white-haired, aged woman, silent, unsmiling, placid-faced, who manoeuvered with her son and her head shepherd alike, to bring it about that a handful of Indians might once more confess their sins to a Franciscan

Ramona, Chapter II, 1884.

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN (1833-1908) 1

Strictly speaking, Edmund Clarence Stedman was a New York business man who turned at times to literature for recreation. He was a native of Hartford, Connecticut; he attended Yale, but because of youthful pranks was not permitted to finish his course; and at the age of twenty was married without his guardian's consent. Necessity for securing a livelihood sent him to New York to engage in the manufacture of clocks. The company soon failing, he turned in 1855 to real estate business and brokerage. In the early days of the war he went to the front as a newspaper correspondent, reported brilliantly some of the early battles, and, returning in 1863, entered Wall Street as a broker and a little later as a member of the Stock Exchange. He had found his profession, and, though nearly ruined by the panic of the early seventies, and always in great financial anxiety, he maintained his place until 1900, when he resigned to devote himself wholly to literary work.

From the first, poetry was to Stedman an avenue of escape from the distracting hurly-burly of business life. Like Taylor and Stoddard and Hayne and Timrod, he considered it something sacred and apart, to be approached with reverence. He translated Theocritus, made poems of Grecian beauty, and dreamed dreams in a world far from his own land and day. The war awakened him for a time. but he must be classed with the transition poets who, Janus-like, stand looking longingly backward and at the same time timidly forward into the future. He published enough poetry to make possible a Household Edition,' but of it all only a few virile war lyrics, written in the days when the war shook him out of his dreamy reveries, and two or three other lyrics that came from his heart, have survived him. In his later years he turned to prose, and wrote graceful studies of the Victorian poets and of the American poets. But he was a soul too poetic and sentimental to succeed as a critic. His flowing and ornate appreciations to-day seem lacking in force and breadth and philosophical insight. In spirit they are of the generalizing, and gorgeous mid-century rather than of the more scientific and accurate later years. In his study of Poe he reached his highest point as a critic.