 | The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches |  |
THE MISSION DOLORES.
THE Mission Dolores is destined to be “The
Last Sigh” of the native Californian. When
the last “Greaser” shall indolently give way to
the bustling Yankee, I can imagine he will, like
the Moorish King, ascend one of the Mission hills
to take his last lingering look at the hilled city.
For a long time he will cling tenaciously to Pacific
Street. He will delve in the rocky fastnesses of
Telegraph Hill until progress shall remove it. He
will haunt Vallejo Street, and those back slums
which so vividly typify the degradation of a people;
but he will eventually make way for improvement.
The Mission will be last to drop from his
nerveless fingers.
As I stand here this pleasant afternoon, looking
up at the old chapel, — its ragged senility contrasting
with the smart spring sunshine, its two
gouty pillars with the plaster dropping away like
tattered bandages, its rayless windows, its crumbling
entrances, the leper spots on its whitewashed
wall eating through the dark adobe, — I give the
poor old mendicant but a few years longer to sit
by the highway and ask alms in the names of the
the shadow of its dissolution. The shriek of the
locomotive discords with the Angelus bell. An
Episcopal church, of a green Gothic type, with massive
buttresses of Oregon pine, even now mocks its
hoary age with imitation and supplants it with a
sham. Vain, alas! were those rural accessories, the
nurseries and market-gardens, that once gathered
about its walls and resisted civic encroachment.
They, too, are passing away. Even those queer little
adobe buildings with tiled roofs like longitudinal
slips of cinnamon, and walled enclosures sacredly
guarding a few bullock horns and strips of
hide. I look in vain for the half-reclaimed Mexican,
whose respectability stopped at his waist, and
whose red sash under his vest was the utter undoing
of his black broadcloth. I miss, too, those
black-haired women, with swaying unstable busts,
whose dresses were always unseasonable in texture
and pattern; whose wearing of a shawl was a terrible
awakening from the poetic dream of the
Spanish mantilla. Traces of another nationality
are visible. The railroad “navvy” has builded his
shanty near the chapel, and smokes his pipe in the
Posada. Gutturals have taken the place of linguals
and sibilants; I miss the half-chanted, half-drawled
cadences that used to mingle with the cheery “All
aboard” of the stage-driver, in those good old days
when the stages ran hourly to the Mission, and a
of the temple, in the place of those “who sell
doves for sacrifice,” a vender of mechanical
spiders has halted with his unhallowed wares.
Even the old Padre — last type of the Missionary,
and descendant of the good Junipero — I cannot
find to-day; in his stead a light-haired Celt is
reading a lesson from a Vulgate that is wonderfully
replete with double r's. Gentle priest, in thy Risons,
let the stranger and heretic be remembered.
I open a little gate and enter the Mission Churchyard.
There is no change here, though perhaps
the graves lie closer together. A willow-tree,
growing beside the deep, brown wall, has burst
into tufted plumes in the fulness of spring. The
tall grass-blades over each mound show a strange
quickening of the soil below. It is pleasanter
here than on the bleak mountain seaward, where
distracting winds continually bring the strife and
turmoil of the ocean. The Mission hills lovingly
embrace the little cemetery, whose decorative taste
is less ostentatious. The foreign flavor is strong;
here are never-failing garlands of immortelles, with
their sepulchral spicery; here are little cheap
medallions of pewter, with the adornment of three
black tears, that would look like the three of clubs,
but that the simple humility of the inscription
counterbalances all sense of the ridiculous. Here
are children's graves with guardian angels of great
toys in a glass case beside them. Here is the average
quantity of execrable original verses; but
one stanza — over a sailor's grave — is striking,
for it expresses a hope of salvation through the
“Lord High Admiral Christ”! Over the foreign
graves there is a notable lack of scriptural quotation,
and an increase, if I may say it, of humanity
and tenderness. I cannot help thinking that too
many of my countrymen are influenced by a morbid
desire to make a practical point of this occasion,
and are too apt hastily to crowd a whole life
of omission into the culminating act. But when
I see the gray immortelles crowning a tombstone, I
know I shall find the mysteries of the resurrection
shown rather in symbols, and only the love
taught in His new commandment left for the
graphic touch. But “they manage these things
better in France.”
During my purposeless ramble the sun has been
steadily climbing the brown wall of the church,
and the air seems to grow cold and raw. The
bright green dies out of the grass, and the rich
bronze comes down from the wall. The willow-tree
seems half inclined to doff its plumes, and
wears the dejected air of a broken faith and violated
trust. The spice of the immortelles mixes
with the incense that steals through the open window.
cold and cheap in this searching air; by this light
the church certainly is old and ugly. I cannot
help wondering whether the old Fathers, if they
ever revisit the scene of their former labors, in their
larger comprehensions, view with regret the impending
change, or mourn over the day when the
Mission Dolores shall appropriately come to grief.
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