On the opposite side of the way, in a neglected,
weedy open, stood his chapel,-- a poverty-stricken little place, its
walls imperfectly whitewashed, decorated by a few coarse pictures
and by broken sconces of looking-glass, rescued in their
dilapidated condition from the Mission buildings, now gone utterly
to ruin. In these had been put handle-holders of common tin, in
which a few cheap candles dimly lighted the room. Everything
about it was in unison with the atmosphere of the place,-- the most
profoundly melancholy in all Southern California. Here was the
spot where that grand old Franciscan, Padre Junipero Serra, began
his work, full of the devout and ardent purpose to reclaim the
wilderness and its peoples to his country and his Church; on this
very beach he went up and down for those first terrible weeks,
nursing the sick, praying with the dying, and burying the dead,
from the pestilence-stricken Mexican ships lying in the harbor.
Here he baptized his first Indian converts, and founded his first
Mission. And the only traces now remaining of his heroic labors
and hard-won successes were a pile of crumbling ruins, a few old
olive-trees and palms; in less than another century even these
would be gone; returned into the keeping of that mother, the earth,
who puts no head-stones at the sacredest of her graves.
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