and contests and on the baseball nines of the two troops with zest. For, deprived of the usual amusements of city life, the boys in blue often find life in the wilds very monotonous, with nothing to occupy their recreation time, excepting an occasional game of "horse-shoe pitching," (a game of quoits, except the "stakes" or hobs are "rung" with horse-shoes instead of disks or rope loops) and the usual indoor games of dominoes, craps, and cards.

At sunrise the National holiday is ushered in by the deep-mouthed peal upon peal of the cannon echoing and re-echoing through the rocky gorges like the roar of distant thunder. By nine o'clock a motley crowd of spectators has gathered, lining up along. the ropes which have been stretched from the mess-house to the officer's headquarters, to mark off the field of performance.

There are guests from the hotel and camps, whose brown khaki walking

suits make a sombre background for the bright calico dresses and bandanas of the Indians who have come from the Indian village nearby. Cowboys who have ridden in from neighboring ranges are there, likewise shepherds. who have left their flocks for a day. A covered wagon approached, depositing under a spreading oak its load of smiling, dirty-faced children, who have come all the way from Sonora for the occasion.

Soon the officers who are to act as judges take their places in the field and the sport begins. First come the mule back races. A dozen men on mule mounts line up and at a signal from the presiding officer are off, urging the reluctant beasts down the field toward the goal post, amid the laughter and cheers of the lookers-on, for the quiet, sluggish animals do not relish the unaccustomed strenuous pace, one old fellow obstinately refusing to budge, much to the annoyance of his rider who finally was obliged to lead

him back to the corral. The contest in rapid mounting follows, then "Dixie," a noble white charger, who has been trained in various stunts by "Long Tom," an ex-cowpuncher now in Uncle Sam's service, delights his audience by waddling down the field in true cake-walk fashion, "playing dead" at command from his trainer, and mounting step by step a set of strongly built stairs, prepared for the occasion, finally reaching the surmounting platform with a snort of triumph. The hurdle races which follow complete the events of the forenoon, when after an intermission of two hours the baseball match takes place. In the army are professional men, some of major league experience, and the officers many of whom have taken an active interest in the game during their college days as coaches in this favorite of all out door sports among the boys of both army and

With the evening's display of fireworks the day's program ends and the members of Uncle Sam's household in the Yosemite resume the quiet uneventful "tenor of their way" during the months which follow, until when

the grassy meadows have begun to turn brown and the trees to drop their leaves and the chill winds bearing the breath of snow capped mountains sweep through the valley, Uncle Sam pulls up stakes and Camp Yosemite is deserted until summer comes again.

MARIAN TAYLOR.

T

HOUSANDS of tourists go annually to California determined to take in the sights of the State. In San Francisco they ride out to the Cliff House; they mingle with the strollers on Market street; they hire a guide to lead them through Chinatown's dark alleys. In Los Angeles they try the waters of the Pacific at each of its nine beaches; they make a trip up Mt. Lowe; they watch the plucking of the ostriches; they wonder at flowering orange trees and snowtopped mountains in the same panorama; they follow the kite-shaped track, and crowd half a dozen other excursions into a week, struggling not to miss anything. In San Diego they cross the ferry to Hotel Coronado; they break a piece of mud from the adobe walls of Ramona's marriage place at La Jolla; they travel ten miles to Tia Juana in order to say they have visited Old Mexico. In their way they have seen California, more or less thoroughly according to their strength and their pocketbooks.

The dreamer and the lover of the picturesque recognizes another side to California. For him the romance of an unknown past hangs over her. The adobe ruins scattered over the country, here a group of a dozen, there a single one, are the last traces of a people who have disappeared, of a people who were not the products of a temperate clime, and who loved their home not for its material resources but for its wealth of sunshine and of color. The noisy bustle of commercial America has already engulfed California's cities, and the evidences of a million imprisoned humans are blazoned

everywhere; out in the country, however, no such anomalies confuse the imagination, and the sunny State can be pictured as it rested a century ago in the hands of a leisure-loving people. Other early settlements in America have lived exciting history of whose details we are fully informed; California's past on the other hand was lived by a people whose life philosophy differed too much from our own for our understanding, and of whose history tantalizingly small fragments alone remain. The glamor of mystery surrounds it. California was made for these people. In our practical nation of exact time this one spot was reserved for leisure and dreams and romance, a distinction everyone now forgets. When California in the springtime riots in gold and purple dress or in the summer when she rests in heavy somnolence under a weight of hazy sunshine Americans. are a mockery to Nature's work. Her proper owners disappeared a century ago.

The ruins of their houses, their eucalyptus shaded roads, and their low, cool, churches stand neglected and reproachful throughout the country. In the day of their usefulness the Franciscan monks guided the dark-skinned Mexicans and Indians, who grouped their one-roomed adobes round the missions. California then glorying in her dwellers' need for her watchful care exerted herself to provide a bountiful harvest of the luscious cactus fruit; her patron god showered the noon-day sunshine solely that the Mexican might lie under his live oak tree, and while he dozed off into his siesta see a procession of dream fig

ures grow in its haze. To such a people as these, people who were happy or sombre as the sun smiled or sulked, does California with her tropical moods belong.

Even yet the spirit of this sun-loving race hangs over the country so that the dreamer when he comes across one of their deserted homes can take the place they formerly kept smooth under the nearby tree and reconstruct their life. He imagines a brown-cassocked Franciscan monk walking slowly along the shady path, glancing protectingly at the brown

again with the one adobe, roofless and crumbling.

Companions to these forsaken homes are the mission churches, each one a day's walk apart on El Camino Real, the road from San Francisco to San Diego. Three of these have vanished entirely; fourteen are partly in ruins; in three the priests perform the masses; and the last one, Santa Barbara, has been repaired to house a band of Franciscan monks. Sole possessors of the traditions of their predecessors who worked to convert a thousand Indians to their religion, they

adobe. From the colony of enormous cacti a slender Indian plucks the blood-red fruit, carefully avoiding the prickles. The yellow mustard field sways rhythmically in the breeze, and from within it he hears the shouts of invisible children at play. Then the mission bell rings out, and from the vineyards on the other side of the eucalyptus bordered road come groups of monks and Mexicans and Indians. Slowly they disappear into the church, a wavering outline in the sunshine, until Nature and the dreamer are alone

have in comparison little to do. The same grapevines that the fathers planted the monks still tend, and morning, noon and evening the swinging bell, set up two centuries ago, calls them in from the fields. Pitiful remnant of a great band that they are, even the need for their existence faded years ago when the Americans claimed California for their own.

Los Angeles, ungrateful though she is in her mad desire to grow away from it, includes within her limits one of the missions where until very re

597

cently services in the soft, sibilant

Spanish were still held. Its rude sunbaked brick walls have been patched here and there by some zealous priest, but it remains practically unaltered since the host of Mexicans and Indians under the direction of the fathers finished building it. The eucalyptus doors open out on the plaza, a square. of ground where, despite the envious eyes cast upon it by the city, the Mexican dwellers in Sonoratown still come to get their share of sunshine, and to stare curiously at Chinatown on the other side. Crowding close to the long, low, foundationless house next door to the church and reserved for priests, is Sonoratown, frightened Sonoratown, that withdraws into a smaller and smaller area each year. Back of the church a square courtyard-the interior court of all SouthEuropean countries-flanked on two sides by one-roomed adobes inhabited by specially privileged Mexicans and their parrots, reflects the Spanish blood in its designers. On the fourth side stands a stage, the medieval churchyard stage, where at certain times of the year, the priests, keeping up a custom of whose beginning they have no record, present the miracle plays. Inside the church the walls are adorned, except where some priest has whitewashed them, with paintings made by the mission fathers. Groups of queer looking Indians and too fat or too thin monks, and incidents of the Passion Play, form the subjects. Everything is unchanged, even to the baptismal font, a hollowed stone, chipped out with hard labor by faithful Indians. When Sonoratown shall have ceased to exist, an event not far distant, the little Plaza church will lose its excuse for being, and one more memento of the past will make way for the new.

Twenty miles from Los Angeles the little town of San Gabriel, the most suggestive survival of the past, sleeps on, unmindful that its methods of life were forgotten decades ago, and that a new kind of civilization reigns at a perilous distance from it. No one in