Ranch Life 121 



taxation and a fall in the price of cattle, turned 

 many rancheros into farmers. The big Spanish 

 grants were cut up and sold in small tracts to 

 Eastern and mid- Western buyers. Th^ese men 

 fenced their farms with barbed wire, built ram- 

 shackle board-and-batten houses and barns, and 

 talked glibly of improvements. Across the fair face 

 of the Southern Californian landscape was inscribed 

 the grim word — Ichabod. In an incredibly short 

 time, the superb trees — the live oaks, white 

 oaks, madrones, sycamores, and cotton-woods — were 

 chopped down. A spirit of utilitarianism was 

 abroad, smiting hip and thigh, sparing nothing, 

 not even the ancient mission of San Luis Obispo. 

 It stands to-day smugly respectable in a cheap 

 modern overcoat of concrete and paint. The pic- 

 turesque tiles have been thrown to the void ; the 

 pillars and arches have been pulled down ; and the 

 padres' garden — a cool sequestered pleasance, fra- 

 grant with herbs whose very names and uses are 

 forgotten — has been subdivided into town lots ! 



Once, upon the steps of the church, I met an old 

 Spanish woman, whose withered face was framed 

 in a soft black shawl, most becomingly draped. 

 She chattered of the pleasant yesterdays, and I 

 asked idly if she approved the changes that had 

 been wrought in the ancient building. 



" My American friends," she answered in her own 

 tongue, " tell me to wear a jacket with big sleeves, 

 and to buy a bonnet, but, seHor, this shawl suits me 

 best. And the Mission was getting like me — ugly 

 and wrinkled j but I wish they had left it — its old 

 shawl." 



