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There is the raw-hide bed which was Father Peyri's, and he gave to my father. Majella will like to lie on that. My father believed it had great virtue." "Like that you made for Felipe?" she asked. "Yes; but it is not so large. In those days the cattle were not so large as they are now: this is not so broad as Senor Felipe's.

The Mexican owner of the Temecula valley, a friend of Father Peyri's, and a good friend also of Pablo's, had returned to Mexico in disgust with the state of affairs in California, and was reported to be lying at the point of death. This man's promise to Pablo, that he and his people should always live in the valley undisturbed, was all the title Pablo had to the village lands.

If the Fathers could have stayed, and the life at the Mission have gone on, why, Alessandro could have had work to do for the Fathers, as his father had before him. Pablo had been Father Peyri's right-hand man at the Mission; had kept all the accounts about the cattle; paid the wages; handled thousands of dollars of gold every month.

Most strenuously Pablo had striven to obey Father Peyri's directions. He had set his people the example of constant industry, working steadily in his fields and caring well for his herds. He had built a chapel in his little village, and kept up forms of religious service there.

The pulpit was entered from the side altar, through a doorway pierced through the wall. The steps leading up to it are of red burnt brick. Evidently it was a home product, and was possibly made by one of Padre Peyri's Indian carpenters, who was rapidly nearing graduation into the ranks of the skilled cabinet-makers.

And so it had come about that no bedroom in the Senora's house was without a picture or a statue of a saint or of the Madonna; and some had two; and in the little chapel in the garden the altar was surrounded by a really imposing row of holy and apostolic figures, which had looked down on the splendid ceremonies of the San Luis Rey Mission, in Father Peyri's time, no more benignly than they now did on the humbler worship of the Senora's family in its diminished estate.

As Felipe talked with him, he perceived even more clearly how bitter and unjust his mother had been to Alessandro. "He is a noble young man," said Father Salvierderra. "His father was one of the most trusted of Father Peyri's assistants. You must find them, Felipe. I wonder much they did not come to me. Perhaps they may yet come.