fountain in the centre, surrounded by spokes of thin turf, and walled
at its outer circumference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn
and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or brad-awls standing
broad end down. At all hours of the day idle boys and still idler men
are to be seen basking on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face
down, heels in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress
croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this ancient and ingenious
style of shearing and compressing foliage into unnatural and distorted
shapes. It comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the traditions
of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries ago; and it gives to
the town a certain quaint and foreign look, in admirable keeping with
its irregular levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers
one above another.
One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which seems bewilderingly
un-American, of a precipice wall covered with bird-cage cottages, the
little, paling-walled yard of one jutting out in a line with the
chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down to the street at
the base of the hill. Wooden staircases and bits of terrace link and
loop the odd little perches together; bright green pepper-trees,
sometimes tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give a
graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of the steep fronts are
covered with bloom, in solid curtains, of geranium, sweet alyssum,
heliotrope, and ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the
rich: the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap quality; but
they do more for the picturesqueness of the city than all the large,
fine, and costly houses put together.
Moreover, they are the only houses that command the situation, possess
distance and a horizon. From some of these little ten-by-twelve
flower-beds of homes is a stretch of view which makes each hour of the
day a succession of changing splendors,--the snowy peaks of San
Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and south; to the west, vast
open country, billowy green with vineyard and orchard; beyond this, in
clear weather, shining glints and threads of ocean, and again beyond,
in the farthest outing, hill-crowned islands, misty blue against the
sky. No one knows Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny
outlying heights, and roam and linger on them many a day. Nor, even
thus lingering, will any one ever know more of Los Angeles than its
lovely outward semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he have
the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud, sensitive, tender
reserve, behind which is hid the life of the few remaining survivors
of the old Spanish and Mexican _régime_.
Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stintless hospitality and
immeasurable courtesy which gave to the old Franciscan establishments
a world-wide fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they
created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyousness and generosity
never known by any other communities on the American continent.
In houses whose doors seldom open to English-speaking people, there
are rooms full of relics of that fast-vanishing past. Strongholds also
of a religious faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as
are the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully resting
their last days on its support.
In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but gayly decorated
little bedroom, hangs a small oil-painting, a portrait of Saint
Francis de Paula. It was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by
the woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and prayed to it
every day of the fifty-five years. Below it is a small altar covered
with flowers, candlesticks, vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A
long string under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver
votive offerings from persons who have been miraculously cured in
answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, hearts,
heads, babies, dogs, horses,--no organ, no creature, that could
suffer, is unrepresented. The old woman has at her tongue's end the
tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself a sad cripple; her
feet swollen by inflammation, which for many years has given her
incessant torture and made it impossible for her to walk, except with
tottering steps, from room to room, by help of a staff. This, she
says, is the only thing her saint has not cured. It is her "cross,"
her "mortification of the flesh," "to take her to heaven." "He knows
best." As she speaks, her eyes perpetually seek the picture, resting
on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She has seen tears roll down
its cheeks more than once, she says; and it often smiles on her when
they are alone. When strangers enter the room she can always tell, by
its expression, whether the saint is or is not pleased with them, and
whether their prayers will be granted. She was good enough to remark
that he was very glad to see us; she was sure of it by the smile in
his eye. He had wrought many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was
too trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when she had broken a vase
in which she had been in the habit of keeping flowers on the altar,
she took the pieces in her hands, and standing before him, said: "You
know you will miss this vase. I always put your flowers in it, and I
am too poor to buy another. Now, do mend this for me. I have nobody
but you to help me." And the vase grew together again whole while she
was speaking. In the same way he mended for her a high glass
flower-case which stood on the altar.
Thus she jabbered away breathlessly in Spanish, almost too fast to be
followed. Sitting in a high chair, her poor distorted feet propped on
a cushion, a black silk handkerchief wound like a turban around her
head, a plaid ribosa across her shoulders, contrasting sharply with
her shabby wine-colored gown, her hands clasped around a yellow staff,
on which she leaned as she bent forward in her eager speaking, she
made a study for an artist.
She was very beautiful in her youth, she said; her cheeks so red that
people thought they were painted; and she was so strong that she was
never tired; and when, in the first year of her widowhood, a stranger
came to her "with a letter of recommendation" to be her second
husband, and before she had time to speak had fallen on his knees at
her feet, she seized him by the throat, and toppling him backward,
pinned him against the wall till he was black in the face. And her
sister came running up in terror, imploring her not to kill him. But
all that strength is gone now, she says sadly; her memory also. Each
day, as soon as she has finished her prayers, she has to put away her
rosary in a special place, or else she forgets that the prayers have
been said. Many priests have desired to possess her precious
miracle-working saint; but never till she dies will it leave her
bedroom. Not a week passes without some one's arriving to implore its
aid. Sometimes the deeply distressed come on their knees all the way
from the gate before the house, up the steps, through the hall, and
into her bedroom. Such occasions as these are to her full of solemn
joy, and no doubt, also, of a secret exultation whose kinship to pride
she does not suspect.
In another unpretending little adobe house, not far from this Saint
Francis shrine, lives the granddaughter of Moreno, one of the twelve
Spanish soldiers who founded the city. She speaks no word of English;
and her soft black eyes are timid, though she is the widow of a
general, and in the stormy days of the City of the Angels, passed
through many a crisis of peril and adventure. Her house is full of
curious relics, which she shows with a gentle, half-amused courtesy.
It is not easy for her to believe that any American can feel real
reverence for the symbols, tokens, and relics of the life and customs
which his people destroyed. In her mind Americans remain to-day as
completely foreigners as they were when her husband girded on his
sword and went out to fight them, forty years ago. Many of her relics
have been rescued at one time or another from plunderers of the
missions. She has an old bronze kettle which once held holy water at
San Fernando; an incense cup and spoon, and massive silver
candlesticks; cartridge-boxes of leather, with Spain's ancient seal
stamped on them; a huge copper caldron and scales from San Gabriel; a
bunch of keys of hammered iron, locks, scissors, reaping-hooks,
shovels, carding-brushes for wool and for flax: all made by the Indian
workmen in the missions. There was also one old lock, in which the key
was rusted fast and immovable, which seemed to me fuller of suggestion
than anything else there of the sealed and ended past to which it had
belonged; and a curious little iron cannon, in shape like an ale-mug,
about eight inches high, with a hole in the side and in the top, to be
used by setting it on the ground and laying a trail of powder to the
opening in the side. This gave the Indians great delight. It was fired
at the times of church festivals, and in seasons of drought to bring
rain. Another curious instrument of racket was the matrarca, a strip
of board with two small swinging iron handles so set in it that, in
swinging back and forth, they hit iron plates. In the time of Lent,
when all ringing of bells was forbidden, these were rattled to call
the Indians to church. The noise one of them can make when vigorously
shaken is astonishing. In crumpled bundles, their stiffened meshes
opening out reluctantly, were two curious rush-woven nets which had
been used by Indian women fifty years ago in carrying burdens. Similar
nets, made of twine, are used by them still. Fastened to a leather
strap or band passing around the forehead, they hang down behind far
below the waist, and when filled out to their utmost holding capacity
are so heavy that the poor creatures bend nearly double beneath them.
But the women stand as uncomplainingly as camels while weight after
weight is piled in; then slipping the band over their heads, they
adjust the huge burden and set off at a trot.
"This is the squaw's horse," said an Indian woman in the San Jacinto
valley one day, tapping her forehead and laughing good-naturedly, when
the shopkeeper remonstrated with her husband, who was heaping article
after article, and finally a large sack of flour, on her shoulders;
"squaw's horse very strong."
The original site of the San Gabriel Mission was a few miles to the
east of the City of the Angels. Its lands are now divided into ranches
and colony settlements, only a few acres remaining in the possession
of the Church. But the old chapel is still standing in a fair state of
preservation, used for the daily services of the San Gabriel parish;
and there are in its near neighborhood a few crumbling adobe hovels
left, the only remains of the once splendid and opulent mission. In
one of these lives a Mexican woman, eighty-two years old, who for more
than half a century has washed and mended the priests' laces, repaired
the robes, and remodelled the vestments of San Gabriel. She is worth
crossing the continent to see: all white from head to foot, as if
bleached by some strange gramarye; white hair, white skin, blue eyes
faded nearly to white; white cotton clothes, ragged and not over
clean, yet not a trace of color in them; a white linen handkerchief,
delicately embroidered by herself, always tied loosely around her
throat. She sits on a low box, leaning against the wall, with three
white pillows at her back, her feet on a cushion on the ground; in
front of her, another low box, on this a lace-maker's pillow, with
knotted fringe stretched on it; at her left hand a battered copper
caldron, holding hot coals to warm her fingers and to light her
cigarettes. A match she will never use; and she has seldom been
without a cigarette in her mouth since she was six years old. On her
right hand is a chest filled with her treasures,--rags of damask,
silk, velvet, lace, muslin, ribbon, artificial flowers, flosses,
worsteds, silks on spools; here she sits, day in, day out, making
cotton fringes and, out of shreds of silk, tiny embroidered scapulars,
which she sells to all devout and charitable people of the region.
She also teaches the children of the parish to read and to pray. The
walls of her hovel are papered with tattered pictures, including many
gay-colored ones, taken off tin cans, their flaunting signs reading
drolly,--"Perfection Press Mackerel, Boston, Mass.," "Charm Baking
Powder," and "Knowlton's Inks," alternating with "Toledo Blades" and
clipper-ship advertisements. She finds these of great use in both
teaching and amusing the children. The ceiling, of canvas, black with
smoke, and festooned with cobwebs, sags down in folds, and shows many
a rent. When it rains, her poor little place must be drenched in
spots. One end of the room is curtained off with calico; this is her
bedchamber. At the other end is a raised dais, on which stands an
altar, holding a small statuette of the Infant Jesus. It is a copy in
wood of the famous Little Jesus of Atoches in Mexico, which is
worshipped by all the people in that region. It has been her constant
companion and protector for fifty years. Over the altar is a canopy of
calico, decorated with paper flowers, whirligigs, doves, and little
gourds; with votive offerings, also, of gold or silver, from grateful
people helped or cured by the Little Jesus. On the statuette's head is
a tiny hat of real gold, and a real gold sceptre in the little hand;
the breast of its fine white linen cambric gown is pinned by a gold
pin. It has a wardrobe with as many changes as an actor. She keeps
these carefully hid away in a small camphor-wood trunk, but she
brought them all out to show to us.
Two of her barefooted, ragged little pupils scampered in as she was
unfolding these gay doll's clothes. They crowded close around her
knees and looked on, with open-mouthed awe and admiration: a purple
velvet cape with white fringe for feast days; capes of satin, of
brocade; a dozen shirts of finest linen, embroidered or trimmed with
lace; a tiny plume not more than an inch long, of gold exquisitely
carved,--this was her chief treasure. It looked beautiful in his hat,
she said, but it was too valuable to wear often. Hid away here among
the image's best clothes were more of the gold votive offerings it had
received: one a head cut out of solid gold; several rosaries of carved
beads, silver and gold. Spite of her apparently unbounded faith in the
Little Jesus' power to protect her and himself, the old woman thought
it wiser to keep these valuables concealed from the common gaze.
Holding up a silken pillow some sixteen inches square, she said, "You
could not guess with what that pillow is filled." We could not,
indeed. It was her own hair. With pride she asked us to take it in our
hands, that we might see how heavy it was. For sixteen years she had
been saving it, and it was to be put under her head in her coffin. The
friend who had taken us to her home exclaimed on hearing this. "And I
can tell you it was beautiful hair. I recollect it forty-five years
ago, bright brown, and down to her ankles, and enough of it to roll
herself up in." The old woman nodded and laughed, much pleased at this
compliment. She did not know why the Lord had preserved her life so
long, she said; but she was very happy. Her nieces had asked her to go
and live with them in Santa Ana; but she could not go away from San
Gabriel. She told them that there was plenty of water in the ditch
close by her door, and that God would take care of the rest, and so he
had; she never wants for anything; not only is she never hungry
herself, but she always has food to give away. No one would suppose
it, but many people come to eat with her in her house. God never
forgets her one minute. She is very happy. She is never ill; or if she
is, she has two remedies, which, in all her life, have never failed to
cure her, and they cost nothing,--saliva and ear-wax. For a pain, the
sign of the cross, made with saliva on the spot which is in pain, is
instantaneously effective; for an eruption or any skin disorder, the
application of ear-wax is a sure cure. She is very glad to live so
close to the church; the father has promised her this room as long as
she lives; when she dies, it will be no trouble, he says, to pick her
up and carry her across the road to the church. In a gay painted box,
standing on two chairs, so as to be kept from the dampness of the bare
earth floor, she cherishes the few relics of her better days: a shawl
and a ribosa of silk, and two gowns, one of black silk, one of dark
blue satin. These are of the fashions of twenty years ago; they were
given to her by her husband. She wears them now when she goes to
church; so it is as if she were "married again," she says, and is "her
husband's work still." She seems to be a character well known and
held in some regard by the clergy of her church. When the bishop
returned a few years ago from a visit to Rome, he brought her a little
gift, a carved figure of a saint. She asked him if he could not get
for her a bit of the relics of Saint Viviano. "Oh, let alone!" he
replied; "give you relics? Wait a bit; and as soon as you die, I'll
have you made into relics yourself." She laughed as heartily, telling
this somewhat unecclesiastical rejoinder, as if it had been made at
some other person's expense.
In the marvellously preserving air of California, added to her own
contented temperament, there is no reason why this happy old lady
should not last, as some of her Indian neighbors have, well into a
second century. Before she ceases from her peaceful, pitiful little
labors, new generations of millionnaires in her country will no doubt
have piled up bigger fortunes than this generation ever dreams of, but
there will not be a man of them all so rich as she.
In the western suburbs of Los Angeles is a low adobe house, built
after the ancient style, on three sides of a square, surrounded by
orchards, vineyards, and orange groves, and looking out on an
old-fashioned garden, in which southernwood, rue, lavender, mint,
marigolds, and gillyflowers hold their own bravely, growing in
straight and angular beds among the newer splendors of verbenas,
roses, carnations, and geraniums. On two sides of the house runs a
broad porch, where stand rows of geraniums and chrysanthemums growing
in odd-shaped earthen pots. Here may often be seen a beautiful young
Mexican woman, flitting about among the plants, or sporting with a
superb Saint Bernard dog. Her clear olive skin, soft brown eyes,
delicate sensitive nostrils, and broad smiling mouth, are all of the
Spanish madonna type; and when her low brow is bound, as is often her
wont, by turban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her face becomes a
picture indeed. She is the young wife of a gray-headed Mexican señor,
of whom--by his own most gracious permission--I shall speak by his
familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever has the fortune to pass as a
friend across the threshold of this house finds himself transported,
as by a miracle, into the life of a half-century ago. The rooms are
ornamented with fans, shells, feather and wax flowers, pictures,
saints' images, old laces, and stuffs, in the quaint gay Mexican
fashion. On the day when I first saw them, they were brilliant with
bloom. In every one of the deep window-seats stood a cone of bright
flowers, its base made by large white datura blossoms, their creamy
whorls all turned outward, making a superb decoration. I went for but
a few moments' call. I stayed three hours, and left carrying with me
bewildering treasures of pictures of the olden time.
Don Antonio speaks little English; but the señora knows just enough of
the language to make her use of it delicious, as she translates for
her husband. It is an entrancing sight to watch his dark,
weather-beaten face, full of lightning changes as he pours out
torrents of his nervous, eloquent Spanish speech; watching his wife
intently, hearkening to each word she uses, sometimes interrupting her
urgently with, "No, no; that is not it,"--for he well understands the
tongue he cannot or will not use for himself. He is sixty-five years
of age, but he is young: the best waltzer in Los Angeles to-day; his
eye keen, his blood fiery quick; his memory like a burning-glass
bringing into sharp light and focus a half-century as if it were a
yesterday. Full of sentiment, of an intense and poetic nature, he
looks back to the lost empire of his race and people on the California
shores with a sorrow far too proud for any antagonisms or complaints.
He recognizes the inexorableness of the laws under whose workings his
nation is slowly, surely giving place to one more representative of
the age. Intellectually he is in sympathy with progress, with reform,
with civilization at its utmost; he would not have had them stayed, or
changed, because his people could not keep up, and were not ready. But
his heart is none the less saddened and lonely.
This is probably the position and point of view of most cultivated
Mexican men of his age. The suffering involved in it is inevitable. It
is part of the great, unreckoned price which must always be paid for
the gain the world gets, when the young and strong supersede the old
and weak.
A sunny little southeast corner room in Don Antonio's house is full of
the relics of the time when he and his father were foremost
representatives of ideas and progress in the City of the Angels, and
taught the first school that was kept in the place. This was nearly a
half-century ago. On the walls of the room still hang maps and charts
which they used; and carefully preserved, with the tender reverence of
which only poetic natures are capable, are still to be seen there the
old atlases, primers, catechisms, grammars, reading-books, which meant
toil and trouble to the merry, ignorant children of the merry and
ignorant people of that time.
The leathern covers of the books are thin and frayed by long handling;
the edges of the leaves worn down as if mice had gnawed them:
tattered, loose, hanging by yellow threads, they look far older than
they are, and bear vivid record of the days when books were so rare
and precious that each book did doubled and redoubled duty, passing
from hand to hand and house to house. It was on the old Lancaster
system that Los Angeles set out in educating its children; and here
are still preserved the formal and elaborate instructions for teachers
and schools on that plan; also volumes of Spain's laws for military
judges in 1781, and a quaint old volume called "Secrets of
Agriculture, Fields and Pastures," written by a Catholic Father in
1617, reprinted in 1781, and held of great value in its day as a sure
guide to success with crops. Accompanying it was a chart, a perpetual
circle, by which might be foretold, with certainty, what years would
be barren and what ones fruitful.
Almanacs, histories, arithmetics, dating back to 1750, drawing-books,
multiplication tables, music, and bundles of records of the branding
of cattle at the San Gabriel Mission, are among the curiosities of
this room. The music of the first quadrilles ever danced in Mexico is
here: a ragged pamphlet, which, no doubt, went gleeful rounds in the
City of the Angels for many a year. It is a merry music, simple in
melody, but with an especial quality of light-heartedness, suiting the
people who danced to it.
There are also in the little room many relics of a more substantial
sort than tattered papers and books: a branding-iron and a pair of
handcuffs from the San Gabriel Mission; curiously decorated clubs and
sticks used by the Indians in their games; boxes of silver rings and
balls made for decorations of bridles and on leggings and
knee-breeches. The place of honor in the room is given, as well it
might be, to a small cannon, the first cannon brought into California.
It was made in 1717, and was brought by Father Junipero Serra to San
Diego in 1769. Afterward it was given to the San Gabriel Mission, but
it still bears its old name, "San Diego." It is an odd little arm,
only about two feet long, and requiring but six ounces of powder. Its
swivel is made with a rest to set firm in the ground. It has taken
many long journeys on the backs of mules, having been in great
requisition in the early mission days for the firing of salutes at
festivals and feasts.