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"And how much did it cost, then?" asked the child.

"It cost everything that the man had,” answered Padre Vicente simply. "The man had to pay much more than money. Home and father and mother-friends and the hope of joys that might be his in time to come--all these were the price of the pearl."

"And did the man pay the price?" questioned Miguel anxiously.

"Sí, Miguelito mío," returned the priest calmly, "he paid the price."

"What? Everything?" cried the child in surprise. "You don't mean that he gave up all that he had?"

"Everything, Miguel," said the padre.

"But the man in the Book didn't do that," said the child sagely, "he didn't give up his friends. He just paid money."

"We do not know, hijo mío," replied the priest. "Perhaps the man's friends wouldn't care for him any longer when all his possessions were gone."

"I hadn't thought of that," said little Miguel slowly. Then, after a silence, he lifted troubled eyes to the padre's face. "Was the man ever sorry that he gave everything for the pearl?" Padre Vicente smiled.

"No, Miguelito, the man was never sorry,"

he said. "He was happier than he had ever been before."

The child drew a long breath of relief.

"Then it isn't true-what old Juana says— that you have to wait to be happy till you are dead?" he asked innocently.

"No, hijo mío,” said the priest with certainty, "you do not have to wait.”

Whereby, had little Miguel been able to understand, he would have known that Padre Vicente had already entered upon his exceeding great reward.

CHAPTER III.

La Purísima

LONG the bare, broken hillsides of

A

San Juan the early rains brought
autumn grass that year,
and the

tragedy of 1812 had not yet come to pass. The changes that had come over the peaceful little valley during the past few years were gradual but sure. The rancherías were larger and more thickly populated, and the flocks and herds that roamed the hills were more numerous and more prosperous than before. The olive groves were older, and bore heavier crops of glistening black fruit. Along the level floor of the valley, the vineyards and orchards spread more widely than in the past, and everywhere the yellow wheat-fields extended farther over the rolling mesas. All through the valley moved swarms of Indians at their work among the groves and vineyards, and in the cloisters resounded the swing and thud of the loom and the clang of the hammer at the forge. The bells in the tower swung over all with benediction still, but in the hearts of Padre Vicente and his brother priests

lurked a fear that in the space of a few years had grown from the measure of a mocking dwarf to the stature of a threatening giant. It was the fear of a premature secularization of the Missions. Beside this menace, the terror of Pico Juarez, who still lurked in the hills, harrying the flocks and herds and leading off Indians from the Mission, was like the shadow of a summer cloud. From the first the fathers had known that secularization must come some day. No one doubted that in the fullness of time, secularization would be the fitting outcome of the Mission system. But the fullness of time was not yet, and premature secularization would mean the utter ruin of the whole splendid fabric wrought so tenderly by the devoted hands of the Mission fathers. Desperately the fathers fought against it, and hopefully they told each other that the dread. blow surely would not fall, until, softened by the fullness of time, it should be not a blow at all, but rather a blessing. But still the menace lurked in the dark, peering out of corners where least expected; and the heart of each loyal adherent of Holy Church in New Spain grew cold with the fear he tried not to feel.

The afternoon of the seventh of December, the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, was warm and sultry in San Juan valley. Old Rosario, a huge, woven basket on his arm, and little Miguel trotting at his side, crossed the King's Highway south of the Mission buildings and plunged into a thicket of willows and live oaks that bordered the road. The two had come to gather green boughs to place in the church in honor of the morrow's celebration, and they halted first under a tall sycamore filled with clinging knots of pearl-studded mistletoe.

The child picked up a bunch of the gleaming berries that his companion had gathered, and thrust it into the basket, but it was plain that his thoughts were somewhere else.

"Rosario," he said slowly, as he looked wistfully back to where the broad trail of the King's Highway stretched away outside the thicket, "Rosario, where does the trail go to?"

"What? The King's Highway?" asked the old Indian in his husky voice. "It goes to the other churches. I have been as far north as San Gabriel, and south to San Diego," he said proudly.

"But after that-after San Diego, where then, Rosario?" questioned Miguel.

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