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Show CHAPTEE XVI. THE REPOSE OF THE GRAVE. I well remember the afternoon I arrived after a ride across the mountains of thirty- two miles at a turn of the narrow road and, for the first time, looked down upon the quaint and historically fascinating village of Loretto, Lower California. This is the place. Stand still, my steed, Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once had been. Eight generations of human life had come into the world, lived their uneventful but singular existence, and when the time came were laid away with those who had preceded them, since first the Spanish missionary bore a message from the crucified Christ to the most loathsome of men and women that ever walked the earth. Yet they could claim, if they but knew it, kinship with God, the immutable and eternal, through Him whose message of friendship and love the Spanish Ambassador was sent to deliver. Unless God the Almighty took away their human and gave them a brute nature, it was impossible for the " Digger Indians " or for any human beings to approach nearer to the brute's state. There existence was a hell of foul licentiousness, of nameless lusts, of hunger, thirst, of disease and physical suffering, and there was no hope for betterment save in annihilation or reconstruction, or rather resurrection. The civilized and educated man who entered this barren |