Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Mission San Luis Rey De Francia, And Somewhat Of The Padre Who Does Not Die by rail, intending for San Luis Rey, leave the train at Oceanside whence the four miles to the Mission in its beautiful valley may be done as one chooses. I set out, camera on shoulder, to walk it in the sparkling freshness of a sunny morning succeeding a showery night; but soon a sociable Jewish peddler, overtaking me in a buggy, invited me to share a seat with him. At a crossroad, somewhat short of the Mission, he set me down, our ways parting there, and assuming me to be an itinerant portrait photographer, earnestly advised me to come again after the walnut-picking when everybody would be flush and I could make "a fortune of money" taking their pictures. I had visited San Luis Rey in other years, when it was completely and frankly in ruins, save as to the church, and that with its scaling plaster and mellow color had the picturesque charm of half a ruin. So it was a shock to find that morning a smugly restored two-storied convento with a hard, white, cheerless front corridor unrelieved by vine or flower. The facade of the noble church, too, and the campo santo wall were sleekly plastered in glaring white, the decorations startlingly outlined in red. Remembering the dignified beauty of the dilapidated old edifice of ten years before, sunning itself under the sky like a Spanish hidalgo of broken fortunes in his ragged: cloak, I could have cried for vexation at the sight of that spick- and-span product of plumb-line and rule. It was not until I bethought me of the mellowing influence that Time could bedepended upon to exert and the fact that meantime the devastation of the elements had been stopped, that I felt reconciled to proceed farther, and touch the bell of the convento. A small community of Fr...