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: at 8an £abroL Narrow windows pierce the walls, In the nave no sunlight falls— Shadows mock the tapers pale; Ah, but love is quick to see— Shadows may not hide from me Pancha, at the altar rail. Pancha, with an air demure, Tells her beads; those lips would lure Gabriel himself from rest. Veiled her eyes, but well she knows I have found the crimson rose, Worn an hour upon her breast. nf 8an | HERE the Mexican is, there also are traditions. It may interest the tourist to know that one of the bells swinging high in the massive tower of San Gabriel mission has a legend all its own. In the days when the mission was young, two lovers in sunny Spain were parted by some cruel decree of fate. He, taking the vows of brotherhood, sailed over seas to New Spain, and later joined the little band of Franciscan monks at San Gabriel. When, in the land of his birth, the bell was cast for the church of his adoption, his true love flung the betrothal ring into the mass of molten metal. And that, so say the Mexican crones, as they sit on their doorsteps in the twilight and talk over the days that were, is why one of the bells always rang clearer and sweeter than the others. Poets have told the story in rhyme, and artists have transferred to canvas the quaint bell-tower of San Gabriel, with the matchless blue of the California sky for a background. But one need be neither artist nor poet to feel the charm of this lovely spot ; and to see it is to tempt one to forswear the frivolities of the world, that one may dream on forever in the shadow of San Gabriel's moss-grown walls. JTRANGERS to our fair land, who have never sampled our wonderful climate, will scarcely credit the statement that, in one of the coast islands but thirty miles distant from the mainland, the c...