Missions; but the Indians, although not so prosperous and well treated as under the Fathers, still kept, through Mexican protection, most of their privileges and the lands they owned.  Finally came the Anglo-Saxon, and, under the imperious civilization that poured into California from 1840 to 1860, the pastoral age soon disappeared.  The Missions, which had already lost much of their property and power under the Mexican Government, quickly shrank after this new invasion into decrepitude.  The practical Anglo-Saxon introduced railroads, electricity, commerce, mammoth hotels, and scientific irrigation, all of which the Fathers, Mexicans, and Indians never would have cared for.  Nevertheless, with his arrival, the curtain fell upon as peaceful a life-drama as the world had seen.

[Illustration:  Santa Barbara.]

[Illustration:  San Juan Capistrano.]

[Illustration:  Group of Franciscan Friars.]

To the reader, thinker, and poet the memories and associations of these Missions form, next to the gifts of Nature, the greatest charm of Southern California; and, happily, although that semi-patriarchal life has passed away, its influence still lingers; for, scattered along the coast—­some struggling in poverty, some lying in neglect—­are the adobe churches, cloisters, and fertile Mission-fields of San Juan Capistrano, San Fernando Rey, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, all of which still preserve the soft and gracious names, so generously given in those early days, and fill us with a genuine reverence for the sandaled monks, who by incessant toil transformed this barren region into a garden, covered these boundless plains with flocks and herds, and dealt so wisely with the Indians that even their poor descendants, to-day, reverence their memory.

[Illustration:  Chief of A tribe of mission Indians.]

The Saxon has done vastly more, it is true; but, in some ways, he has done much less.  The very names which he bequeathed to places not previously christened by the Spaniards, such as Gold Gulch, Hell’s Bottom, and Copperopolis, tell a more forcible, though not as beautiful a tale, as the melodious titles, San Buenaventura, San Francisco Dolores, Santa Clara, San Gabriel, and La Purissima.

[Illustration:  Indian women.]

It is not, therefore, the busy streets and handsome dwellings of Los Angeles and Pasadena, but the adobe ruins, the battered statues, the cracked and voiceless bells, the poor remnants of the Indian tribes, and even the old Spanish names, behind which lies a century of sanctity and romance, which give to Southern California an atmosphere of the Old World and harmonize most perfectly with its history.

[Illustration:  San Diego mission.]