“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers, whence are thy beams, O Sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course?” The Indian’s eyrie on the summit of some steep and lofty mountain, (seldom visited by a white man, save the curate,) may be easily passed many times unnoticed by a stranger, who has occasion to go over the usual routes in any of the principal ravines and valleys of the Sierra, and who may never be led to suspect its existence till he one day meets a swift-footed Indian, closely followed by a person on a well-accoutred and elegant mule, whose gear is all laden with silver ornaments; and the rider, who sits at his ease in a saddle of the country with a rich pellon, wears a large-brimmed hat, with a black silk cap emerging to view at the ears and temples. He has on at least a couple of ponchos (mantles) well-decorated and fringed; his black or brown stockings are of warm Vicuña wool; and the heel of a small shoe, half-concealed in a clumsy and costly, though wooden stirrup, is armed with a prodigiously disproportioned silver spur, with a large tinkling roller, used to keep his noble animal in mind that she is but the harbinger of death, and carries on her back the keeper of the sinner’s conscience. This minister of peace to the miserable, hurries to save the soul of a dying Christian, whose abode, like the falcon’s, overlooks the ordinary path of wayfaring men; and which, when descried, seems, to the sight of an observer underneath, to be indeed the loftiest earthly point between the ground he himself stands upon and that heaven for which, it is believed, the anxious and fluttering spirit of the gasping Indian, only waits the curate’s absolution and blessing to wing its immortal flight. It occurs to us here to remark, that in the remote curacies of the hills no friars are to be seen, as on the coast or more genial climates; an important part of whose duty it is, wherever they locate themselves, to aid the Christian to die well, and to watch by his pillow, and exhort and comfort him, while the crucifix and taper are ever before his eyes, and the breath of life about to leave his animal frame. But, destitute of these helps, the curate or curate-substitute, whose calling renders him the most influential person and only spiritual comforter in an Indian village, makes, in the appearance we have offered to describe, his rapid way over hill and cliff, broken ravine and dangerous path, on a chosen traveller, whose movements are so gentle that she never wearies the rider. This mule seems not to make any trying exertion, while she leaves all ordinary beasts of her kind behind her on a day’s journey, and ascends a cuesta of three or four leagues without stopping once to draw breath, and again descends the same without missing a foot or slackening