"You must not go until you have seen the cemetery," said our guide as we moved toward the entrance, and throwing open a door to the right he admitted us to the neglected graveyard. Here and there a rude cross marked the resting place of an early Indian convert and an almost obliterated inscription on a broken headstone revealed the name of a Spanish grandee. Shattered columns, loosened by the hand of time and overthrown in recent years, lay upon the ground, while great willow and pepper trees spread out protecting arms, as if to shield the silent company from the inroads of modern enterprise. We picked our way along vine-latticed paths, past graves over which myrtle and roses wandered in untrimmed beauty, to where a white shaft marked the resting place of Don Luis Argüello, comandante of the San Francisco Presidio for twenty-three years and the first Mexican governor of California. "How splendidly strong he looms out of the past," I said. "His keen insight into the needs of this western outpost and his determined efforts for the best interests of California will forever place him in the front rank of its rulers. I wonder if his young wife, Rafaela, is buried here also?" I drew aside the tangled vines from the near-by headstones. "She was always a little dearer to me than his second wife, the proud Dona Maria Ortega, perhaps because Rafaela belonged pre-eminently to San Francisco. Her father, Ensign Sal, was acting comandante of the Presidio when Vancouver visited the Coast, and Rafaela and Luis Argüello grew up together in the little adobe settlement." "Go on," said the skeptic, leaning comfortably against a tree trunk. "This old Mexican governor seems to have had an interesting romance." "He wasn't old," I protested, "only forty-six when he died. He was a splendid type of a young Spanish grandee, tall and lithe of form, with the dark skin and hair of his race. He combined the freedom born of an out-of-door life with the courtly manners inherited from generations of Spanish ancestry. To Rafaela Sal, watching the soldiers file out of the mud-walled Presidio, it seemed that none sat his horse so straight nor so bravely as did Don Luis Argüello. And at night to the young soldier dozing before the campfire in the forest, the billowy smoke seemed to shape itself into the soft folds of a lace mantilla from which looked out the smiling face of a lovely grey-eyed girl, framed in an exquisite mist of copper-colored hair.