Wherever you find in California a warm, sunny valley leading from the ocean back to the purple mountains, with a clear stream in its midst, and filled in summer with blue haze, around it steep slopes on which grapes may grow, you have found a mission valley, and these grapes are mission grapes. Somewhere in it you will see a cluster of large, wide-spreading pepper-trees, with delicate light-green foliage, or a grove of gnarled olives, looking like stunted willows, or, perhaps, a cluster of old pear-trees, or sometimes a tall palm. Near these you will find the ruins of old houses of adobe, wherein once dwelt the Indian neophytes. These houses are clustered around the walls, now almost in ruins, of the mission itself, which had its chapel, refectory, and baptistry, and in all its details it resembled closely a parish church of Italy of Spain. The mission was usually laid out in the form of a hollow square, inclosed by a wall of adobe, twelve feet high, the whole inclosure being two or three hundred feet square. In the center of this square was a chapel, also of adobe; for the sun of California is kind to California's children, and a house of dried mud will withstand the scanty rains of a century. Some of these old chapels are still used, but the roofs of most of them have long since fallen in, and the ornaments have been removed to decorate some other building. The mission churches were built like mimic cathedrals, cathedrals of mud instead of marble, and, like their great models, each had its altar, with candles and crucifix, its vessels of holy water, and on the walls the inevitable paintings of heaven and purgatory. Their most charming feature was the arched cloister, a feature which has been retained and beautified in the architecture of Leland Stanford Jr. University, at Palo Alto. Each church, too, had its little chime of bells, some of which were partly of gold or silver, as well as of brass. During the early enthusiasm, when the mission bells were cast, old heirlooms from Spain, rings, vases, and ancestral goblets from which had been "drunk the red wine of Tarragon," were thrown into the molten metal. And when these consecrated bells chimed out the Angelas at the sunset hour, with the sound of their voices all evil spirits were driven away, and no harm could come to man or beast or growing grain. "Bells of the past, whose long-forgotten music Still fills the wide expanse, Tingeing the sober twilight of the present With color of romance; I hear you call, and see the sun descending On rock and wave and sand, As down the coast the mission voices blending, Girdle the heathen land. "Within the circle of your incantation No blight nor mildew falls, Nor fierce unrest nor sordid low ambition Passes those airy walls. Borne on the swell of your long waves receding I touch the farther past. I see the dying glow of Spanish glory, The sunset dream and last.