Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/148

 118 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA ecclesiastical parlance, " Our Lady of the Weep- ing Willows," and though the Mission did honour to St. Francis of Asis, it assumed the name of the brook and became known as the Mission of Sorrows Dolores. The staunch adobe walls of the chapel, built in 1782, stood with scarcely a tremor during the earthquake, though a modern church beside it crumbled and fell. The flames blew their hot breath upon the arched and pillared portal be- neath the tiled eaves, but a Hand stayed them, and the emblem of San Francisco's earliest civilisation was spared in the midst of devastation. It is permitted to enter and look about the chapel if one is accompanied by the parish priest or his delegate. The bizarre decoration of altar and rafters, the bells and the belfry in which they hang, thonged with hide to sturdy beams, are now as Spanish craftsmen left them. In the cemetery rest ten thousand dead beneath a jungle of vines. Between the years 1776 and 1862 this was the only Catholic bury ing-ground in the community. The grave of Luis Arguello, who, born in San Francisco in 1784, became Upper California's first Governor under Mexico, is marked by a tall shaft. Bret Harte has related in rhyme the mournful tale of Concepcion de Argu- ello, sister of the Governor, and the perfidious Russian, Chamberlain to the Tsar, who in 1807