Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/288

 242 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA Mission San Jose was established 17 miles north- east of San Jose pueblo. Only a fragment of the cloister and a few olive trees repay a journey to it. From Irvington, on the Southern Pacific, a stage departs twice a day for the Nun's School which occupies modern buildings in the midst of these memorable surroundings. The original chapel and monks' quarters were shattered by an earthquake half a century ago, or about 60 years after the Mission was founded. " A spacious stone building with court-yard and long corri- dors " constituted the primitive establishment which served not only the religious and communal needs of the little company, but was their shelter in time of contest between Whites and Indians. The Mission of Santa Clara, founded in 1777, was twice driven from the sites chosen by the pa- dres by floods and quakes. Father Serra helped dedicate the second church, destroyed in 1818. When a third set of buildings was erected on a third site, a town grew up about it, the present town of Santa Clara, a short way from San Jose. Once the Mission estate counted 25,000 head of cattle. When Bayard Taylor visited it in 1848, its walls were dilapidated, and " a single monk in the corridor, habited in a very dirty cowl and cassock, was the only saintly inhabitant." In 1851, California's first institution of learning was installed within the crumbling Mission which