Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/56

36 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA offering on the chapel altar. Or, if he had nothing to give, if his saddle-bags were thinning and his purse but a leathern mockery, the Fathers saw that he had meal and money to go on with, and perhaps a rush-braided flagon of the Mission wine. Often the traveller left these monastic inns richer than when he arrived. Sometimes whole troops of soldiers descended upon the scattered villages, and they were cared for too.

When ranch houses arose on the plains that were granted to Spanish and Mexican settlers and, later, to those of other countries, the custom of the Franciscans was observed in private homes. The doors were flung wide; the house, for the time, became the stranger's in fact, not only in the elaborate phrase which lays all that a Spaniard owns at his guest's feet. He was welcome at round-up and feast, and at the daily board; the hospitality proffered was broad as the acres of his host's rancheria. On a table, negligently placed and covered with a napkin, stood the heap of guest-silver. And no one watched how much or how little of the store the departing one found it convenient to take.

Travel on the highways increased; adventurers, men-of-arms, traders, planters pressed from north to south, and back again from San Diego as far as Sutter's Fort. Within the latter's stockades many found shelter upon their arrival from the