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 scratched and poorly-plowed! You can't expect beasts to more than pull the hat off of your head hitched up by the horns that way."

"Then you shall show us the better way, Juan Molinero. Truly, God directed you to teach us many things. I am ashamed to show you the wine press now, that was the pride of our hearts yesterday. Perhaps you will say we are savages when you see it. But come."

Padre Ignacio himself was there, and the mayordomo, Don Geronimo, just inside the broad arched door. A broad stairway of thin bricks—the padres followed the Spanish custom, making their bricks thin and broad—led down to the wine press, which stood several feet below the ground level. At the press itself this stairway narrowed to half its upper breadth to continue into the cellar, now to become the padres' wine vault, which underlay the eastern end of the administration building.

The wine press would have passed undiscovered by Juan Molinero if he had been left to find it for himself. It was nothing more than a big bowl, made of bricks, plastered with cement, built into a corner of the passage, or area-way, into which the arched door opened. It was about as high as a man's head, six or seven feet square, tapering toward the bottom. A ledge was fashioned around the interior walls to hold a framework, or strainer, laced with strips of rawhide, a space of a foot or so between it and the bottom of the press to admit the free passage of the compressed juice, the pulp re-