think, judging from the appearance of the walls, except in falling weather and times when the santanas blew from the northeast, carrying clouds of sand. Then one must shut the door to fend off the pestiferous drafts, and the smoke was sluggish between walls, and slow to find its way out under the rafters and through the tiles.
And a pleasant smoke it was which came from the dry cedar under Magdalena's grill, sweet with the incense of old romances; blowing down, it seemed, from the camp fires of the beginning, when mankind was young on the mountains and in the green forest glades. There is a mystery in the scent of sweet cedar blazing lazily on an open fire, a reminiscent melancholy, a quickening of strange, dear things which struggle in the recollection for voices, yet all of them commingled and obscure, woven in the fibre of mind and memory, indefinable, unknown. No other smoke will move such outreaching, vain soft gropings in the human mind. It is the incense of romance.
Magdalena, wife of Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, was not so much interested in the company gathered at table in the great dining-hall that autumn evening as she was in the company at hand: two men who sat under her smoky joists with a candle between them, feeding from the sheep's haunch set for their refreshment. Her eyes were more than half for them as she stood before her grill where a saddle of mutton was sputtering over the coals, her ears wholly for them,
