was the first Indian countenance marked with the quickness of intellectual nobility that Juan had met among the hundreds which he had viewed that morning.
The driver of the oxen, another Indian little older than the one who came behind, brought the load of grapes to a stand near a broad arched door in the main building, unsparing of his sharpened goad. This instrument was a peeled sapling, as thick at the butt as a man's wrist, six or seven feet long. An iron spike was inset in its smaller end, and wound about with a rawhide thong. Three-quarters of a century later, the drovers of the plains which lay in the bounds of this new Louisiana territory which the stranger at San Fernando mission had crossed, used the same kind of goad to prod up the cattle which had fallen from fatigue and thirst to the car floor, as the slow train held onward to a distant market.
"Come this way, Juan; you shall see our noble wine press," Padre Mateo beckoned, one foot within the door, the arch of which was six feet thick above his head.
"What a way to yoke oxen!" said Juan in high contempt of the crude and barbarous method that made the creatures' labor a long-drawn agony. He lingered in the court, pity in his face for the suffering brutes, on whose withers streams of blood were black-streaked in the dust, where the unsparing driver had urged and directed them as he had been taught.
