"The second miracle!" we wonderingly repeated.
"Yes, it was at the time of the fire of 1906. The heart of San Francisco was a raging furnace. The fireproof buildings melted under the tremendous heat and collapsed as if they had been constructed of lead; the devouring flames swept over the Potrero; they fell upon the brick building next door and crept close to the walls of this old adobe, when suddenly, as if in the presence of a sacred relic, the fire crouched and died at its very doors."
We passed the altar and the old man crossed himself, while in our hearts we, too, gave thanks for the preservation of this monument of the past.
"You must not go until you have seen the cemetery," said our guide as we moved toward the entrance, and throwing open a door to the right he admitted us to the neglected graveyard. Here and there a rude cross marked the resting place of an early Indian convert and an almost obliterated inscription on a broken headstone revealed the name of a Spanish grandee. Shattered columns, loosened by the hand of time and overthrown in recent years, lay upon the ground, while great willow and pepper trees spread out protecting arms, as if to shield the silent company from the inroads of modern enterprise. We picked our way along vine-latticed paths, past graves over which myrtle and roses wandered in untrimmed beauty, to where a white shaft marked the resting place of Don Luis Argüello, comandante of the San Francisco Presidio for twenty-three years and the first Mexican governor of California.
"How splendidly strong he looms out of the past," I said. "His keen insight into the needs of this western outpost and his determined efforts for the best interests of California will forever place him in the front rank of its rulers. I wonder if his young wife, Rafaela, is buried here also?" I drew aside the tangled vines from the near-by headstones. "She was always a little dearer to me than his second wife, the proud Dona Maria Ortega, perhaps because Rafaela belonged pre-eminently to San Francisco. Her father, Ensign Sal, was acting comandante of the Presidio when Vancouver visited the Coast, and Rafaela and Luis Argüello grew up together in the little adobe settlement."