This text is part of:
“
[127]
are not the things most wanted by people in these valleys.
In Algiers and Paraguay, our Fathers taught the native how to till his soil and gather in his grain.
At Santa Clara we have other things to do. The native race, for whom the brethren of St. Francis toiled, is all but gone.
Our conflict lies in other fields.”
Varsi is right.
His conflict lies in other fields than that in which Fray Tomas the Franciscan laboured.
Pausing in the library, the theatre, and the playground, we note with curiosity his instruments of war.
“Our business,” says Padre Varsi, “ is to educate the young.
Hoping to do our business well, we have enlarged the old fence, built a new front to the church, and added new halls and bath-rooms to the mission-house.”
“Pray tell me how you got the ground?”
“By bringing peace into the town, and proving that we came as friends.
My predecessor, Padre Giovanni Nobili, came to Santa Clara shortly after the gates were opened to our exiles.
There was some confusion in the place.
The brethren of St. Francis, having just come back, were trying to ”
1875.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.