William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[112] his fortune, wants to build himself a poetic home. A hundred villas nestle in the woods, a hundred chalets climb the hills. A railway belts the town. Schools, churches, banks, hotels, and hospitals abound. Here stands a court-house, there a university. Santa Clara is an English town, alive with English fire and hope; and yet, one turns from all these signs of a new order to the old Franciscan cloister, in the cells of which the city of Santa Clara had her birth.

Slouching at the college gate, stands an old Indian, called Marcello, dressed in tags and beads, like a Mexican. He is waiting for his daily dole.

Marcello is a double of the patriarch of Carmelo Bay. A child when Fray Tomas de la Peina built this cloister, and laid out these walks, the old chief has lived through many histories. Within his fivescore years the Spaniards have come and gone, the Mexicans have risen and fallen. Living under many flags, he has been a thrall of Spain, a citizen of Mexico, a vassal of California, an outcast of the United States. To him these changes have been like an evil dream, of which the sense escaped his mind, while the pang remained in his flesh.