"For a day, one single day of Paris!" repeated the Padre, gazing through
his cloisters at the empty sea. 

Once in the year the mother-world remembered him.  Once in the year, from
Spain, tokens and home-tidings came to him, sent by certain beloved
friends of his youth.  A barkentine brought him these messages.  Whenever
thus the mother-world remembered him, it was like the touch of a warm
hand, a dear and tender caress; a distant life, by him long left behind,
seemed to be drawing the exile homeward from these alien shores.  As the
time for his letters and packets drew near, the eyes of Padre Ignacio
would be often fixed wistfully upon the harbor, watching for the
barkentine.  Sometimes, as to-day, he mistook other sails for hers, but
hers he mistook never.  That Pacific Ocean, which, for all its hues and
jeweled mists, he could not learn to love, had, since long before his
day, been furrowed by the keels of Spain.  Traders, and adventurers, and
men of God had passed along this coast, planting their colonies and
cloisters; but it was not his ocean.  In the year that we, a thin strip of
patriots away over on the Atlantic edge of the continent, declared
ourselves an independent nation, a Spanish ship, in the name of Saint
Francis, was unloading the centuries of her own civilization at the