One enters the church with some trepidation, for it seems as if the cracked and crazy structure may stagger to shapeless ruin at any moment. What a pity that the material of California's missions was not enduring stone, like the English abbeys, rather than the quickly disintegrating adobe! Back of the church is a pathetic little burying ground where wooden crosses and simple memorials indicate that the present parishioners of San Fernando are the poorest of the poor,—probably a few wretched Mexican families such as the one we found in charge of the mission.
I have anticipated, perhaps, in describing the church before the mission itself, but, after all, the church is a part of the exterior with which I have been dealing. On our first visit we found a Mexican family living in two or three of the damp, cavernous rooms of the old building. They could speak but little English, but it was easy to see that visitors were welcome, and gratuities no doubt afforded their means of livelihood. When we returned a year later, another family was in possession and had reduced sightseeing to a business basis. We were required to pay "two bits" entrance fee and an extra charge was assessed for a peep into the ruinous church, all doors and rents in the wall having been religiously boarded up. Each member of our party was given a lighted lantern—a wise precaution, it proved, for there were dilapidated and broken stairways and unsound floors in the dimly lighted building. There was little enough to see; only a series of prison-like cells with tiny windows piercing the massive walls, with earthen floors, and rude beamed ceilings—surely life at best was hard and comfortless at San Fernando, and the fathers had little advantage over their Indian charges. There was one large room, apparently for assembly purposes, on the second floor. Our Mexican guide grinned gleefully as he pointed out a little conduit in the wall through which wine flowed from the presses to vats in the ample cellars; evidently the fathers made a plentiful supply of the genial liquor to counteract the hardships they must have endured.
One need explore but a corner of the mission; he will find it typical of the whole huge structure, perhaps two hundred feet in length. There is a pathetic little chapel—the altar covered with tinsel and gewgaws—where services are held at long intervals. As a whole, the building is in fair condition and a little intelligent repair and restoration would insure its preservation for many years to come. It is, in some respects, one of the most typical of the missions; except for decay, which has not impaired the structure or interior arrangement to any great extent, it stands to-day much as it did one hundred years ago and gives an excellent idea of the domestic life of the padres and their converts. A narrow stairway led to a platform on the roof and coming out of the dimly lighted interior into the broad sunlight—for the rain had ceased—we were struck with the remarkable beauty of the situation.