Page:Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan.djvu/564

480 understand, but learned that it was meant as a pledge of friendship, which I reciprocated with a penknife. The Prefect was kind and courteous to the last; even the old Alcalde, drawing a little daily revenue from us, was touched. Every male inhabitant came the house to bid us farewell and wish us to return; and before starting we rode round and exchanged adios with all their wives: good, kind, and quiet people, free from all agitating cares, and aiming only at an undisturbed existence in a place which I had been induced to believe the abode of savages and full of danger.

In order to accompany us, the cura had postponed for two days a visit to his hacienda, which lay on our road. Pawling continued with us for the purpose before mentioned, and Juan according to contract I had agreed to return him to Guatimala. Completely among strangers, he was absolutely in our power, and followed blindly, but with great misgivings asked the padre where we were taking him. His impression was that he was setting out for my country, and he had but little expectation of ever seeing Guatimala again.

From the village we entered immediately upon a beautiful plain, picturesque, ornamented with trees, and extending five or six days' journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The road was very muddy, but, open to the sun in the morning, was not so bad as we feared. On the borders of a piece of woodland were singular trees, with tall trunks, the bark very smooth, and the branches festooned with hanging birds'-nests. The bird was called the jagua, and built in this tree, as the padre told us, to prevent serpents from getting at the young. The cura, notwithstanding his strange figure, and a life of incident and danger, was almost a woman in voice, manner, tastes, and feelings. He had been educated at the capital, and sent as a penance to this retired curacy. The visit of the padres had for the first time broken the monotony of his life. In the political convulsions of the capital he had made himself obnoxious to the church government by his liberal opinions; but unable, as he said, to find in him any tangible offence, his superiors had called him up on a charge of polluting the surplice, founded on the circumstance that, in the time of the cholera, when his fellow-creatures were lying all around him in the agonies of death, in leaning over their bodies to administer the sacrament, his surplice had been soiled by saliva from the mouth of a dying man. For this he was condemned to penance and prayers, from midnight till day-break, for two years in the cathedral, deprived of a good curacy, and sent to Palenque.

At half-past two we reached his sitio, or small hacienda. In the apprehension of the afternoon's rain, we would have continued to the