Page:Life in Mexico vol 1.djvu/188

168 useful, thus being fitted to become excellent wives to respectable men in their own rank of life.

We visited the chapel, which is extremely rich and handsome, encrusted with gilding, and very large. The pupils and their teachers attend mass in the gallery above, which looks down upon the chapel and has a grating before it. Here they have the organ, and various shrines, saints, nacimientos, &c. We were afterwards shown into a great hall, devoted to a different purpose, containing at one end a small theatre for the pupils to act plays in. All the walls of the long galleries are covered with old paintings on holy subjects, but many of them falling to pieces from damp or want of care. The building seems interminable, and, after wandering all through it for several hours, and visiting every thing—from the old garden below, where they gave me a large bunch of roses and carnations, to the azotea above, which looks down upon every street and church and convent in Mexico—we were not sorry to rest on the antique high-backed chairs of a handsome apartment, of which the walls were hung with the portraits of the different Spanish directors of the college, in ancient court costume. Here we found that the directors had prepared a beautiful collation for us—fruit, ices, cakes, custards, jellies, wines, &c., in great profusion.

Rested and refreshed, we proceeded to visit the pupils at their different classes. At the writing-class various specimens of that polite art were presented to us. That of the elder girls was generally bad, probably from their having entered the college late in