Page:Life in Mexico vol 1.djvu/240

220 most beautiful flowers for us; sweet pease and roses, with which all gardens here abound, carnations, jasmine and heliotrope. It was a pretty picture to see them wandering about, or standing in groups in this high-walled garden, while the sun was setting behind the hills, and the noise of the city was completely excluded, everything breathing repose and contentment.

Most of the halls in the convent are noble rooms. We visited the whole, from the refectory to the botica, and admired the extreme cleanness of everything, especially of the immense kitchen, which seems hallowed from the approach even of a particle of dust; this circumstance partly accounted for by the fact that each nun has a servant, and some have two; for this is not one of the strictest orders. The convent is rich; each novice at her entrance pays five thousand dollars into the common stock. There are about thirty nuns and ten novices.

The prevailing sin in a convent generally seems to be pride;

and it is perhaps nearly inseparable from the conventual state. Set apart from the rest of the world, they, from their little world, are too apt to look down with contempt upon all who do not belong to their community, a contempt which may be mingled with envy, or modified by pity, but must be unsuited to a true Clnistian spirit.

The novices were presented to us—poor little entrapped things! who really believe they will be let