Page:Life in Mexico vol 2.djvu/240

220 from the signs of the times, will probably be our last in Mexico.

28th.—This morning Cn took his farewell audience of the President, and the new Minister was received.

30th.—These few last days have chiefly been spent in paying visits of ceremony with the Señora. Nevertheless, we spent an hour last evening in the beautiful cemetery a little way out of the city, which is rather a favorite haunt of ours, and is known as the "Pantéon de Santa Maria." It has a beautiful chapel attached to it, where daily mass is said for the dead, and a large garden filled with flowers. Young trees of different kinds have been planted there, and the sight of the tombs themselves, in their long and melancholy array of black coffins, with gold lettered inscriptions, even while it inspires the saddest ideas, has something soothing in its effect. They are kept in perfect order, and the inscriptions, though not always eloquent, are almost always full of feeling, and sometimes extremely touching. There is one near the entrance, which is pathetic in its native language, and though it loses much in the translation, I shall transcribe it:

"Here lie the beloved remains of Carmen and José Pimentel y Heras. The first died the 11th of June, 1838, aged one year and eleven months; the second on the 5th of September of 1839, in the sixteenth month of his existence; and to their dear memory maternal love dedicates the following