Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/205

 158 A small wooden cross, near a tangled thicket, adjoining a ruined church, marks the fatal spot, and bears an inscription imploring your prayers for the murdered pair.

In a nook at the northwest corner of the city of Mexico, as you pass out of the gate of St. Cosmé, is the English Burying-ground, bowered among trees and flowers toward the town, and open, with a sweet lowland prospect, toward the setting sun; and here were deposited, side by side, the unfortunate victims. Few spectacles have ever been more sorrowful, than the group of "strangers in a strange land," who gathered around the grave of their murdered friends on the melancholy evening of their interment.

At the distance of a few feet from them, repose the remains of William McClure, a countryman, dear to American science. The Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, of which he was so long the President and benefactor, erected a small marble monument over his grave, and surrounded it with an iron rail. A short time before I left Mexico, the rail was torn down, the monument upset, and, on the same night, the newly buried body of a Scotchman was disinterred, stripped of its clothes, and thrown over the wall of the cemetery!

St. Augustin is another village of which I have already spoken; and St. Angel is one of nearly the same character, except that the views from its azotéas over the valley and city, are perhaps more beautiful.

The pleasantest ride, however, about the vale or its adjoining mountains, is to the ruins known as "El Desierto," or the Desert; the remains of an abandoned Carmelite convent, built among the rocky recesses of the western Sierra.

It is a fashionable ride of about seven leagues, and parties of gentlemen, and even ladies, make it a resort for agreeable pic-nics. The edifices were built between two hills, and are now going rapidly to decay, yet there are some remains of cells which still retain their coverings, while the main buildings are unroofed and almost choked with luxuriant trees and flowering shrubbery.

, a converted monk who visited Mexico about the end of the first century after the conquest, gave an account of this convent in 1677, when it was in its days of glory.