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196 do. He did not grumble when sent to this "finished" town. Western readers know what that word means. The East has none such. He came and saw, and did not like the dilapidated condition of affairs, and set himself to work to get up a new church, or to make an old one as good as new. There was not much money here, as there is not usually where such preachers are stationed. But he gets what he can at home, and pushes abroad; begs it, brick by brick, and tint by tint, and penny by penny, poco poquito, little and least, till he gets the money and work, and finishes his cozy box for his half a hundred worshipers. A hundred would jam it. That is the only non-Methodistic part of the procedure. But in a town which is full of big and empty churches, he may have thought that it was well to make an exception, and so he chose "a little house well filled."

I hope he may yet be found among the Protestant ministers. He will be one of the most useful when he does come.

We ride a mile farther, past a big church ruin—which my party offer me for our church, but which is respectfully declined in favor of the gay little box just left—and, going through a stretch of green fields, ascend a slight hill, ride up a string of broad stone steps, and halt at the closed doors of the Church of Guadalupe. There are many of that name in this country, the Divine Virgin near Mexico not being one-childed in respect to temples or idolaters, if she was, as the Romanists assert, in respect to her married family.

The view is beautiful, but desolate. Streets run straight in all directions, but without a house. Churches besprinkle the vacant landscape. The maguey makes the fields green, and grasses more fit for man and beast cover some of the pastures with their early beauty. The mountains are about us, vast and lonely, and "all the air a solemn stillness holds." It is not so much a church town as a church-yard.

Before us rises the famous Pyramid. We came here to get the right point of observation for that curiosity. It comes forth out of a very level plain, and is evidently built up from that base. Some