Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/226

216 It was a great resort in the middle of the seventeenth century, within fifty years after the first stone was laid. One Thomas Page, an English ecclesiastic, visiting it then, says: "The orchards and gardens were full of fruits and flowers, which may take two miles to compass; and here among the rocks are many springs of water which, with the shade of the plantain (or banana) and other trees, are most cool and pleasant to the hermits. They have also the sweet smell of the rose and the jasmine, which is a little flower, but the sweetest of all others; and there is not any flower to be found that is rare and exquisite in that country which is not in that wilderness, to delight the senses of those mortified hermits."

The rose-bush and the jasmine remain yet, the path through the garden being lined with the former, growing as tall as your head, and the latter clinging to the crevices of the walls and along the ruined battlements, as fragrant and as pretty in its pink and checkered blossoms as it was more than two hundred years ago. The garden is now neglected, but could easily yield all tropical luxuries in this frostless air. No wonder the place became a great attraction, and Desierto was the fashion for Mexics. "It is wonderful," says Priest Thomas, "to see the strange devices of fountains of water which are about the gardens; but much more wonderful to see the resort thither of coaches, and gallants and ladies, and citizens from Mexico, to walk and make merry in those desert pleasures, and to see those hypocrites, whom they look upon as living saints, and so think nothing too good for them to cherish them in their desert conflicts with Satan." Even so early had the fruit of sainthood begun to ripe and rot. Like Martha's Vineyard, it had ceased to be so much a spiritual as a luxurious resort. Will the camp-meeting to come here fall into like condemnation?

He says these visitors brought presents, and the image of our Lady of Carmel had treasures of diamonds, pearls, golden chains, and crowns, and gowns of cloth of gold and silver. "Before this picture did hang in my time twenty lamps of silver, the poorest of them being worth a hundred pounds." Quaintly and profitably he