Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/247

Rh Bananas, cocoa and other palms, oranges, coffee, and all manner of precious fruit, abound; while the vistas along the broken arches, half-empty pools, and flowering trees, to the black mountains near at hand, are as beautiful as desolate. Like its once profusely wealthy builder and its profusely pompous occupants, it has itself become a ruin. How much better to have used this wealth in founding of hospitals and schools, that would have remained a perpetual illumination and elevation of this still degraded population! Will the overflowing wealth of America to-day be any more wisely spent?

Nowhere have I seen idolatry more rampant, or the Church authorities more faithfully upholding it, than here. On the walls of one of the chapels in the Cortez church-yard are proclamations by the Archbishop of Mexico and Bishop of Puebla offering eighty days and more of indulgence for a certain number of repetitions of the Lord's Prayer, Ave Marias, and the sweet numbers of Jesus, before pictures in that chapel of St. John, and that of the Magdalen, and the Virgin. These were all printed and put up as a permanent institution. I saw none earning the indulgence. Perhaps they had a number of days yet left from previous exercises, and did not need to go through any labor of prayer at present; as the Neapolitan lazzaroni refused to carry a valise because he had no need of money, since he had had his breakfast and the time of dinner was not yet. In fact, I saw hardly any worship of any sort in this city. It seemed as if the Church at all hours was, like the climate and the town, fast asleep. It can wake up like these mountains about us in blood and fire and vapor of smoke. It is reported to be already thus reviving. I heard a rumor, on the first day of my arrival here, that there had been a riot at Oajutla (pronounced Wahootla), forty miles from here, and that forty Christians had been killed. This rumor is not confirmed, but it shows something of the state of the atmosphere, and possible earthquakes and eruptions, that such rumors could get current.

But let us get away from the torpid present, and the perhaps volcanic future, into a once powerful past. Leave the gardens and