Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/55

Rh boys ahead, preparatory to performing outside the walls. It was the first band of music I had heard on Sunday since that which awoke me in Detroit last summer. How sad and striking the resemblance! Shall our German infidelity and mis-education make our land like Mexico? Or shall a holy faith and a holy life make this land like the New England of our fathers? As Mr. Lincoln said, "Our nation must be all slave or all free;" and as One infinitely greater said, "A house divided against itself can not stand;" so America, North and South, the United States and Mexico, must be all Christian in its Sabbath sanctity, or all diabolic.

I walked out in the afternoon to the cemetery, feeling that the best church and congregation were to be found there. The way led over the alameda, or a short bridge across a tiny stream, which is lined with young cocoa-nut palms, and stone seats for loungers. Here Cortez once built a bridge ten feet or so long, for which he charged the government three millions of dollars, making even Tweed lower his haughty front before this Castilian grandeur of thieving. The Church of Christ stood a little beyond, with huts of the poor near it—a church where funeral services are mostly performed. A poor old man was kneeling on a bench near the door, with arms outspread, and agonized face, muttering earnestly. Oh that he could have been spoken to, so that he might have been taught the way of life more perfectly, and might have gone down to his house justified and rejoicing in the Lord Jesus, to whom not one of his muttered prayers was addressed!

The Street of Christ leads out half a mile to the Campo Santo. Well-named is that street, if lowliest people are nearest him, and if the grave is his triumphant goal.

The walls of the grave yard are high and deep. Tall obelisks stand at either corner. The dead sleep not in the open area, which is unoccupied, but in the walls. Tablets cover the recess that incloses the coffin, and words of tenderness rather than of faith bedew the marble. Not the highest faith. No such beautiful words as are found on the monuments of the saintly dead of