Page:Pictures of life in Mexico Vol 1.djvu/139

Rh Soon after, perhaps, a lady, belaced, befringed, and bejewelled, whose life was a career of vanity and frivolity, would proceed to the confessional. The pious father would doubtless receive her simpered professions of repentance at least as kindly as in the former case; and soon she would return, on the most complacent terms with the world, with herself, and with the priest who had so sympathetically listened to her, and granted her absolution in full for her interesting follies and dissipations.

I have noted a tradesman issuing from his store, with the fruits of his extortion and dishonesty in his hand, to offer a commission to the priest upon a portion of his knavish dealings, on condition of being absolved from the consequences of the whole. He has afterwards rushed eagerly to the gaming-table and the spirit-shop, and compensated himself in his own way for his religious offering; qualifying himself to require new penances and mortifications for sin, at a very early opportunity.

Filthy léperos, the vilest of the vile, will often kneel down before their brass crucifixes in seemingly deep adoration; their devotion