Page:Pictures of life in Mexico Vol 2.djvu/154

130 of duty; where children play and hide themselves, and mothers and nurses live over again the days of infancy; while the sick and drooping breathe the pure air at stated seasons, or lovers' vows ascend in sweet cadences on the air, at twilight.

I have sat under the trees skirting such a scene as the last, until the gray tints of evening have deepened into darkness; enjoying the coolness of the retirement, the luxuriance of the spreading branches, the vista views in the changing atmosphere, the sight of the cheerful homeward-bound figures, and the sound of merry voices as they swept by. Sometimes the love-lorn lute of a languishing swain would become tenderly audible, or the murmured song of a soliloquizing cavalier; and, more frequently still, would a hymn to the Virgin—tuned in her honour by some loitering devotees—strike musically on the growing stillness of the night.

These songs to the Virgin are, for the most part, ludicrously childish things: a few rhymes loosely put together, with nothing to recommend them but their pious intention. The subjoined stanzas, however, are imitated from what struck the writer as one of the