Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/55

Rh in the streets of Mexico. There are two sorts of monks in the convent: monks still young enough to delight in a monte table and in a tertulia, and who are never in their cells; others whose age and infirmities prevent them from mixing with the world: these last form the settled population, which is not a very numerous one. Among the monks whom I met in the corridors of San Francisco, there was one, above all, who seemed to me to personify the convent life, with all its attendants of gloomy observance and secret penance. He was an old man, with a shining bald head; a kind of awe, mingled with curiosity, seized me whenever I saw him. I could have sworn that one of those sombre pictures upon the walls of the convent, from the pencil of Rodriguez, Cabrera, or Villalpando, had left its frame and come to life again. Sometimes I mused away an idle hour in the garden; for, all the time I was in Mexico, solitude was peculiarly pleasing to me. Since my arrival in Mexico, years had been added to years, and I began to experience attacks of home-sickness. The unvarying deep blue sky, so unlike that of France, rather increased my sadness. The appearance of the convent garden, surrounded on all sides by lofty walls, was in perfect harmony with the melancholy thoughts which had taken possession of my mind. The sun had calcined the brick walls, upon which opened the windows of the tenantless cells. Weeds were growing here and there on a terrace shaded with the wide-spreading branches of the sycamore, the palma christi, and the mango. An arbor, ornamented with climbing plants, was the place to which I most frequently directed my steps. There, under a flowery arch, where the passion-flower, that favorite plant of the cloisters,