Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/84

82 through its deserted arches, and the wind whistling in the empty nave, in its organ loft, in its solitary cells, and he will have some idea of the shelter in which we spent the remainder of the night.

We stood shivering in our wet clothes, and our first business was to seek materials for a fire. We took each a different part of the convent. The quarter in which I was engaged happened to be the most ruinous in the whole building. The remembrance of the old monk of St. Francis often came into my mind; and, in passing along the deserted galleries, I could not help fancying I saw him flitting through the gloomy arches. Around me the pillars stretched their great shadows upon the ground, whitened by the moonbeams. A stillness, as of the grave, rested every where. The ivy curtains alone shook in the wind.

From the cloister I entered a vast corridor. Through the large chinks in the vaulted roof above the moonbeams stealthily penetrated. In the distance I thought I observed a red glow on the flag stones playing amid the surrounding whiteness, and imagined I heard the snort of a horse which did not seem to proceed from the court where we had fastened our steeds. At the same instant my companions called me; I eagerly joined them. They had collected some brushwood, as they could find nothing better. The officer, Don Blas, affirmed that he had seen, by the light of the moon, in a distant court, a horse which was not one of ours. The student pretended he had met the ghost of one of the monks who had been buried in the convent. A short silence succeeded. Don Romulo was the first to break it.

"Here is a charming variety of horrors; the horse