On Sunday morning the priest arrived on an ambling mule, the favourite clerical animal.  They say it is impossible to ride a mule unless you are either an arriero or a priest.  Not that it is by any means necessary, however, that he should ride a mule.  I shall not soon forget the jaunty young monk we saw at Tezcuco, just setting out for a country festival, mounted on a splendid little horse, with his frock tucked up, and a pair of hairy goat-skin chaparreros underneath, a broad Mexican hat, a pair of monstrous silver spurs, and a very large cigar in his mouth.  The girls came out of the cottage doors to look at him, as he made the fiery little beast curvet and prance along the road; and he was evidently not insensible to the looks of admiration of these young ladies, as they muffled up their faces in their blue rebozos and looked at him through the narrow opening.

Nearly two hundred Indians crowded into the church to mass, and went through the service with evident devotion.  There are no more sincere Catholics in the world than the Indians, though, as I have said, they are apt to keep up some of their old rites in holes and corners.  The administradors did not trouble themselves to attend mass, but went on posting up their books just outside the church-door; in this, as in a great many other little matters, showing their contempt for the brown men, and adding something every day to the feeling of dislike they are regarded with.

We speak of the Indians still keeping up their ancient superstitious rites in secret, as we often heard it said so in Mexico, though we ourselves never saw anything of it.  The Abbe Clavigero, who wrote in the last century, declares the charge to be untrue, except perhaps in a few isolated cases.  “The few examples of idolatry,” he says, “which can be produced are partly excusable; since it is not to be wondered at that rude uncultured men should not be able to distinguish the idolatrous worship of a rough figure of wood or stone from that which is rightly paid to the holy images.” (There are people who would quite agree with the good Abbe that the distinction is rather a difficult one to make.) “But how often has prejudice against them declared things to be idols which were really images of the saints, though shapeless ones!  In 1754 I saw some images found in a cave, which were thought to be idols; but I had no doubt that they were figures representing the mystery of the Holy Nativity.”

A good illustration of the wholesale way in which the early Catholic missionaries went about the work of conversion is given in a remark of Clavigero’s.  There is one part of the order of baptism which proceeds thus:  “Then the Priest, wetting his right thumb with spittle from his mouth, and touching therewith in the form of a cross the right ear of the person to be baptized, &c.”  The Mexican missionaries, it seems, had to leave out this ceremony, from sheer inability to provide enough of the requisite material for their crowds of converts.