what the entertainment was, I was heartily vexed that I should be at such a place on the Sabbath day. The dancing and singing was bad enough, but the climax was reached when the priest came down from the altar, with an array of attendants having immense candles, to the side door, where the procession stopped to witness the discharge, at mid-day, of a large amount of fire-works in honor of the most blessed Virgin Mary.
I hurried home from this profanation of the Lord's day, and sat down and contemplated the old Aztec god, who had been deified for his wisdom, and could not but regret the change that had been imposed upon these imbecile Indians.
The next Sabbath after this was the national anniversary of the miraculous apparition; but, having seen enough of this sort of thing, I concluded that my Sabbaths would be better spent in staying at home and reading a Spanish Testament, which had been brought into the country in violation of the law.
When I was first at the city of Mexico, Governor Letcher related to me the stratagem by which he contrived to smuggle an American Bible agent out of the country when the police were after him, on an accusation of selling prohibited books! for in such a country as this, the Word of God is a prohibited book.
Juan Diego, upon whose veracity rests the story of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin, was an Indian peon; and though, like the rest of his race, he probably was an habitual liar, yet when he bears testimony to a miracle he is presumed to speak the truth. He lived in a mud hut somewhere about the barren hill now consecrated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The attempt to make out that it was Saint Thomas, or the Wandering Jew who here had an interview with the Virgin Mary, and that the old rag on which the picture is painted is really a part of the cloak of Saint Thomas, is, by a very verbose proclamation of the Archbishop