The sun was descending behind the proud walls of Avila when we regained the steep hillside, lighting up the grim towers and crowning them with splendor. We stopped on the brow, before the lofty portal of San Vicente, to look at its wreaths of stone and mutilated saints, and read the story of the rich man and Lazarus so beautifully told in the arch. Angels are bearing away the soul of the latter on a mantle to Abraham’s bosom. On the south side of the church is a sunny portico with light, clustered pillars, filled with tombs, some in niches covered with emblazonry, others like plain chests of stone set against the wall. We went down the steps into the church, cold, and dim, and gray, all of granite and cave-like. The pavement is composed of granite tombstones covered with inscriptions and coats of arms. There are granite fonts for the holy water. Old statues, old paintings, and old inscriptions in Gothic text line the narrow aisles. The windows are high up in the arches, which were still light, though shadows were gathering around the tombs below. There was not a soul in the church. We looked through the _reja_ that divides the nave at the beautiful Gothic shrine of San Vicente and his two sisters, Sabina and Chrysteta, standing on pillars under a richly-painted canopy, with curious old lamps burning within, and then went down a long, narrow, stone staircase into the crypt――of the third century――and kept along beneath the low, round arches till we came to a chapel where, by the light of a torch, we saw the bare rock on which the above-mentioned saints were martyred, and the _Bujo_ out of which the legendary serpent came to defend their remains when thrown out for the beasts to devour. This _Bujo_ was long used as a place of solemn adjuration, a kind of _Bocca de la Verità_, into which the perjurer shrank from thrusting his hand, but the custom has been discontinued. The following morning we went to visit the place where St. Teresa was born. On the way we passed through the Plaza de San Juan, like an immense cloister with its arcades, which takes its name from the church on one side, where St. Teresa was baptized. The very font is at the left on entering――a granite basin fluted diagonally, surrounded by an iron railing. Over it is her portrait and the following inscription: Vigesimo octavo Martii Teresia oborta, Aprilis ante nona est sacro hoc fonte renata MDXV.