Madame Lefaivre and Elsie S. are sketching; all is peaceful, sun-flooded, with much singing of birds, and the trees are dropping solid bits of gold through their dark branches. There is a fine old five-belled belfry that pierces the perfect sky; the top bell and one of the next lower pair are missing (in what vagary of Mexican history they disappeared I know not). This was once a Carmelite monastery, and still has a wonderful garden and a celebrated peach and pear and chabacano orchard. The wall inclosing the orchard is so high that scarcely anything green grows tall enough to show above it, though the mirador has a few vines twisting about it. The wall, however, is beautiful in itself--pink, crumbling, sun-baked, with moss and flowers and bits of cactus clinging to it, and a fruity odor was wafted over to us as we passed on the broken, ditch-like road with the motor at an angle of forty-five degrees. There is a large space, planted with live-oaks, outside the _patio_ of the church with _its_ lovely, broadly scalloped pink wall. Once through the carved door, one is as if in a bath of sun and beauty. Before another time-worn, carved door leading into the church stand two straight, black, immemorial cypresses. The inside wall of the _patio_ has, here and there, an old carved coat of arms cemented into it, and colored growing things abound. The live-oaks outside bend above the scalloping of the walls, on which are ancient numbers above flat-carved symbols for the "Way of the Cross." Elsie chose a corner inside, and Madame Lefaivre is sketching outside, so I got the guardian, who is also the administrator of the orchard and hacienda, to unlock the church. Several gilded _Churrigueresque_ altars still remain--intricately designed, time-softened, lovely, and on the altar steps were some charming old candlesticks, five or six feet high, in the same lovely style of gilding and twisting. How they have remained there during a century of suburban vicissitudes I know not. Various saints in ecstasy, San Joaquin in special, were portrayed, almost life-size, their garments floating, falling, blowing about, with the special unquiet but lovely _Churrigueresque_ touch. Winged, open-mouthed cherubim and seraphim hold up the vaulting with its wealth of lovely, conventional motifs; throughout Mexico, in churches where everything else is gone, one finds the out-of-reach vaultings intact. There is a school of a sort, held in what was once the seminary behind the church; and some barefooted, bareheaded, and otherwise scantily clad wrestlers with the "three R's" came out from one end of the church and passed through, followed by their teacher, a shabby, bored-looking young Mestizo of doubtful cleanliness and dubious competency. Calle Humboldt, _Later_.