Some 30 years ago Bishop Neraz of San Antonio had La Purísima Concepcion cleared of rubbish and re-dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes.[88] [Illustration] SAN JOSÉ DE AGUAYO The sculptured window of this old Franciscan Mission near San Antonio, Texas, is widely famed for its refined beauty. [Illustration] SAN XAVIER DEL BAC, ARIZONA. Though largely restored, this survival of early 17th-century missionary effort, is one of the most interesting antiquities of its class in the United States. The Second Mission, properly called San José de Aguayo, was the first founded of the four, dating from 1720. It was 11 years a-building, and the date of its completion, March 5, 1731, seems to have determined the beginning of the remaining three Missions in the chain, all of which were founded on their present sites in that same year.[89] It was in its day the most flourishing of the Texas Missions, as, in its ruins, it is the most beautiful. The builder indulged to the uttermost his love of florid carving, and the broken façade of the roofless church is a marvel of ornate sculpturing—of saints, life size or in bust, cherubs’ heads and flaming hearts, volutes and arabesques and conchoids innumerable. But it is good sculpture and an amazing thing that it should have been wrought to the glory of God in that wilderness of what was Northern Mexico, near two centuries ago. Doubtless it was the work of some artisan (I have read that his name was Juan Huisar) brought up from Old Mexico where such ecclesiastical art was encouraged from the beginning of the Spanish occupation; and for assistants Indians were employed. Around the corner from this front is a window in the baptistry that makes you exclaim for the beauty of it, so exquisite is it in its sculptured setting, so delicate and of so simple loveliness is its _reja_, or grating of wrought iron. And about it in the broken chinks of crumbling masonry is a fern garden of Nature’s own sowing, of a sort that thrives in the sunshine and aridity of the Southwest and nowhere else, a species that botanists call _Notholaena sinuata_. The Mission is quite abandoned now save for an occasional service at a modest little altar in one room. A neighboring Mexican family has the key and supplies a guide.