In the evening we turned again to the church to hear the vesper service. The spacious edifice was dimly lighted by the candles on the altars and pillars, and men and women knelt all over the rough floor. A choir of female voices was singing as we entered, and soon the officiating priest was conducted by candle-bearing acolytes to the altar. The responses by the choir and orchestra (organ, violin, flute, and violoncello) were very impressive, the musicians often joining their voices to the music of their instruments. The Indian drum, made of hides rudely stretched over the hollow trunk of a tree, boomed from the remote part of the church, and bombs and rockets exploded outside in a most effective manner. A black-robed young priest entered a confessional near where I was sitting, and a veiled female at once knelt at the side, while others in the immediate neighborhood moved quietly out of earshot. The whole service was very solemn; and the clouds of incense from the swinging censers of the Indian boys partly concealed the tinsel and tarnished gilding of the uncouth altar, and even cast a glamour over the huge doll, which, most gaudily dressed, represented the Queen of Heaven. The decaying church, so painfully out of repair by daylight, was covered with respectability, even with sanctity, by the shadows of night. One cannot but feel with sadness that the offices of a religion held so sacred here in centuries gone by should be so lightly regarded, and that the church buildings reared by so much labor and often unselfish devotion should now be cared so little for, even in this State of Verapaz, where the Church gained an ascendency over the Indios which the iron-clad and iron-hearted Conquistadores had never done. Monday was spent in photographing views in the neighborhood and hunting for mules. Of these we agreed to take three for our use all through the country at a charge of $150; but when we unsaddled them at our hotel we found they all had sore backs, and accordingly sent them home. In the evening I went with the postmaster (a Kentuckian) to an examination at the Colegio de Libertad. Three ladino lads did most of the reciting in arithmetic, botany, zoology, and history; and a certain doctor took the _rôle_ of chief examiner,—evidently quite as much bent on displaying his own knowledge as that of his pupils. I had to ask a few questions, which were understood and promptly answered.