It is particularly unfortunate that, while so many apartments have remained free, this most curious and interesting one has become filled up. It is probable that the walls, as well as the arch, are plastered and painted. It would have cost a week's labour to clear it out, and my impression was, that, in consequence of the dirt having been piled up against the walls for an unknown length of time, through a long succession of rainy seasons, the colours were so completely effaced that nothing would have been discovered to compensate for the labour. It was now nearly dark. My day's work had been a severe one. I was tired and covered with garrapatas, but the next day was Sunday, the last of the fiesta, and I determined on returning to the village that night. There was a brilliant moonlight, and, hurrying on, at eleven o'clock I saw, at the end of a long straight road, the illuminated front of the church of Jalacho. Very soon, amid the shining lights and congregated thousands, I forgot desolations and ruins, and my sympathies once more moved with the living. I passed by the tables of the gamblers, worked my way through the plaza and through a crowd of Indians, who fell back in deference to the colour of my skin, and, unexpectedly to my friends, presented myself at the baile. This time I had no disposition to sleep. For the last night of the fiesta the neighbouring villages had sent forth their all; the ball was larger and gayer of whites and those in whose veins white blood ran, while outside, leaning upon the railing, looking in, but not presuming to enter, were close files of Indians, and beyond, in the plaza, was a dense mass of them--natives of the land and lords of the soil, that strange people in whose ruined cities I had just been wandering, submitting quietly to the dominion of strangers, bound down and trained to the most abject submission, and looking up to the white man as a superior being. Could these be the descendants of that fierce people who had made such bloody resistance to the Spanish conquerors?