The same labour was repeated the next day with a new set of men; but, by continual supervision and urging, we managed to get considerable work done. Albino was a valuable auxiliary; indeed, without him I could hardly have got on at all. We had not fairly discovered his intelligence until we left Uxmal. There all had a beaten track to move in, but on the road little things were constantly occurring in which he showed an ingenuity and a fertility of resource that saved us from many annoyances. He had been a soldier, and at the siege of Campeachy had received a sabre-cut in a fleshy part of the body, which rather intimated that he was moving in an opposite direction when the sabre overtook him. Having received neither pay for his services nor pension for his wound, he was a little disgusted with patriotism and fighting for his country. He was by trade a blacksmith, which business, on the recommendation of Dona Joaquina Peon, he had given up to enter our service. His usefulness and capacity were first clearly brought out at Kabah. Knowing the character of the Indians, speaking their language, and being but a few degrees removed from them by blood, he could get out of them twice as much work as I could. Him, too, they could ask questions about us, and lighten labour by the indulgence of social humour, and very soon I had only to give instructions as to what work was to be done, and leave the whole management of it to him. This doubled our effective force, as we could work with two sets of Indians in different places at the same time, and gave Albino a much greater value than that of a common servant. He had one bad habit, which was that of getting the fever and ague. This he was constantly falling into, and, with all our efforts, we could never break him of it, but, unluckily, we never set him a good example. In the mean time Bernaldo sustained his culinary reputation; and, avoiding the bad habit of Albino and his masters, while all the rest of us were lank as the village dogs of that country, his cheeks seemed always ready to burst open. While we were working at the ruins, the people in the village were losing no time. On the eleventh began the fiesta of Corpus Alma, a festival of nine days' observance in honour of Santo Cristo del Amor. Its opening was announced by the ringing of church bells and firing of rockets, which, fortunately, as we were away at the ruins, we avoided hearing; but in the evening came the procession and the baile, to which we were formally invited by a committee, consisting of the padrecito, the alcalde, and a much more important person than either, styled El Patron del Santo, or the Patron of the Saint.