Don Jose Gulielmo Roderigues, the cura of Xul, was a Guachapino, or native of Old Spain, of which, like all the old Spaniards in the country, he was somewhat proud. He was educated a Franciscan friar; but thirty years before, on account of the revolutions and the persecution of his order, he fled from Spain, and took refuge in Yucatan. On the destruction of the Franciscan Convent in Merida, and the breaking up of the Franciscan monks, he secularized, and entered the regular church; had been cura of Ticul and Nohcacab; and about ten years before had been appointed to the district of Xul. His curacy was one of those called beneficiaries; _i.e._, in consideration of building the church, keeping it in repair, and performing the duties and services of a priest, the capitation tax paid by the Indians, and the fees allowed for baptism, marriages, masses, salves, and funeral services, after deducting one seventh for the Church, belonged to himself personally. At the time of his appointment, the place now occupied by the village was a mere Indian rancho. The land comprehended in his district was, in general, good for maize, but, like all the rest of that region, it was destitute of water, or, at least, but badly supplied. His first object had been to remedy this deficiency, to which end he had dug a well two hundred feet deep, at an expense of fifteen hundred dollars. Besides this, he had large and substantial cisterns, equal to any we had seen in the country, for the reception of rain-water; and, by furnishing this necessary of life in abundance, he had drawn around him a population of seven thousand. But to us there was something more interesting than this creation of a village and a population in the wilderness, for here, again, was the same strange mingling of old things with new. The village stands on the site of an aboriginal city. In the corner of the plaza now occupied by the cura's house, the yard of which contains the well and cisterns, once stood a pyramidal mound with a building upon it. The cura had himself pulled down this mound, and levelled it so that nothing was left to indicate even the place where it stood. With the materials he had built the house and cisterns, and portions of the ancient edifice now formed the walls of the new. With singular good taste, showing his practical turn of mind, and at the same time a vein of antiquarian feeling, he had fixed in conspicuous places, when they answered his purpose, many of the old carved stones. The convent and church occupied one side of the plaza; along the corridor of the former was a long seat of time-polished stones taken from the ruins of an ancient building, and in every quarter might be seen these memorials of the past, connecting links between the living and the dead, and serving to keep alive the memory of the fact, which, but for them, would in a few years be forgotten, that on this spot once stood an ancient Indian city.