I have said that I knew not whence the Indians obtained the idols which they brought to me, beyond that they were exhumed at the base of the Cerro de Santiago, near Subtiaba. Now the Fray FRANCISCO DE BOBADILLA, of the Order of Mercy, was especially active in the conversion of the Indians of Nicaragua, which process, according to the chronicler Oviedo y Valdez, consisted in baptizing them, giving them a Christian name, and exacting forty grains of cacao! Bobadilla converted forty thousand in three months in the dominions of the cazique of Nagrando, whose principal town was where the city of Leon now stands. He also prevailed upon the cazique to allow him to throw down the idols which stood in “the spacious and sumptuous temple which the Indians, under the special direction of the devil, had erected there,” and to set up the cross in their stead. After he had battered the faces of these idols with a mace, Bobadilla threw them down from their high places, intending to burn them with fire, in order to show the Indians the impotence of their _teots_; but, “during the night some did take them away and buried them, so that they could not be found.” And it is not unlikely that those are the very idols exhumed for me by the Indians of Subtiaba, two of which, after doubling the Horn, now frown down upon the “hijos de Washington,” from the west corridor of the Smithsonian Institution! Upon the site of this temple was afterwards built the Christian church “La Mercedes de Subtiaba,” which for more than two hundred years has been in ruins. Its adobe walls have subsided into brambly mounds, and all is formless save the piers on which its wooden pillars stood, and its low, Moorish archway, flanked by two slender columns, which rise white and spectral above a tangled mass of verdure. The town, of which it was once the centre, has shrunk in the lapse of time, and is now a mile distant; and the aboriginal city of which Bobadilla speaks, which covered three square leagues, and had more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, has dwindled to less than one fourth of that number. We visited this church on our return. Ben cut away the bushes with his _machete_, and we rode over the outline mounds, and stood where the simple Indians had knelt, centuries ago, in silent awe before the symbols of a new and imposing religion. A few rude wooden crosses marked the deep pits within which were heaped the victims of the cholera, when in 1837, five years after it had devastated our country, it more than decimated the population of Leon. Two or three Indians, returning from their daily toil in the fields, hearing our voices, pushed their way through the bushes, and reverently took off their hats, when they entered the sacred area. We asked them if they knew aught of the ancient church, or who built it? “_Quien sabe?_” was the sole reply, and they moved the forefinger of the right hand slowly back and forth, in token of ignorance.