The Padre Cartine is a learned man, in the continental acceptation of the term of two centuries ago. That is to say, he reads Latin and the Fathers, and is familiar with the Natural History of Pliny,—the latest book on the subject with which he is acquainted, and which is his sole authority. The Padre is withal a mathematician, has a Latin edition of Euclid, and reads it once a year by way of amusement, and to refresh his memory. He is an architect, and has made a plan for the restoration of the convent, on a scale of splendor which would beggar a prince to carry out, and feels as anxious about its accuracy as if the masons were to commence to-morrow, and any defect in the plan would ruin the architectural effect of the structure for ever. I am not likely to forget my first visit to Padre Cartine. I found him seated in a broad arm-chair, in the principal room of his house. He had been a man of fine proportions, but was now a little corpulent, a defect only to be observed when he was standing. His head was of fine outline, large, and massive, and his face had an expression of intelligence, dignity, and equanimity, at once pleasing and impressive. He wore a dress of coarse, gray serge, bound at the waist by a rough pita cord, for he still kept up many of the austere practices of his order. The furniture of the house was plain and simple, and I believe all of the Padre’s own manufacture. Upon a low bench extending around two sides of the room, was a most incongruous assortment of clocks, of every date, pattern, and country, from a tall cupboard contrivance of the last century, dingy with age, in the corner, through every intermediate variety, to a little German or French concern, which ticked spitefully from the opposite wall. There were cases without clocks, and clocks without cases; besides a wilderness of weights, cords, pulleys, wheels, and springs; for the Padre was so passionately fond of clocks, that he not only kept an extensive variety of his own to tinker, but borrowed all of his neighbors’, and encouraged the distant villagers to bring him theirs for gratuitous cleansing and repair. No Jew’s second-hand furniture-shop in Chatham street could afford more than a very faint counterpart of this curious collection. The Padre observed that they attracted my attention, and commenced a philosophical lecture on horology, which I hastily brought to a close by suggesting a walk through the old convent and the church which had been attached to it. In the first courtyard were half a dozen deer, tame as kittens, which came bounding up at the sound of the Padre’s voice; they licked his extended hand, and held down their heads to have them rubbed, but failing to cajole the Padre out of a plantain or tortilla, butted him playfully, and struck at him with well-feigned malice. Upon one side of this court the Padre had fitted up a private chapel. It contained a marble altar, a wax figure of Christ, and a great variety of valuable ornaments saved