My travelling companions then left me and I remained a solitary stranger amongst a crowd of busy Indians. I was told that there was no hotel, but that possibly I might get a room in an old disused convent which was being altered for the purpose of receiving guests. I rode up to the gate and there saw a Spaniard who informed me that he had lately bought a portion of the ruins, and was re-arranging the interior sufficiently to enable him to keep an inn. He had a room at my disposal and assured me that he would be pleased if I would occupy it. This room had been a nun’s cell, the door of which opened into the quadrangle. I found that I was quartered within the Convent of the Conceptionistas, which after the suppression of the monastic orders had been abandoned. Thus, by a strange series of events, I had come from the ruined Indian “nunnery” at Uxmal to the ruined Spanish nunnery at Merida. The cells and the quadrangle of the Conceptionistas reminded me of the interior of the “Casa de las Monjas.” During my brief sojourn in Merida I was generally occupied during the day in observing the habits of the Indians who came into the town from the adjacent country. In the evenings, within the convent walls where, for many years, the nuns had led their quiet and secluded lives, I listened to the plans of my worthy and eager landlord for converting a building, constructed for the purposes of solitude and prayer, into a busy and prosperous inn. I frequently thought of the past of this land. The monastic institutions of an unknown race of Indians had flourished and had been destroyed, and were succeeded by the churches and convents established by an enthusiastic race of devoted missionaries who came across the Atlantic to spread their faith in the New World. Many changes had happened, the old order of things had passed away. The work of the Spanish priests for the education and conversion of the Indians, maintained for centuries with such zeal and self-sacrifice, was destined to become useless, and in their turn the monasteries of the Spaniards are doomed to fall into the same condition of ruin as the temples and religious structures of the Indians. One evening the landlord (Miguel Yturran) told me that a brig had arrived and was at anchor off the port of Sisal, and was going to sail for Cuba on the afternoon of the next day. I accordingly arranged to leave on the following morning. A good level road led to the northern coast, the distance was about thirty-eight miles. We changed mules at a village called Junucuma, and reached Sisal before nine in the morning. We had left Merida at daybreak and travelled at an average speed exceeding twelve miles an hour. In the offing we saw the brig with her sails loosed, preparing for sea.