through the sala.

Still we were not entirely at ease. In Yucatan, as in Central America,
it is the custom for a traveller, whether he alights at the casa real,
convent, or the hacienda of a friend, to buy ramon and maize for his
horses; and it is no lack of hospitality in the host, after providing a
place for the beasts, to pay no more attention to them. This might have
brought on a premature explanation; but presently four Indians
appeared, each with a great back-load of ramon. We ventured to give a
hint about maize, and in a moment all anxiety about our horses was at
an end, and we had the whole evening to manage for ourselves.

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 s