It all reminds me of February 22, in New York, when national proclivities will rise against time and circumstances, and George Washington will blaze with all his calm dignity from the Teuton’s shop window with a huge glass of lager in his hand, and the citizen from County Cork flashes him forth from his aldermanic window with an extra width to his supermaxillary, while Hop Long Quick displays him with his weekly washee washee, sporting a three foot queue.
I suppose all this proves that we think a lot more of ourselves than we do of others, and of our nationality: “My country, may she ever be right, but right or wrong, my country.”
I suppose local color is everything to the ambitious artist, and in making the rounds of the different churches, the amount of dripping gore you encounter in the transit from the Sanhedrin to Calvary is appalling. Were you to meet the dramatis personæ in the flesh, and away from their settings, you would be in doubt as to whether they were just from the foot-ball game, or a delegation from Darktown Alley “After de Ball.” Beyond the city and near the foothills is the modest little chapel of Guadalupe.
Around it is a grove of maguey plants with their long, fleshy leaves, just as inviting to the jack-knife of the Mexican boy as a white beech tree was to you when you were loitering around the country church. Nor were these boys less boys than others, for all over these telltale leaves are inscriptions, some cut “When you and I were boys, Tom, just twenty years ago.” Nor were all these inscriptions outbursts of piety and consecration to the church. Some still told the old, old story, that the lovely Ramona was La alma de mi vidi, mi dulce corizon, the soul of his life and his sweetheart forever.
I sincerely hope Ramona got the letter and rewarded the young man for his splendid sculpturing, but I doubt if he “sculped” all the things I read.
Some were avowals to the service of the Virgin, and I know of no place better calculated to inspire such thoughts of worship than the little chapel of Guadalupe.
Beyond the chapel was a young man quarrying stone, and in his idle hours he had chiseled out a small miniature chapel, about three feet long and similar in design to Guadalupe. Perhaps he was the one who wrote the pious inscription, but he looked just about old enough to have boiled over with that effervescence about Ramona.
While he was at work, I slyly investigated his means of saving grace. Within the little chapel were candles and tinsels of gold leaf and silver, and symbols made of pewter and tin, and bits of broken crockery and other childish playthings, while around it were planted a row of resurrection plants.
This botanical wonder, Selaginella lepidophylla, grows upon the bare rocks, and may be kept a dozen years in a trunk, but when placed in a saucer of water, immediately changes its grey color for green, and unfolds its fronds like a thing of life. When taken from the water it closes up like a chestnut-burr, and continues in its dormant state till water is given it, when it responds every time. This young man having all this paraphernalia as a means of worship may be strange, but what about the church from which he drew his pattern?
What the lower classes here do not know about the bible would fill a book.