of Santo Domingo near at hand. Every crevice of the large chapel is covered with carved wood, tossed up into airy forms like the filigree work of a gold setting, and every bit of this carved wood or clay, on roof, wall, side, and every spot but the floor, is covered with gilding. It is a little antique, but when first opened it must have well-nigh blinded the eyes of the worshipers. So yet are some of the chapels of the cathedral in Mexico. One can but feel, as he looks on all this display, the fitness of one of Hood's puns:
"Just like a button is his soul,
All cased in triple g(u)ilt."
This church, in its service and its life, its doctrines and devices, is very like these gorgeous gildings,
"All cased in triple g(u)ilt."
That Santo Domingo is a specimen. Come with me out of that dazzling chapel into this corridor of the convent to which that chapel is attached. Here was another like glittering room, where a rich Pueblano paid four hundred dollars to have his body rest a night on its way to the grave. Back of this gorgeous preliminary to the sepulchre and the worms, you see this closed-up hole in the wall. Knock it open. There is a room there, if room it may be called, where two or three can crouch, and none can walk or hardly stand, with a stone bench, and a hole big enough to pass a piece of bread through. In that wall were confined those suspected by the friars of St. Dominic, who said mass so ornately in that golden chapel. Here they were fed, and here, when the order came, food ceased to come, and they ceased to live. Buried with Christ were these his saints—buried alive.
Close by that living tomb a hole was broken in the wall, and out of it rattled a heap of skulls and other human bones, which had been tossed into a vault at an opening above, and which bottom of the vault was thus opened to the light, and all their deeds became manifest that they were wrought of the devil and not of God.
This Convent of the Inquisition was located in the very heart
