I.
FIRST WEEK IN THE CAPITAL.
Hotel Gillow.—Cost of Living.—The Climate.—Lottery-ticket Venders.—First Sabbath.—First Protestant Church.—A Praise Meeting.—State of the Work.—The Week of Prayer.
Mexico begins well, though perhaps a good beginning may result in a bad ending. It was Saturday evening, at setting of the sun, that we landed at the Buena Vista station, just outside the city. The last rays had left the top of Popocatepetl, but were lingering yet in a rosy cloud above the snowy deadness of Iztaccihuatl. These two giant guardsmen are set to watch this lovely valley that circles beneath them, a girdle of hundreds of miles, itself encircled with a lower but not inferior range of mountains. The drive into the city is through a long avenue of green trees, past the Alameda, or park, half a mile square, well crowded with trees in their best June apparel, down the streets of San Francisco and Profesa, round the corner of the elegant Church of the Profesa, into the Hotel Gillow, a new hotel built on a part of the convent property belonging to the Church of the Profesa, and confiscated; but in this case built upon by the gentleman whose name it bears, whose son is a priest of this convent, who manages, if he does not own, the building, and who thus assists in desecrating a portion of the estates of the Church.
If a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church may build, or control, and even give his family name to a hotel on sacred soil, a clergyman of the Holy Catholic Church may occupy a room in it without danger of profaning either it, or himself, or his church, or his landlord. So I enter a somewhat too sumptuous apartment for my means or my church. Yet, as it is the only one opening on the street, I take it till a less ornate one is vacated.
