The churches are still left to the secular clergy, and they are as uninteresting as Spanish-American churches are wont to be. Had the conquest occurred but a century earlier America might have been covered with churches worthy of the traditions handed down by the builders of Burgos, Toledo, and Seville, for the supply of labourers was for some time unlimited, the Indians were good craftsmen, and the great monuments of Copan and Quirigua show that curved and drooping feathers may afford a motive for decoration as graceful and beautiful as Gothic foliations; but
such art as the Spaniards brought with them was a degraded form of the renaissance, and the innumerable churches which they built are without any architectural merit but mass, the interiors great bare halls, and the facades overloaded with stumpy twisted columns, wavy stucco cornices, and such-like abominations. Not even the ruin into which so many of them have fallen can add a grace to the masses of stucco and rubble. It is only in the villages that they gain a picturesqueness of their own, and that owing more to their surroundings than to any merit in design. However, in their favour it must be said that they are neither dirty nor bad-smelling, partly because they are so little used and partly because in this equable climate doors and windows can be left open all day long.
A few days before Christmas we happened to enter the church of La Merced and chanced upon a vesper service for the Hijas de Maria, sung by a choir of girls and children to the strains of a wheezy harmonium, whilst all did their best to increase the noise by blowing penny whistles, shaking bells and tambourines, and striking triangles. After playing with their penny toys until they were tired, the choir broke into a quaint chant, to which the rest of the congregation responded. During this performance the "Daughters of Mary," veiled and dressed in white, and each carrying a lighted candle in her hand, knelt at the altar rails, whilst the "Sons of Mary," with large white ribbon bows tied on their arms, sat in the seats near the choir. This was almost the only ladino church-function which we saw during our stay in the country. In all the other towns and villages the churches seemed to be given over almost exclusively to the Indians.
In our rambles through the suburbs we often found our path barred by the great barrancas which almost surround the town. These big fissures are very beautiful, and we spent many idle and pleasant hours watching the shadows chasing each other across their open green mouths, and enjoying the delicious June temperature which comes to this favoured land at Christmas time. Trees and shrubs loaded with festoons of creeping plants cling to the precipitous sides of these rifts, and now and then one caught a bright gleam where the sunlight struck the rivulet that bubbles through the luxuriant
