ssss1

“ONE particularly lovely Sunday morning, some time after taking up my abode at Chi-chen Itza,” says Don Eduardo, “I was awakened, as on other occasions, by the softly melodious chiming of the bells in my little church on the hill. As I lay in my hammock, idly listening to the pleasant sound, I could distinguish the different tones of the several bells and it was a pleasant thought to me to know that I had equipped the little church with bells having a superior quality of tone. The sound of them was indeed delightful because while church bells in Yucatan are as plentiful as millionaires in Pittsburgh, they are usually cracked and raucous.

“It was still early when I stood before my manor and turned my gaze eastward toward the little stone church perched cozily on a near-by gently sloping hillside. Both my manor and the little church had for many years been in ruins, unused. Extensive repairs had just been completed on both, to make them habitable. Here and there one of my Indians, or a whole family, dressed in their Sunday best, were already churchward bound, and the chimes continued softly to remind the laggard of his duty. The red rim of the sun was just peeping over the horizon behind the church, while the birds in every tree and thicket were voicing their welcome to this glorious new day. A lazy, blissful breeze laden with the mingled scents of a thousand tropic blossoms ruffled the tree-tops. Before me stretched a vista of wildly beautiful country-side with no sign of the handiwork of man other than the little church. No towering peaks, no gushing streams, no bottomless cañons greeted my eye; merely a terrain that is just saved from being flat. Yet it is all divinely lovely—a study in green and blue with here and there a spot of flaming color. The cloudless sky was of so clear and vivid a blue that I was tempted to stand on tiptoe and take down a handful. Foliage of some sort covered every inch of ground and was of every imaginable shade of green, from the shadowed purple-green where the rising sun had not penetrated, to the pale green of some of the tree-tops, turned golden in the first slanting rays. A gorgeous parrot flashed from tree to tree and disappeared and by his flight brought my eye to rest on a riot of flame-flower high up in a distant tree.