Career of a Lay Franciscan — Clerical Iinniorality in Lima. 371 



bed-frame with a skin stretched upon it, a hard stool, a plain 

 table, a crucifix, and a human skull, comprise the entire in- 

 ventory. The latter, the cranium of a departed brother, 

 was covered with numerous aids to religious meditation, 

 some written, some carved on the substance of the bone. 



The lay-brother who escorted us round had not long been 

 a denizen of this gloomy monastic abode. Though still 

 very young, he was leaving behind him a tolerably enlarged 

 experience of the world. Starting as a gold-digger in Cali- 

 fornia, he became a gambler and speculator, when he quickly 

 lost all he had so laboriously wrested from tlie soil, and re- 

 turned to Lima, where, more for the sake of change and 

 comfort than for any special vocation or imperious spiritual 

 necessity, he had entered tlie order of Franciscans. His 

 temperament being much more that of a man of the world 

 than a monk, he must have felt himself sorely hamj)ered by 

 the restrictions of monastrism, were it not for the lax moral- 

 ity which is the standard of convent life in the capital of 

 Peru ; but the monk's cowl is in Lima not only the attire of 

 humility and resignation, it is likewise the cloak for all 

 manner of licentiousness and hypocrisy — the " surtouV which 

 conceals many a lapse from virtue ! 



The monastery of San Pedro was the wealthiest in Lima, 

 so long as it remained the property of the Jesuits. When, 

 in 1773, the order went forth for the suppression of the Order 

 throughout South America, it was not executed without the 

 Spanish viceroy's cherishing certain secret hopes of obtaining 



