158 MEXICO. 
A small vvooden cross, near a tangled thicket, adjoining a ruined church, 
marks the fatal spot, and bears an inscription imploring your prayers for 
the murdered pair. 
In a nook at the northwest corner of the city of Mexico, as you pass 
out of the gate of St. Cosme, is the English Burying-ground, bowered 
among trees and flowers toward the town, and open, with a sweet lowland 
prospect, toward the setting sun ; and here were deposited, side by side, 
the unfortunate victims. Few spectacles have ever been more sorrowful, 
than the group of " strangers in a strange land," who gathered around 
the grave of their murdered friends on the melancholy evening of their 
interment. 
At the distance of a few feet from them, repose the remains of Wil- 
liam McClure, a countryman, dear to American science. The Acad- 
emy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, of which he was so long the 
President and benefactor, erected a small marble monument over his 
grave, and surrounded it with an iron rail. A short time before I left 
Mexico, the rail was torn down, the monument upset, and, on the same 
night, the newly-buried body of a Scotchman was disinterred, stripped of 
its clothes, and thrown over the wall of the cemetery ! 
ST. AUGUSTIN— ST. ANGEL— EL DESIERTO. 
St. Augustin is another village of which I have already spoken ; and 
St. Angel is one of nearly the same character, except that the views from 
its azoteas over the valley and city, are perhaps more beautiful. 
The pleasantest ride, however, about the vale or its adjoining moun- 
tains, is to the ruins known as " El Desierto," or the Desert ; the remains 
of an abandoned Carmelite convent, built among the rocky recesses of the 
western Sierra. 
It is a fashionable ride of about seven leagues, and parties of gentle- 
men, and even ladies, make it a resort for agreeable pic-nics. The edi- 
fices were built between two hills, and are now going rapidly to decay, 
yet there are some remains of cells which still retain their coverings, 
while the main buildings are unroofed and almost choked with luxuriant 
trees and flowering shrubbery. 
Thomas Gage, a converted mojik, who visited Mexico about the end of 
the first century after the conquest, gave an account of this convent in 
1677, when it was in its days of glory. 
