s to making any serious study of Indian customs--save only those of the
most open and well-known sort--in this short time, I soon perceived that
the case was quite hopeless. Coming from Fray Antonio, whose benevolent
ministrations among them had won their friendship, the Indians treated
me with a great respect and showed me every kindness. But I presently
began to suspect, and this later grew to be conviction, that because my
credentials came from a Christian priest I was thrust away all the more
resolutely from knowledge of their inner life. What I then began to
learn, and what I learned more fully later, convinced me that these
Indians curiously veneered with Christian practices their native heathen
faith; manifesting a certain superstitious reverence for the Christian
rites and ceremonies, yet giving sincere worship only to their heathen
gods. It was something to have arrived at this odd discovery, but it
tended only to show me how difficult was the task that I had set myself
of prying into the secrets of the Indians' inner life.

Indeed, but for an accident, I should have returned to Morelia no wiser,
practically, than when I left it; but by that turn of chance fortune
most wonderfully favored me, and with far-reaching consequences. It was
on the last afternoon of my stay in the village of Santa Maria; and the
beginning of my good-luck was that I succeeded in walking out upon the
mountain-side alone. My walk had a decided purpose in it, for each time
that I had tried to go in this direction one or another of the Indians
had been quickly upon my heels with some civil excuse about the danger
of falling among the rocks for leading me another way. How I thus
succeeded at last in escaping from so many watchful eyes I cannot say,
but luck was with me, and I went on undisturbed. The sharply sloping
mountain-side, very wild and rugged, was strewn with great fragments of
rock which had fallen from the heights above, and which, lying there for
ages beneath the trees, had come to be moss-grown and half hidden by
bushes and fallen leaves. In the dim light that filtered through the
branches, walking in so uncertain a place was attended with a good deal
of danger; for not only was there a likelihood of falls leading to
broken legs, but broken necks also were an easy possibility by the
chance of a slip upon the mossy edge of one or another of the many
ledges, followed by a spin through the air ending suddenly upon the
jagged rocks