Note 13 — Chapter V · EL RIO META

And then, too, was to be seen one of those charming gatherings so beautifully pictured by our own Longfellow in “The Children of the Lord’s Supper”—“Thus all the children of the Mission hasten, at the sound of the bell, to gather about the cross, which is raised on high, and to approach near the venerable man who with his silver locks towers above so many infantile heads. Oh, neither Plato nor Socrates, famous in the annals of knowledge, after long years of continuous vigils, ever knew what these poor, ingenuous children learnt from the tremulous lips of the old man at the foot of a tree-trunk in the forest.”13