Bishop's Palace and told the illustrious Señor Don Fray Juan Zumarraga, first Bishop of Mexico, what he had seen and heard.
The Bishop listened, but doubted. In sore trouble Juan Diego went back to the hill, and at its foot the Virgin again appeared to him, and repeated, in substance, her first message, adding, that the Holy Mother Church would never be blessed in Mexico, until the church was erected in her honor at the point she had indicated. A great, flowing well or spring of mineral water, dark and turbid, but excellent for scrofula and other diseases of the body and the soul, burst out from the rock where she stood this time, and it is flowing yet; I drank some of the water just three hundred and thirty-eight years, to a day, thereafter, and it did not make me seriously sick. He went back to the Bishop, and still the worthy prelate doubted.
A third time she appeared to him, and told him to carry, as a proof of his story, to the Bishop, a bunch of full-blown roses, such as do not bloom, even in Mexico, in midwinter. He wrapped them in his blanket and hurried to the Bishop. When the latter unrolled the bundle, and saw the roses, his unbelief was disturbed; but when the roses fell apart and disclosed a beautiful picture of the Holy Virgin, miraculously painted on the coarse cloth of the country, the dark face glowing with sacred light, he knew that the message was indeed of Heaven, and falling on his knees, he kissed the hem of her garment, and declared that the church should be erected as ordered.
When the Spaniards, under Cortez, escaped from Mexico on the Noche Triste, one of the soldiers dropped a rag-doll, or image, and on their return in triumph,
