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 the Americans very well. He had spent some time in captivity among them, having been taken prisoner at San Jacinto, and had learned to know them as they are. They mean well, he said, and are enterprising and appreciative of the arts of life; and you can depend upon what they say. Most of his countrymen, he said, very sensibly, did not understand this, but were distrustful and jealous. Their idea of American character, in fact, is largely derived from foreign books in which it is conventionalized and caricatured in an unfriendly way. There is evidence of it on every hand. The American, as touched upon in the newspapers and current literature, is the "Yankee" of Dickens and followers of less intelligence on the Continent. He is a sordid person, exclusively wrapped up in "dollars," and can know but little of the chivalrous nature of those who thus superciliously disapprove of him.

There is nothing very warlike about Chapultepec at present. A glimpse is got, as you approach, of a light, oblong, colonnaded edifice, with a lookout on the top, which is now a part of the government observatory. The hill is not precipitously high, though of a good elevation. There is a monument at its foot to the memory of the pupils of the military school who fell in its defence in 1847, and in the grounds moss-grown cypresses and a tank of clear water. I found the main part of the building, when an upper terrace was reached, in a state of ruin. The light iron columns of an arcade had been coquettishly painted and gilded, and its walls decorated in the Pompeian style, under Maximilian, but all had been wrecked in the revolutions. There was a little garden, in which a small guide picked me some flowers. He answered, "Quien sabe?" [Who knows?] in a childish lisp, to most inquiries, just as his father, the custodian, if he had been there, would