Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/179

Rh permanency of nearly every thing in it. Bernal Diaz himself was not less affected than Mrs. Blake by the wondrous beauty of the landscape; while others, of a later date, have written about the manufactures and customs of the country in phraseology which we, who were there only yesterday, as it seems, would scarcely alter. Don Antonio de Solis, for instance, "secretary and historiographer to his Catholic Majesty," tells us that he saw cotton cloths "well wove, and so fine that they could not be known from silk but by feeling." "A quantity of plumes," he continues, "and other curiosities made of feathers, and whose beauty and natural variety of colors (found on rare birds that country produces) so placed and mixed with wonderful art, distributing the several colors, and shadowing the light with the dark so exactly, that, without making use of artificial colors or of the pencil, they could draw pictures, and would undertake to imitate nature." The same work contains an excellent woodcut of Mexican women making bread. The process, the utensils, the implements, are precisely the same as those which Mrs. Blake describes as now in use.

Writers in the present century only repeat the