Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/56

54

country about Queretaro dimples into a nest of sunny valleys, rounded and curved into great beauty, unlike the long plains to which we have grown accustomed; and the fields of wheat have the same delicious Irish green which we saw on entering the country, but which had given way for some time to harsher tints.

At Tula we receive our first introduction to that ancient Mexico which was so strongly impressed upon our minds before being brought face to face with the modern country. To those who have felt the witchery of Prescott's story of its conquest, it is the old world with its shadowy and poetic peoples, its vanished tribes of Toltec and Aztec, its vague, mystical rites, combined of flowers and sacrifice, of tenderness and cruelty, that appeals most strongly to sentiment before entering. But the reality of the present soon