Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/123

Rh, whatever were the divinations of the priests; for, being on the water, it was not easily assailable. They took the eagle with the serpent and cactus for their national symbol, and the conquerors accepted that national coat of arms from their subjects. Some irreverent Yankees assert that a more appropriate symbol would be a Greaser sitting on a jackass drinking pulqui. But so they could retort that our symbol could better be a whisky-jug and a turkey than our like chosen eagle.

The city thus laid out has since had the water dry up from beneath it sufficiently to give it solid streets. The water of the lake was in it, in canals, and close to it, in its own shallow waves, when Cortez captured it. To-day it is two or three miles from its outer most eastern gate. While the streets are straight, but few are noticeable, and only two or three are really attractive. The chief thoroughfare from the dépôt to the plaza and its two nearest parallel streets are the main avenues of the city.

The San Cosme Avenue starts out from the station very broad, but it narrows as it passes the Alameda, and enters the thick of the town, where it terminates at the eastern end of the Grand Plaza. This is the very street over which Cortez made his famous escape from the infuriated town, rendered doubly mad by the interference of his lieutenant, Alvarado, in his absence, with the bloody rites of human sacrifice. The town woke up before they were well started, roused by a sentinel, chased them along this dike, which is all this then was, crossed with rude and frequent ditches, and inclosed on either side with water. The multitudes dragged them off the narrow causeways, caught them as they tried to clear the chasms, their pontoon train being pressed into the mud of the first broad ditch, so that it could not be taken up. The band of adventurers lost their arms, ammunition, horses, precious metals, and gems, and all but a score of their men were left along the ravine, a prey to the destroyer. They assembled a few miles up, under the cypress tree still standing, and a few days later, with their good swords and strong hearts cut their way through two hundred thousand men, swinging down upon them from the Sierra of Gaudalupe, in the