Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/182

 172 weather here. It changes not. The sun comes exquisitely up over Guadalupe. The fields beneath the hills are very like the farms of the West, all except the mountains. Culture and comfort seem to nestle in these shaded retreats. The sierras of Toluca and Guadalupe come together in a narrow and not lofty pass, which our engineering associate is easily surmounting with his gauges and his trains. Over it, and we are in the Valley of Mexico. The city lies fifteen miles off, a garden of foliage being our ceaseless escort to its gates. We move moderately through village and town, examining churches, olive-groves, plazas, riding under broad-spreading branches, slowly wading through droves of burdened mules and asses, going to town with the "truck" of the country.

The morning is delicious, and our spirits hardly less so. We could not help exclaiming, although it was not Mexican—inspired, doubtless, by the Massachusetts memories of Samuel Adams and Hancock, on the morn of the battle of Lexington, "What a glorious morning is this!" Yet they have them here all the time and all the day long; although the peculiar preciousness of the Lexington morning is not yet fully transferred to this rare clime.

Just before we reach Tacuba, a few miles from the city, a big old tree, walled in and inscribed, stands almost in the road-way. It is the tree under which Cortez collected the little remnant of his soldiers in that "noche triste" (sad night), when they had been driven from the city by the uprising natives, determined to extirpate the invaders, avenge their gods, and save their country. It was a terrible night. None more terrible in the history of battles. The Indians had rushed upon them in the dark from boat and marsh and at the open crossings of the dike, until but a handful was left to tell the tale. These gathered here a moment on retreat to the victory which another year saw accomplished.

It is a huge and gnarled cypress, with scant boughs and foliage—old then, and held in great veneration to-day by the Spaniards. How do the Mexicans regard it? If New England were to-day three-fourths British, and they were held in subjection, how would they regard the Lexington Monument? But the natives are