Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/269

 Rh, progressive man, who failed to see that submitting to a wrong ruler was the best way to get a right one.

Miramon is here, who was shot with Maximilian, and whom the emperor compelled to take the post of honor, the centre of the group, on that sad day. Juarez, who shot him, lies not far away, each as quiet now, as fierce and hostile then. Saragossa, the popular general who drove the French from Puebla, is here, only a year elapsing after that victory before death conquered him. Comonfort, who began the revolution against the Church, is in the centre, one of the ablest presidents the country has ever had. The brother of the present President, a powerful leader himself of the State, is here. My Old Mortality guide through this realm was the American minister, who had known many of them, as almost all had been placed here in the last few years. Most of these leaders died in their boots, died with their feet warm, as the witty Isaac O. Barnes said John Rogers did. It matters not how. Enough that they died. Finis is finis. How mocking is life in such a place! How easy, it would seem, it must be to have all ambition and life-greed of every sort

Yet we walk out from this dusty assemblage of the leaders of this nation, and in an instant are among the hot and hasting crowds of the public thoroughfare; horse rail-cars are flying by; they fly, and do not creep here, as in all the United States; the only thing that does creep there, except snakes and babies. Coaches and horsemen, and water-carriers and other carters, whose shoulders and foreheads are loaded with huge weights, every body and thing, seems as if it would never die. Both are right. Live while you live, and yet live so as to be ready for this sure summons.

If we still walk on up the San Cosme road, we shall come, after a mile or more, to where the aqueduct suddenly wheels westward, and turns its face toward Chapultepec. Opposite this turn you see the shaded gate-way of the English cemetery. The American adjoins. Each is neatly kept; but the English had a prettier