Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/285

 Rh do not wonder, that Maximilian, lavished such sums upon the spot which he fondly anticipated was to be the home of himself and his descendants, and the seat of power of a mighty empire, which he imagined he had founded on the ruins of liberty in America. The last official document signed by this infatuated dreamer, when he was surrounded at Queretaro, and captivity and a felon's death stared him in the face, was an order for the importation of two thousand German nightingales with which to stock the groves of Chapultepec.

The obscene statuary which he placed in the gardens and corridors of Chapultepec, though generally mutilated in no delicate manner, still stands there, and the walls are adorned with voluptuous representations of the Seasons, etc., after the style of an ancient Pompeian Villa, which he designed to imitate; but there are no pictures left in the palace, and most of the furniture, and all the costly plate and dinner-service was removed when General Diaz—who had his head-quarters here—reduced the city to a surrender and the last act in the ghastly farce was over.

We saw the bath-room and chambers occupied by the royal couple, their beds and parlor furniture, or a portion of it, and a few other relics and souvenirs, but cared more for the attractions with which nature and art, combined, have invested the view from the verandah. The magnificent colonnade, which was being erected by Maximilian's orders along the whole front of the palace, next to Tacubuya, is still unfinished, and the stones lie just where they were left when the news came that Queretaro had fallen; and knowing that the end had come,