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86 so firmly as to imprint a name upon the whole region.

It is no wonder that the broad, lofty valley where they found themselves made so strong an impression upon them that they at once decided to adopt it; though the exact spot they selected for their capital has been often condemned by posterity.

They saw a vast oval of more than forty leagues' circumference, surrounded, like an amphitheatre, with a girdle of mountains. On the east rose the two proud volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, covered with perpetual snow, their sides clothed with forests. When the Aztecs came, one vast lake occupied the basin of the broad plateau, too wide to be called a valley, as well as too elevated, for the lowest part is more than six thousand feet above the level of the sea.

They saw a rocky height rising above the wet soil near the lake, out of which were doubtless even then growing huge cypress-trees, ahuehuetl, making a dense and pleasant shade; a large spring of water flowed constantly from the rock. Here they stopped and named the place Chapultepec, which means the Hill of the Grasshopper. In the picture-writings of the Aztecs it is depicted as a small hill with a huge grasshopper standing all over it.

Here the Mexicans, or Aztecs, remained for a few years, but their place was contested by the neighboring tribes, who also all of them saw the merits of the site, and valued as much as the new-comers the spring of sparkling water. The Mexicans made themselves odious by their religious practices, and a