Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/236

204 by every means in his power, while he encouraged the development of all the resources of the country, especially the mines, of which some important discoveries were made in his time.

The building of the cathedral at Puebla was pushed with great activity under this viceroy, although the building was not finished until the middle of the next century.

Puebla de los Angeles, second in importance in all Mexico to Guadalajara only, receives its name from the tradition that before the light of Christianity was shed on New Spain, the heathen used to see visions of angels marshalled in mighty hosts in the heavens above the spot where the city stands. It is in the Province of Tlaxcalla, where Cortés found his first friends and stanch allies, on the highway between the coast and the capital.

Of the founding of the city a local chronicler writes that the illustrious Fray Julian Garces, the first bishop who came to Tlaxcalla, fully shared the project for establishing a town somewhere in these parts that might be a resting-place in the long and weary walk from the coast to the city of Mexico; yet he was uncertain in his mind as to where the town had best be, until one night in a vision he beheld a most lovely vega, a plain, bounded by the slope of the great volcanoes on the west, broken by two little hills, and dotted by many springs, and cut by two rivers which gave abundant water, and made all things fresh and green. And as he gazed in pleased amazement, the dream revealed two angels, who with line and rod were measuring boundaries