"I didn't know," she said, a little husk ily. No one seemed to know just then -when I heard of the fire-who it was that brought him down the ladder. And I misunderstood you." A shimmer came into the dark of her eyes. "I thought that you were with those who had the trouble after the dinner."

"My God!" cried Hastings, starting up. Her hand trembled over his and he sat down. "Do you mean to tell me that you thought I had disgraced myself?that I had been drunk? Do you mean-"

"Hush!" she commanded, herself very white and still. "No one said so, and I should have learned better if I had not kept away from every one who might have told me. I thought that this was why you had concealed from me the fact that you had been at the dinner."

Hastings arose again, and Mr. Erastus

Cardley came sauntering up the corridor. "I will fetch my uncle-you ought to know—”

"No, no!" She caught his sleeve. "I beg of you. Do you think I could care for that?"

A look passed between them. One would have needed his eyes to read the appeal in hers, and hers to read the reply in his.

Hastings pointed to the short-hand book. "How shall that letter end? Write the salutation."

She hesitated a moment. Then she wrote two small words after the lines already there,

Hastings saw them.

Cardley was only three yards away. "Quick!" whispered Hastings. "What do they say?"

The blood was in her face again. "Yours forever."

"Uncle 'Rastus," said Hastings, cheerily, "I think you ought to become better acquainted with Miss Tenney. You see, I have rather kept the matter a secret from you, but we are engaged to be married.'

O

I.

NCE again the Study windows are open upon the tropics. This time from the Hotel Alarcon, in Cuernavaca, in the republic of Mexico. This changing the point of view is merely a question of latitude. At two o'clock in the morning the Southern Cross, the least brilliant in the group of constellations that are passing in review at that hour, is not high above the horizon, while the North Star is so low as to lose its importance in our Northern-trained eyes. Even those persons who allow themselves a good deal of latitude at home are sensible of some enlargement of their point of view in the change in their geographical position. If they come south of the Tropic of Cancer, they are likely to lose some of their prejudices, if they do not take up a new line of conduct. I cannot suppose that the character is changed by passing an imaginary line; so it must be that the change

of latitude temporarily affects conduct. How, otherwise, does it happen that a man who in New England would not think of staying away from the morning service, or of dodging the contribution-box, no sooner crosses the Tropic of Cancer than his conscience permits him to take in a bull-fight and also a cock-fight on Sunday? Is not the Southern Cross as restraining as the Northern Cross? It would seem not. Would the same effect be produced upon a man if he travelled north instead of south? The experiment might easily be tried, and it could be settled whether a man's virtue is geographical or personal. If he found that on going north his goodness increased and his moral stamina hardened, and that as he moved south his conscience apologized for his inclinations, he could establish a definite scale of virtue, marked by degrees of north and south latitude. And in order to know what sort of a man he was at

any given moment, he would only need to consult the terrestrial map. If the traveller thinks this a fanciful theory, then he must invent another to account for his aberrations.

Is it necessary to remind the reader that he saw Cuernavaca, looking from these same Study windows, last year? It is the same quaint city of towers and domes, palaces and thatched hovels, charming lanes lined with tropical fruits and foliage, a city with not a level acre in it, sloping between deep barrancas down toward the hot country, and with a winter sun hot enough for a sanitarium in any month, although it is 5000 feet above sealevel; a sort of limitless valley, encircled by mountains, growing sugar-cane, and corn, and coffee, and bananas, and palms, and unbelievable varieties of tropical fruits; and on the eastern horizon, beyond artistically converging ranges of hills and masses of fantastic rocks that are red in the sunset, like the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, rise the massive snow heights of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, each about 17,500 feet in altitude. There they are, remote, majestic, mysterious, sometimes above the clouds, sometimes draped in rosy vapor, sometimes withdrawn in cold seclusion, their Northern virtue always dominating these complaisant regions, ethereally white against an azure sky, dark when the sun comes up on their right, and rosy with an ineffable loveliness when the western mountains are aflame at sunset. One gets in time to have a very friendly feeling for this pagan Woman in White and her constant male companion.

Carefully considering our latitude, we went one Sunday morning to hear mass in the ancient church of Juitepec, an Indian village in the sugar and rice region, some seven or eight miles from the city, down and up barrancas, and through green fields and tropical lanes, over a road fit only for sure-footed horses-a village of cane huts and thatched roofs, African in appearance. On the way is the famous hacienda of Cortez, probably the oldest sugar-hacienda on this continent, an enormous structure, with arches and arcades and columns and walls six or eight feet thick, where the most antiquated processes of sugar-making are still in use. hacienda was given by Cortez to the Hospital of Jesus in the city of Mexico, and it yields a revenue of forty to fifty thou

VOL. XCVII.-No. 577.-21

This

sand dollars a year to that noble charity. The planting of the cane is renewed here every three years, and the grinding season, working night and day, only lasts about six months in the year, and not every day in the year, as in a mill in Cuautla, which is lower down in the hot country. It was a feast-day at Juitepec, and near the old Spanish church were booths for the fair, for eating, drinking, gambling, merrymaking, and singing, and playing on the mandolin. Among other attractions was a phonograph! As is common with all Spanish churches in villages, this has a noble church-yard, shaded by gigantic trees of ash and cy-. press. (Why the American architects do not come down here and learn how to make picturesque façades and towers that please by their simple beauty I do not know.) Within, the church, like most of its kind, is gaudily decorated, an uninteresting parallelogram, but for the service it was literally ablaze with candles, and the pavement was crowded with kneeling worshippers, each holding a lighted taper, a most democratic assembly of peons and working - people, the men in clean white jackets and trousers, and the women in skirts and rebozos of various colors, and the kneeling crowds picked out here and there with a brilliant red blanket. In the church-yard were extensive preparations for fireworks in the evening, and the exuberance of the day manifested itself in a constant popping of torpedoes and fire-crackers, which gave a certain animation to the service. There was a very good organ, and in the loft a fine military band played the militant airs of a conquering Church. The rapt devotion of the congregation was undoubted-of the worshippers who would repair directly to the booths and the cockfights. The blaze of lights, the clouds of incense, the jubilant music, the unconscious air of devotion, would alone have been impressive, but important moments in the mass were punctuated by the roar of a cannon that reverberated in the walls, and the tumult was so invigorating that the figure of a soldier with a drawn sword and a flowing red mantle, mounted on a dwarf wooden horse-it might be Cortez himself-apparently riding from the side wall towards the altar, seemed to signify conquest and glory. It was all so different from going to a decorous service in a New England meeting-house, to

criticise the choir and the sermon. I do not say that this religion is any better than ours, but there is more of it.

Near the village was a construction camp of Colonel Hampson's Mexico and Pacific Railway, advancing towards the fine harbor of Acapulco, the best and only good harbor between Callao and San Diego. We lunched at the camp. The day before, the engineers, in seeking materials for the track, had broken into a tumulus near at hand for stone and gravel. After a little excavation they struck a rubble wall, and breaking through it, found a walled Indian tomb, in shape of a pit, from which they took a few antique, perhaps prehistoric, bones, and many images in stone and terra-cotta, a stone hatchet, and bits of obsidian knives. The whole region is full of remains of this sort, as it is of ruins of ancient temples and cities lost in antiquity. When the villagers learned of the opening of this tomb, they came down in force, with the local judge at their head, and forbade further excavation. They have an idea that there is treasure in the mound, and propose to dig it out themselves when the camp moves on. Railroad-building in this region is not without its perils. The peasants are bitterly hostile to it. The day after we were there the engineer in charge had been obliged to fill up an irrigating ditch on the line. When he rode out in the morning to inspect, he was attacked by some thirty men armed with machetes, led by the village judge; his horse was wounded, and he was dragged off and lodged in the village jail, where he remained the better part of the day, until an Indian runner could take a message to Cuernavaca and get an order from the Governor for his release. It was not a comfortable place to stay in, for he was the thirteenth man in an adobe jail about twelve feet square, filthy enough, and with little more than standing-room. The prisoners are not fed by the authorities, and depend on friends to keep them from starving. Considering the sort of jails common in Mexico, it is remarkable how popular they are. The great Belem, in the city of Mexico, is said to have about five thousand occupants, of whom less than a third

are women.

In the excursion to Juitepec the reader missed, as I did, one great attraction. This was the religious dance of the Ind

ians. This ceremony had been going on for two days, and it was expected to continue on Sunday, but the chiefs ordered them back home on Saturday night. They were the Apaches and the Chalmas, who come from a long distance in the mountains, and every year make their pilgrimage to dance in front of the old church of Juitepec. This mixture of pagan rites with Christianity is made with great solemnity and decorum. There were only about two hundred and fifty Indians, of whom only some thirty, men and women, performed, in the sight of thousands of spectators. As perfectly as tradition recalls them, they reproduce the ancient Aztec sacred dance. costumes are the gay robes and headdresses of feathers, and they dance in slow measure to the beat of the tomtom. It is said to be very effective, and the performance of their sacred rites under the shadow of the church is regarded as a certain tribute to the religion that now prevails here.

Their

Another charm of this region that should be mentioned is the abundance everywhere of clear running water. This bursts out in copious springs from sources in the great volcanoes, and by means of extensive aqueducts and irrigating ditches is conducted to the haciendas and the cane and rice fields, making the land to bloom with verdure, and pleasing the ear with the sound of running streams. It percolates all through Cuernavaca, all the sidewalks of stone being laid over conduits of water.

II.

If the reader is an archæologist or an artist he may willingly be long detained in this enchanted region by the remains of a civilization the antiquity of which so far baffles investigation. On the height of the mountains near Tepoztlan, a five hour's ride east of Cuernavaca, is the ruin of a small temple-a sort of cliff-dweller refuge-which is reached through a difficult ravine, the climber being assisted by ladders of vines. I left it for future reference. On the west side of the barranca which separates Cuernavaca from the village of San Antonio, where the Indian makers of pottery live, is a sculptured granite bowlder, standing on the slope in a thicket, a neglected work of art, neglected and without even a path leading to it. On the top of this bowlder, and accommodating itself to its shape,

is sculptured a lizard, eight feet and five inches in length from the dragonlike mouth to the tip of the curving tail. The vivid lifelikeness of this animal, gripping the rock with his paws and hind feet, is startling. Although weatherworn for ages, it is, in its knowledge of anatomy and of the subject, and in broad, robust execution, worthy to be ranked with the work of the French sculptor Barye. This is no studio-work from a model. The artist knew and felt his lizard, and with a sure touch made him live on this granite.

The work of the archæologist in this region is made difficult by the lack of any historic traditions to guide him; the land has been long occupied by apparently different races developing various stages of civilization; the land has been continuously occupied, and one period has shaded into another so that it is impossible to assign any given remains to any period, and impossible also because as yet no key has been found for reading the inscriptions or interpreting the symbolic sculptures. We believe that the Aztecs and the six other tribes in possession of the Valley of Mexico on the arrival of Cortez in 1520 had been there only a couple of centuries, and that they were not the builders of the pyramids existing in the valley and elsewhere. If they made the Calendar Stone now in the museum in the city, which was found near the cathedral, on the site of the Aztec temple of Montezuma, we cannot connect that with the other sculptures and images gathered from various places in southern tropical Mexico. Before we have any historic traces of the Aztecs, there was a well-advanced civilization in all this region south of Mexico to Guatemala, evidenced by the ruins of temples, palaces, and cities. A hundred miles or less southwest of Cuernavaca have been traced and partially examined remains of habitations covering some sixty miles square. This inay have been one vast city, larger than New York in area, or it may have been a cluster of towns and cities connected by walls and fortifications. The buried remains of cut stone indicate work in architecture far beyond the barbaric period, and induce belief in a civilization that was practically extinct before the advent of the Spaniards. But the existing remains of these departed nations in southern Mexico are not by any means all of

one type, though the types have more or less merged into each other. The mound was common here, as it was in Louisiana and Ohio. It was also usual to build a temple on top of an artificial mound, as at Palenque and elsewhere in Chiapas. But sometimes the temples or palaces are built on cliffs or on hills that were easily fortified, and again, as at Mitla, on the plain.

Last year I visited the remains of the four well-preserved temples at Mitla, in the state of Oaxaca. I refer to them now to say that they bear little resemblance to the ruins of the temple I saw this year at Xochicalco, which is some sixteen miles south of Cuernavaca-at least it is a good four hours' ride over a rough bridle-path and up and down steep barrancas. The ride, however, is as interesting as it is exciting. Nature does things here on a vast scale. The land is cut up by gullies and deep ravines, strewn with round hills, from the summits of which the horseman sees mountains rising beyond mountains, now and then a lake, and both wide and narrow valleys green with the varying shades of the sugar-cane and with the tropical trees, and every where abundant streams of clear water. At this season the hills are dry, and take on wonderful russet and brown colors, almost opalescent. I saw one sweeping hill-side of deep russet covered with trees, which at a distance looked like an apple-orchard. The trees were leafless as yet, but the bark from root to tips of boughs was a dull red. It also peeled in, strips like our birch bark. I do not give the name of the tree, because I could not understand the Mexican name; it resembles a manzanita. As the morning sun shone through this orchard all the fluttering strips of bark sparkled as bright as rubies, and we had an effect of color that is unequalled in my experience. The country is animated, I should say, by the presence of song - birds and birds of brilliant color. There is now and then a hawk sailing in the azure, where the graceful buzzard is always circling; there are myriads of blackbirds, crows of large size, and here and there birds of scarlet, of black and scarlet, of blue, and of yellow plumage. These latter are only occasional.

On our morning way we passed only one Indian village, on a high ridge above a deep barranca, a village of cane huts and high thatched roofs, like pictures of central Africa, with its rude church, in