have been
wandering from place to place, seeking a promised land which their
deity had offered them, a land where they should found a city and an
empire. The hoped-for oracle is before them, the promised symbol which
they had been bidden to seek, by which they should know the destined
spot--an eagle perched upon a _nopal_ with a serpent in its beak: and
their wanderings are at an end. Here they pitched their camp, and here
as time went on the wonderful city of Tenochtitlan arose, the centre of
the strange Aztec civilisation. Thus, fable records, was first
established the site of Mexico City; prehistoric, despotic, barbaric,
first; mediaeval, dark, romantic, later; handsome and interesting
to-day.

[Illustration: THE FINDING OF THE SITE FOR THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF
MEXICO BY THE FIRST AZTECS. (From the painting in Mexico.)]

But whence came these men? That, indeed, who shall say? Whence came the
strange civilisation of the American races--Maya, Toltec, Aztec, Inca?
To Mexico and Yucatan and Guatemala, to Quito and Peru, whence came the
peoples who built stone temples, pyramids, halls, tombs, inscribed
hieroglyphics, and wrought cunning arts, such as by their ruins,
relics, and traditions arouse our admiration even to-day. History does
not say, yet what glimmerings of history and legend there are serve to
take us farther back in time, although scarcely to a fixed
starting-point, for the thread of the tale of wanderings and
developments of these people of Mexico--a thread which seems traceable
among the ruined structures of Anahuac.

The first glimmerings of this history-legend refer to an unknown
country "in the north." About the middle of the third century of the
Christian era there proceeded thence the people known as the Mayas, who
traversed Mexico and arrived in Yucatan; and they are the reputed
originators of the singular and beautiful temples encountered there,
and the teachers of the stone-shaping art whose results arouse the
admiration of the archaeologist and traveller of to-day, in that part
of Mexico. The descendants of the Mayas are among the most intelligent
of the native tribes inhabiting the Republic, doubtless due to the
influence of the polity and work of their ancestors. Time went on.
About the middle of the sixth century A.D. another people came "out of
the north"--the famous Toltecs, and in their southward migration they
founded successive cities, ultimately remaining at Tollan, or Tula, and
to the