o-lucky sort
of life continued until the day fixed for the sacrifice. Then joy gave
way to sadness, pain, death! Stripped of his costly raiment, he was
taken by a procession of priests to a royal barge, thence across a
lake to a temple about a league from the city, where, as he mounted
the weary steps of the huge edifice, he flung aside the garlands of
flowers and broke the musical instruments which had been a joy to him
in his past days. At the summit of the temple, in full view of the
assembled multitude below, he was barbarously put to death by a
priest, in order to propitiate the cruel god to whom the temple
was dedicated. And Master M. was taught that the moral of all this
savagery was, that human joys are transitory, and the partition
between sorrow and happiness is a very thin one, or words to that
effect.

Master M. learned that there were many other inferior gods, each of
which had festivals, sacrifices, etc., proportioned to his rank and
power; that nearly every hour of the day was dedicated to some god or
other; but I cannot tell you all he learned of these strange deities.

[Illustration: A PEACE-OFFERING IN THE YEAR ONE RABBIT.]

He studied the history of the temples, and learned why they were four
or five stories high with the stairs on the outside, and why he had to
go entirely round the temple to find the next flight of stairs as he
went up or down; and why each story was smaller than the next lower,
and learned that some of these buildings were over one hundred feet
square and as many feet high, and had towers forty or fifty feet high
on their summits; and all about the everlasting fire which burned on
the tops of these temples, and that there were so many of these that
the whole country for miles around was always brilliantly illuminated.

I must pass over a long period in the life of Master M. with the mere
remark that he graduated in both his military and religious classes
with the highest honors, and acquitted himself to the most perfect
satisfaction of both the alfalquis, or priests, and the teachcauhs,
which is nearly the same as our word teachers.

Master M. had, for a long time, cherished a hope that some day he
might press the throne as king of Mexico. So, like the Yorkshire lad
who begged salt of a stranger eating eggs near him, so as to have
the salt ready in case any one _should_ ask him to accept an egg, he
prepared himself fully for the possible emergency, and became not only
a milit