med quite lifted
above herself and the world about her. Suddenly rising in the midst, and
pointing, with great energy of expression, to the royal eagle of
Mexico, then sweeping down from his mountain eyrie, to prey upon the
ocelot of the distant valley, she exclaimed--

'Tis he! 'Tis he! our imperial bird!
Whom the gods to our aid have sent;
I saw him in my dream, and heard,
As down from his airy flight he bent,
His victor shout, with the dying wail,
Of the coming foe, borne on the gale;
While the air was dark with the gathering throng
Of bold young eaglets, that swept along
From every cliff, in fierceness and wrath,
To gorge on their prey, in the mountain path.

When she ceased, an echo from a richly cultivated chinampa, which they
were then passing, seemed to take up and prolong the strain.

I saw it too, and I heard the scream,
In the midst of my dark and troubled dream;
'Twas a dream of despair for our doomed land,
For his wings were bound by the royal hand;
His talons were wreathed with a golden chain,
He smelt the prey, and he chafed in vain,
For they trampled him down, in their brave career,
While our monarch looked on with unmanly fear,
Till his crown and his sceptre in dust were laid low,
And proud Tenochtitlan had passed to the foe.

The last words of this solemn chant died away on the ear, just as the
royal barge rounded the little artificial promontory, which the
ingenious Karee had constructed, for the double purpose of an arbor and
look-out, at one of the angles of her chinampa. Leaning over the brow,
and supporting herself by the overhanging branch of a luxuriant myrtle,
she dropped a wreath of evergreen upon the head of Tecuichpo, and said--

Oh! child of doom,
Thy long sealed destiny is come--
One brief, dark, dreadful night,
Then on those blessed eyes
Another day shall rise,
Fair, glorious, bright,
With an unearthly endless light.
Thou shall lay down
An earthly crown,
To win a starry sceptre in the skies

At this moment, signals were heard among the distant hills, which,
answered and repeated from countless stations along the wild sierras,
and reverberated by a thousand echoes as they came, burst upon the quiet
valley, like the confused shouts of a mighty host rushing to battle. It
fell like a death-knell upon the ear of Montezuma. It announ