unificent. When he had, though
reluctantly, admitted the strangers into his capital, he prepared to
give them a royally hospitable entertainment. Partly by way of triumph
in the success of their movements hitherto, and partly by way of
amusing, and at the same time overawing their entertainers, the
Spaniards, the day after their arrival in the city, made a grand
military display in their quarters, and in the neighboring streets. They
exercised their prancing steeds in all the feats of horsemanship,
racing, leaping, and careering, in all the wild majesty of the trained
charger, under the three fold discipline of bit and spur, and cheering
shout. They rushed upon each other in the mock warfare of the
tournament, with clashing sword and glancing spear, and then,
discharging their carbines in the air, separated amid clouds of dust and
smoke, as if driven asunder by the bolts of heaven in their own hands.
The astonished natives, accustomed only to the simple weapons of
primitive warfare, looked on with undisguised admiration, not unmixed
with fear. The strange beings before them, wielding such unwonted
powers, seemed indeed to have descended upon earth from some higher
sphere, and to partake of that mysterious and fearful character, which
they had been wont to ascribe to inhabitants of the spiritual world. But
when, in closing off the day's entertainment, they brought out the
loud-mouthed artillery, and shook the very foundations of the city with
their oft-repeated thunders, the spirit of the Aztec sunk within him,
and he felt, as he retired to his dwelling, that it was for no good end,
that men of such power, having such fearful engines at their command,
had been permitted to fix their quarters in one of the fortresses of
Tenochtitlan.

"Alas!" said an ancient Cacique from the northern frontier, "we are
fallen upon evil times. Our enemies are even now in the citadel--enemies
whom we know not, whose mode of warfare we do not understand, whose
weapons defy alike our powers of imitation and resistance. Let us
abandon the field, and retire to the far north, whence our fathers came,
and rear a new empire amid the impregnable fastnesses of the mountains."

"Who talks of abandoning the field to the enemy?" interrupted
Guatimozin,--"Let no Aztec harbor so base a thought. Rather let us
stand by our altars and die, if die we must."

"Right," cried the youthful prince Axayatl, from the southern slope of
the Sierra, "why should the