could bury them. Where they
perished, there they lay, till at length their bodies bred a plague,
a black and horrible fever that swept off thousands more, who in turn
became the root of pestilence. For one who was killed by the Spaniards
and their allies, two were swept off by hunger and plague. Think then
what was the number of dead when not less than seventy thousand perished
beneath the sword and by fire alone. Indeed, it is said that forty
thousand died in this manner in a single day, the day before the last of
the siege.

One night I came back to the lodging where Otomie dwelt with her royal
sister Tecuichpo, the wife of Guatemoc, for now all the palaces had been
burnt down. I was starving, for I had scarcely tasted food for forty
hours, but all that my wife could set before me were three little meal
cakes, or tortillas, mixed with bark. She kissed me and bade me eat
them, but I discovered that she herself had touched no food that day, so
I would not till she shared them. Then I noted that she could scarcely
swallow the bitter morsels, and also that she strove to hide tears which
ran down her face.

'What is it, wife?' I asked.

Then Otomie broke out into a great and bitter crying and said:

'This, my beloved: for two days the milk has been dry in my
breast--hunger has dried it--and our babe is dead! Look, he lies dead!'
and she drew aside a cloth and showed me the tiny body.

'Hush,' I said, 'he is spared much. Can we then desire that a child
should live to see such days as we have seen, and after all, to die at
last?'

'He was our son, our first-born,' she cried again. 'Oh! why must we
suffer thus?'

'We must suffer, Otomie, because we are born to it. Just so much
happiness is given to us as shall save us from madness and no more. Ask
me not why, for I cannot answer you! There is no answer in my faith or
in any other.'

And then, looking on that dead babe, I wept also. Every hour in those
terrible months it was my lot to see a thousand sights more awful, and
yet this sight of a dead infant moved me the most of all of them. The
child was mine, my firstborn, its mother wept beside me, and its stiff
and tiny fingers seemed to drag at my heart strings. Seek not the cause,
for the Almighty Who gave the heart its infinite power of pain alone can
answer, and to our ears He is dumb.

Then I took a mattock and dug a hole outside the house till I came to
water, which in Tenoctitlan is found at a depth of two