.
But as soon as Mr. Morgan had occasion to write about the social life of
the Aztecs, he forgot his own rules and paid as little respect to the
senses of eye-witnesses as to their judgment. This was amusingly
illustrated in his famous essay on "Montezuma's Dinner."[140] When
Bernal Diaz describes Montezuma as sitting on a low chair at a table
covered with a white cloth, Mr. Morgan declares that it could not have
been so,--there were no chairs or tables! On second thought he will
admit that there may have been a wooden block hollowed out for a stool,
but in the matter of a table he is relentless. So when Cortes, in his
despatch to the emperor, speaks of the "wine-cellar" and of the presence
of "secretaries" at dinner, Mr. Morgan observes, "Since cursive writing
was unknown among the Aztecs, the presence of these secretaries is an
amusing feature in the account. The wine-cellar also is remarkable for
two reasons: firstly, because the level of the streets and courts was
but four feet above the level of the water, which made cellars
impossible; and, secondly, because the Aztecs had no knowledge of wine.
An acid beer (_pulque_), made by fermenting the juice of the maguey, was
a common beverage of the Aztecs; but it is hardly supposable that even
this was used at dinner."[141]

[Footnote 140: _North Amer. Review_, April, 1876. The substance
of it was reproduced in his _Houses and House-Life_, chap. x.]

[Footnote 141: _Houses and House-Life_, p. 241.]

To this I would reply that the fibre of that same useful plant from
which the Aztecs made their "beer" supplied them also with paper, upon
which they were in the habit of writing, not indeed in cursive
characters, but in hieroglyphics. This kind of writing, as well as any
other, accounts for the presence of secretaries, which seems to me, by
the way, a very probable and characteristic feature in the narrative.
From the moment the mysterious strangers landed, every movement of
theirs had been recorded in hieroglyphics, and there is no reason why
notes of what they said and did should not have been taken at dinner. As
for the place where the _pulque_ was kept, it was a venial slip of the
pen to call it a "wine-cellar," even if it was not below the ground. The
language of Cortes does not imply that he visited the "cellar;" he saw a
crowd of Indians drinking the beverage, and supposing the great house he
was in to be Montezuma's, he expressed his sense