dada Prison.--The unfortunate Prisoner.--The Causes
of that Night of Terror.--The Sacking of the City.--The Parian.--The
Causes of the Ruin of the Parian.--Change in the Standard of
Color.--The Ashes of Cortez.

MUSEUM.--BOTANIC GARDEN.--MARKET.

The National Museum has its weekly exhibitions, and attracts as great a
crowd of the common people as does the Academy of Arts. Here as perfect
equality reigns as in the San Carlos or in the Cathedral. The first
object of interest is the large collection of stone idols which have
been dug up from time to time in and about the Grand Plaza. There are
dog-faced idols, and apish gods, and unearthly things, besides the
sacrificial stone, and a rude attempt to represent a goddess. Whether
or no this was a sort of Aztec Lady of Remedies I did not learn. The
Aztecs might easily have produced these works without exhibiting much
civilization; but I have heard it surmised that they must have been
among the plunder of more civilized tribes.

On the two opposite sides of the first hall we entered, I saw spread
out the pictorial chronology of two dynasties that had passed away--the
vice-regal line of potentates standing over against the royal line of
Aztec emperors. The portraits of the vice-kings, from Cortez down to
the last of his successors, stretch entirely across one side of the
hall, and about the same number of Indian caciques are daubed upon a
piece of papyrus that is fastened upon the opposite wall. It requires
the greatest possible stretch of liberality for one accustomed to
Indian efforts of this kind to dignify such intolerable daubs with the
name of paintings. And yet this is the picture-writing of the Aztecs,
with which the world has been so edified for centuries. If there is or
ever was an Iroquois Indian that should undertake to stain so
miserably, I verily believe he would be expelled from his tribe. To
make it manifest that this was intended for a chronological record of
the imperial line, black lines were daubed from one of these effigies
to another. From a printed label in Spanish affixed to this wonderful
relic, I learned that it was intended to represent the wanderings of
the Aztecs from California.

It is usual for North American Indians to store up traditions of the
extensive wanderings of their ancestors, and if one is asked to
represent the tradition on bark, he would produce very much such an
affair as this, though with a somewhat greater resemblance to the