ized by all who
really know the aborigines even to this day. The closet-explorers have
pictured the Spaniards as wickedly falling upon an aboriginal
_festival_; but that is simply because of ignorance of the subject. An
Indian dance is _not_ a festival; it is generally, and was in this case,
a grim rehearsal for murder. An Indian never dances "for fun," and his
dances too often mean anything but fun for other people. In a word,
Alvarado, seeing in progress a dance which was plainly only the
superstitious prelude to a massacre, had tried to arrest the
medicine-men and other ringleaders. Had he succeeded, the trouble would
have been over for a time at least. But the Indians were too numerous
for his little force, and the chief instigators of war escaped.

When Cortez came back with his eight hundred strangely-acquired
recruits, he found the whole city with its mask thrown off, and his men
penned up in their barracks. The savages quietly let Cortez enter the
trap, and then closed it so that there was no more getting out. There
were the few hundred Spaniards cooped up in their prison, and the four
dykes which were the only approaches to it--for the City of Mexico was
an American Venice--swarming with savage foes by the countless
thousands.

The Indian makes very few excuses for failure; and the Nahuatl had
already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuatzin in place of
the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner; and when
the Spaniards brought him out upon the housetop to speak to his people
in their behalf, the infuriated multitude of Indians pelted him to death
with stones. Then, under their new war-captain, they attacked the
Spaniards so furiously that neither the strong walls nor the clumsy
falconets, and clumsier flintlocks, could withstand them; and there was
nothing for the Spaniards but to cut their way out along one of the
dykes in a last desperate struggle for life. The beginning of that six
days' retreat was one of the bitterest pages in American history. Then
was the Noche Triste (the Sad Night), still celebrated in Spanish song
and story. For that dark night many a proud home in mother Spain was
never bright again, and many a fond heart broke with the crimson bubbles
on the Lake of Tezcuco. In those few ghastly hours two thirds of the
conquerors were slain; and across more than eight hundred Spanish
corpses the frenzied savages pursued the bleeding survivors.

After a fearful retreat o