High on the table-land of Mexico there was once a beautiful city which was built partly around the shores of a lake and partly on islands within the lake. It had broad streets and fine buildings, and its temples were among the most beautiful in the world, the principal one, that which was devoted to the worship of the sun, being ornamented with gold and silver and precious stones; here and there were great public squares around which splendid temples were built, and in the centre of the city in one of these great squares stood the temple of the god of war. The people who lived in this city were Aztecs, a tribe of Indians very different from those of the Atlantic coast. They worshipped the sun and the moon, and, above all, they worshipped the terrible god of war, in whose honor they burned the bodies of the enemies they captured in battle. The temples were attended by priests, who were held in great honor by the people, and in every temple there were little boys who were being trained to the priesthood. On great festival days the priests and boys and all the people would form a grand procession and march all around the city, singing and playing on instruments. The lake on which the city was built was one of the finest in the world, and the Aztecs were fond of building floating gardens on its waters; these gardens were very beautiful, with flowers of all kinds, and vegetables were also cultivated in them. The palaces of the king and nobles were built of stone and of great size, and very elegant, being ornamented sometimes with gold and silver. The Aztecs were a very powerful people, and all the nations around them were afraid of them and acknowledged the Aztec king as theirs; and everywhere from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico were great roads leading from the city down to the coasts, so that the king could send messages at any time from one part of his kingdom to another; all over the country outside the city were great fields, where cotton, corn, wheat, sugar, coffee, and other things were raised. The Aztecs did not dress in skins, as did the Indians farther north, but they wove cotton into cloth and made garments of that. They also had a written language and wrote their history down in books. The name of the king was Montezuma, and all his people loved and worshipped him as a god, and when he looked over the city and saw the turrets and spires of the palaces and temples glittering in the sunlight, and the floating gardens, filling the lakes with beauty and fragrance, and the fields rich with harvest, and the green forests, stretching away to the base of the great volcano whose snowy peak shone in the golden light of the sun, he felt that his was, indeed, a great and fair kingdom, beautiful and strong and happy.