Madame Madero had on some sort of somber brocade with a hint of jewel sparkling in her lace jabot, and received in the big _Sala de los Embajadores_. After greeting her, however, we went out to the terrace, where such wonders were going on in the heavens that man for the moment seemed indeed dust. Great bodies of clouds in the form of a vast rose-colored throng, which Madero ought properly to have been with, were taking their way across the western sky, and purple shadows began to come up from the valley, enveloping the city as we watched what I can only call the "orb of day" disappear behind the hills. Madero strikes me as being rather a type apart, not specially Mexican, but such a type as appears in strange moments of the history of the nation to which it belongs. _November 25th._ Waiting for lunch after a most delightful morning in the park with Baroness R. and the French and Belgian ministers. I don't know if it was Marina's[25] spirit, which, according to the Indian tradition, still slips among the cypresses, or other unrecorded ghosts; but as we walked through the Calzada de los Poetas and los Filósofos, the matchless sun filtering through the branches of the old _ahuehuetes_, their bronzy hue the only sign of winter one can note here, we all succumbed to some enchantment. There is a moss-hung cypress near one of the little lakes, called the _Arbol de Moctezuma_. It, with the _Noche Triste_ tree, witnessed the fall of the Aztec Empire. There still remains an old inscription on a walled-in spring, marking the terminus of the Aztec aqueduct which brought drinking-water to Montezuma's capital from Chapultepec. The inscription, which I have sometimes dallied by, says the aqueduct was renovated in 1571 by the fourth viceroy. It faces the dustiest of tramway lines now, but one is thankful for any writing on any wall that gives a clue to the past. Near the great tree is "Montezuma's Bath," where the water still bubbles up, only now the sprucest and most modern of flower-beds encircle it. This is the special haunt of Marina, but it is said that when an Indian has seen her at the _ahuehuete_ pond he himself is seen no more. We sauntered about for a while listening to the music, and then the gentlemen proposed rowing Baroness R. and myself about in the tiny boats that are for hire. Once out from under the trees, one became modern and completely objective, and Mr. Lefaivre and I discussed European diplomatic appointments of his and my governments as we rowed about on the shallow, artificial lakes under the hottest of suns, between the made lands of the new section of the park.