I enclose letter of the 17th from Aunt L., who has just been to Juchitan, saying that the town looked very battered. The _jefe_ not yet back. Among domestic items she says a large packet of cranberries has arrived; after thirty years of Mexico, it is not quite so commonplace as it sounds, but rather as if a denizen of a Vermont village had received a crate of mangoes. _December 22d, Friday._ N. and I went to call on Monsignore this morning. He is stopping at the Hotel Iturbide. He was out, but I took a look about the imposing _patio_, three-storied, colonnaded, and pierced with large, beautifully carved doorways and windows. It was started on a magnificent scale for the Emperor Iturbide, who paid the usual Mexican penalty for power at the hands of the usual Mexican patriots before it was finished. 'Tis known that as a hotel it leaves to be desired; the dust of revolutions and ages covers the spacious corridors. There are strange silences when you call for hot water, or any kind of water, for that matter. And you eat somewhere else. Yesterday another reception at Chapultepec. Madame Madero is much changed from the simple-appearing woman of the Von Hintze dinner. I see she naturally inclines to a somber richness of dress--dark velvets, dull brocades--which I think fit her passionate, ambitious, resolute temperament, though sometimes overpowering to her small physique. Yesterday she had on a deep-blue brocaded velvet, with some sort of heavy, lusterless fringe, and there was a decided though still discreet gleam of jewels. That air of coming from the provinces, but nice provinces, is somewhat gone. The President slipped in quietly, later, without the playing of the national hymn. There was quite a musical program. Madame Esmeralda de Grossmann played beautifully on the harp. It appears she has an international reputation. The daughter of ----, attired in a very tight-skirted, lemon-colored satin dress, trimmed with swan's-down, one of her pupils, started to play, broke down, was further discomfited and finally routed by irate paternal glances. Angela Madero sings charmingly with natural style, and gave Massenet's "Elégie" delightfully. One is continually interested in the composition of the presidential receptions, which means so much more than appears. Madero's father and mother were there, with various daughters and sons and sons' wives.