The Vice-President, young, tall, dark-skinned, black-eyed, black-mustached, regular of features, without, however, any perceptible color of personality, was accompanied by his wife and a contingent of satellites, moving wherever he moved with the regularity of the heavenly bodies--no intention of revolving alone in the unknown social orbit. The _Corps Diplomatique_ was out in force, and the Protocole, Carmona, Nervo, Pulido, etc., also Don Felix Romero, chief of the Supreme Court, and his wife, Judge and Mrs. Sepulveda of California, naturalized Americans, with a handsome daughter. But beyond these I did not see any of what might be called "pillars of society," or, indeed, anything remotely resembling props to uphold the new order. We presented Monsignor Vay de Vaya, who struck the international note in the pink-and-white-and-gold _salon des ambassadeurs_, whose spaces were known to those princes of his monarchy, Maximilian and Carlota. _December 23d, evening._ The Christmas tide is flowing full about the Alameda, where the Indians have again stocked their _puestos_ with reminders of the season. We have just come from a little _tournée_ between the rows of booths hung with lanterns of every size and color, the odor of _la race cuivrée_ mingling with the more familiar scent of freshly cut pine-trees. Tiny plaster and terra-cotta groups of the "Three Kings" abound--a white man, a negro, a Mongolian in various fanciful garbings--shone on by the largest of stars, and all sorts of "Holy Families," especially the "Flight into Egypt," where the burro seems to have come into his own. On all sides were great piles of peanuts, fruits known and unknown, highly colored sweets, heaps upon heaps of fragile potteries, and charming, pliable baskets, brought to the city from mountain fastnesses or distant plains by Indian families afoot. Soft, shining-bodied children were sleeping in the most fortuitous of positions, uncovered, in the chill night air. I could but think of blue-eyed, white-skinned children in warm nurseries. They lay beside grotesque _naguales_--figures with hideous human faces on woolly four-footed bodies, whose _raison d'être_ is to frighten. The population inclines to the grotesque, anyway, on the slightest provocation, and side by side with the _naguales_ are other hideous clown-like figures--_piñatas_--which are the high-lights of certain time-hallowed post-Christmas festivities. They are of all sizes and prices--from little paper dolls hanging from bamboo rods that will decorate adobe huts to the more expensive figures, bulky about the waist, whose tinsel and tissue-paper garments conceal a great earthenware jar filled with toys and candies. The _cohetes_ are sounding as I write--a sort of fire-cracker--announcing the advent of the Child to this Indian world.