Half an hour before the train started, with babe, baggage, and maid safely on board, we took a little turn about the streets. A blessed blue darkness was falling, all that glaze of heat was gone, and the note of color proved to be little low, pink houses with a great deal of green shutter and balcony. We went as far as the Plaza, drawn by the sound of some really snappy music. Indians, mantilla-covered, white-clad women, little children in various stages of undress, and a foreigner or two smoking, were sitting or walking about in the palm-planted square, and under some arcades people were eating and drinking. The domed and belfried cathedral was only a dark mass against the sky, but all the same I deeply knew that it was the tropics, the Spanish tropics. Thus has many a one debarked in a tropical port, and there is nothing at all extraordinary about it, except one's own feeling. As the train moved out of the station every man had his revolver or his rifle ready at hand, and there was a great wiping and clicking and loading going on. The colored porter and a young man reading the _Literary Digest_ gave, however, home notes of security. It wasn't one of those nights when you "lie down to pleasant dreams." As I put my head out of the window at one of the dark stops the scent of some sickeningly sweet unknown flower fell like a veil over my face. There was a hollow sound of the testing of the wheels. Torches and lanterns cut the darkness, so that I got suggestions of unfamiliar silhouettes, as a peaked hat or a flap of a cape or a bayonet caught the light. Soldiers were guarding the bridges and trestle-works, which seemed endless. As the first dim light began to come in at my window I drew up the curtain and looked out on a scene so beautiful, so unexpected, that I could have wept. The two great volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, were high, rose-colored, serene, ineffably beautiful against the sky, still a pale tint of _bleu de nuit_. I felt all the alarms and uncertainties of the darkness slip away. Elim was rolled up like a little ball at the foot of the berth, nothing of his head showing but a shock of yellow hair. We were safely on the heights. Dim, bluish fields of the unfamiliar maguey were planted in regular rows. Even as I looked out they began to take on a rich, brownish-pink tone, the little Indian huts along the way became rose-colored, everything began to glow. The two peaks, which had had no place in my consciousness since I wrestled with their names at school, were masses of flame-color against a sky of palest, whitest blue. At the little stations an occasional red-blanketed, peaked-hatted Indian appeared. It was the Mexico of dreams. II First visit to the Embassy--Adjusting oneself to a height of eight thousand feet in the tropics--Calle Humboldt--Mexican servants--Diplomatic dinners--Progress of Maderista forces. _May 7, 1911._