This morning I went with Mr. de Soto to visit the Escuela Preparatoria. It is long since I had taken a _tournée_ with him, and it is just as well to improve the shining hours. No one knows when the trump will sound. All is quiet in the house; N. is at the Embassy, and won't be back till the small, wee hours. The Escuela Preparatoria, most interesting, was formerly the Colegio de San Ildefonso, which the Jesuits completed in the middle of the eighteenth century, after the order to consolidate their various schools and seminaries into one. It covers an entire city block, and is so massive that, though it is somewhat out of plumb, as are most of the great edifices built on this soft soil, it will long stay in place. It is built of tezontle with a wine-colored staining, and has noble, broad doors and rows of mediæval-looking windows piercing the façade, and altogether is most imposing. As we passed in under the majestic old doors, wide enough to admit a couple of coaches and four abreast, students were being drilled in the beautiful colonnaded _patio_, said to be a remnant of the immediate post-Cortés period. We went first to the Sala de Actas to see the famous seventeenth-century choir-stalls, once the glory of the San Agustin church. Everything one sees in Mexico has been most provokingly ripped from where it belonged and put somewhere else. I got quite sad at the thought of the continual transfers. Something beautiful always gets lost in the changes. As I sat in one of the fine old seats, I discovered that it had bits of "local color" in the shape of a monkey and a parrot, cunningly but charmingly introduced among more austere religious symbols; and when I folded up the next seat I found a quite lovely carving, on the under side, so that it looked equally well in use or disuse. As we went up the broad stairway there was a scuffle of young feet along one of the beautiful old arched corridors, and a hurrying from one class-room to another, just as so many generations before this had scuffled and hurried, pushing on and being replaced. The foundation of the school as it now is dates from Juarez's time, and was founded by a man called Gabino Barreda, a disciple of Comte. Many of the Mexican élite who did not or would not send their sons abroad were educated here. Men like Justo Sierra and Limantour passed through it, too. When we got up on to one of the great flat roofs, by way of various interesting bits of stairs, the most glorious sight was spread out. The volcanoes had such long mantles of snow that they seemed encircled and united by the same band of white. About us lay the city with its sun-bathed domes and roofs, and Mr. de S. quoted me the old lines, "_Si a morar en Indias fueras que sea donde los volcanes vieres_."[33]