With a change of costume, change of hours of visits and dinner, she pictures to my imagination Madame de Sévigné writing to Madame de Grignan, Madame de la Fayette talking to La Rochefoucauld--all that flowering of an elegance of mind with its roots of culture, not alone in books, but in the heart. Her mind is receptive, yet so giving, her conversations so sparkling, with its _fond_ of philosophies and politics, its richness of _nuance_, its elastic impersonality, yet French, though dipped in a thousand dyes and run in a thousand molds. Her three boys go into the army, and of Marguerite she says: "_Gretl est vraiment mon ange gardien, ne me quittant jamais, et me soignant, toujours gaie, toujours dévouée._" "_Châlons étant à deux heures de Paris, les amis viennent facilement._" She gave me news of the Paul Festetics, who had recently been there--"_Fanny toujours l'esprit aussi alerte et aussi charmant_"; of the De B.'s, to whom my heart goes out, "_Très-courageux, mais vous pensez si c'est dur de continuer une route ainsi ravagée_"; and for me "_Nos chemins se Croiseront-ils jamais à nouveau?_ It does not look like it, _hélas_." _July 21st._ This evening, from the hill of Tepeyac, I watched the sun go down into a world of purple shadows rising from the mysterious plain of Anahuac. The valley had been stretched out before us like a chart, the hills in light and shadow. We could name each glistening road leading from the great city, and yet, little by little, one succumbed to the mysteriousness of it all--until the whole spectacle became an inner rather than an outer thing. No rain except for some silver clouds with strange, fugitive effects, just before sunset, that sifted a diamond-like rain for a few minutes over the face of the plain. No wind, but something like a great, cool breathing was about us. We passed by the richly tiled _Capilla del Pocito_ (Chapel of the Well), of which he who drinks returns, and went up the romantic old stone stairway leading to another chapel. Half-way up are the celebrated "stone sails of Guadalupe," their origin dateless, the hands that put them up unrecorded. They can be seen for miles about, and near by they have a _belle patine_, and mosses and bits of cactus and a flower or two grow from them. They commemorate the escape from sea perils of Mexican mariners who had prayed the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring them safely into port. When this had come about, tradition has it that, continuing to believe _after_ they were safe in Vera Cruz, they fulfilled their vow by bringing up on their shoulders the rigging of their ship, afterward encasing it in a covering of stone.