There are hooded, shrine-like resting-places as one goes up the broad, flat steps between the beautiful, high-scalloped wall, often a _Via Dolorosa_, for a cemetery is on the very top behind the chapel that was built on the spot where Juan Diego gathered the flowers, suddenly springing up to be given as testimony to the unconvinced bishop. A great wooden cross is in the little atrium, and we found an Indian family sitting about it, eating their supper, wrapped in their colored blankets, doubtless preparing to spend the night "at the foot of the cross." There was once a temple to the Aztec Ceres, "Tonantzin, our Mother," on this same spot. In the cemetery lies buried the body of Santa Anna, he who led his troops against ours. There is a continual operative magic, some peculiar proportioning of the subjective and the objective here, with correspondences between the seen and the unseen forever making themselves felt. The domes and spires of the city shone in the afternoon light. Where one once saw the great aqueducts, and the still more ancient canals, now rise the slender steel frames bearing the wires of the light-and-power company, charged in Necaxa, a hundred miles away, down in the Hot Country. The lakes were yellowish-silver mirrors, the eternal hills swam in their strange translucence, the great volcanoes pierced a lovely sky; all quite relatable, except just what it is that pulls your soul out of you as you look upon the deathless beauty and think of the dark, restless, passionate races whose heritage it is. As we turned to descend the old stone way, the shining city afar was as if suddenly dipped in purple, but the sky above was of such pure and delicate tints--lemon, saffron, and pale pink--that we wondered whence the "Tyrian" purple could have come. We drove silently home in a many-colored twilight. _July 23d._ Yesterday I found a curious book, "_par un citoyen de l'Amérique méridionale_" ("by a citizen of South America") (vague enough not to get him into trouble), called _Esquisse de la Révolution de l'Amérique Espagnole_, Paris, 1817. It is a saddening, mighty spectacle, the presentation of that immense area in the throes of revolution. A few enlightened viceroys at Mexico, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, might have saved the day. They were not ready for self-government, but for Spain the hour had sounded when she was to lose her great colonies; and Mexico, the dearest, the richest, the most accessible, the most beautiful, was to enter on her century of horrors, heroisms, sacrifices--and the end is not yet. I feel at times as if I were behind the scenes of a mighty drama. I have read so much that I know many of the _répliques_; have sorted some of the red threads of the century-old plot, and, if I am not behind the scenes really, I _am_ in a sort of _avant-scène_, where some of what goes on behind the curtain can be surmised.