The Del Rios have a big, comfortable, modernized house, with a huge, unmodernized garden; and it is a favorite Sunday haunt of certain of the diplomats. In the tiny inner court there is still a gem of an old "rosace"-shaped fountain, with calla-lilies growing about it. Small bitter-orange trees, thickly hung with green and yellow fruit, adorn the corners, and masses of geranium-like vines mingle with the ivy which covers the house walls, pierced here and there with old grilled, arched windows. On the plateau, familiar vines and fruit-trees grow willingly among so many things that don't flourish together in Europe. Tlalpan was once beloved of the viceroys; I think Revillagigedo first made it fashionable, though it was settled immediately after the Conquest, when the picturesque old church was erected. Madame Calderon de la Barca, in whose time Tlalpan was known after the name of the church, San Agustin de las Cuevas,[11] gives a most amusing account of the great annual Whitsuntide gaming festival, and Del Rio tells me that _la Feria de Tlalpan_ still continues to be fittingly celebrated by the exchange of temporary possessions in various forms of gambling, and that it's not quite innocent of cock-fights. However, we moderns repaired to the tennis-court on arriving, where we found a dozen or so people using it to play hockey, and others sitting about in comfortable chairs watching the proceedings. We went for lunch and tea, but stayed for supper, all scampering to the house at tea-time, when a single, well-timed shower deluged the scene. Some played bridge, and some read. Del Rio is an agreeable, intellectual, bookish man, with degrees at several continental universities, and has a good library of new and old books. He also possesses some rather radical ideas, though his personal life, as is so often the case, plays itself out with conventionality on the highest of ethical planes. His wife, partly of German origin, is very pretty in a dark-eyed, unaffected, happy way. When the rain passed we went out and sat in the _mirador_, a sort of summer-house built into a corner of the high stone wall, a feature of every Mexican garden, and watched the sun-glow slipping from the hills, which took on a vivid blue, though the volcanoes kept their light in their own exclusive, dazzling way for long after. A pale moon, arisen among the sunset clouds, was waiting for its chance. By the time we started home through a magical night in an open motor, packed with flowers, a lot of us together, the moon was flooding the world and had cut the whole plateau into great squares of black and white. _August 10th._