The Vírgen de los Remedios--General Bernardo Reyes--A description of the famous ceremony of the "Grito de Dolores" at the palace _September 1st, evening._ To-day was the feast of the Vírgen de los Remedios, once so important in "New Spain," and, as I had planned, Mr. de Soto and I made the pilgrimage there. It was the first church Cortés built in Mexico, on the site of the Aztec temple, where he and his battered remnant halted to bind up their wounds after the retreat from Mexico City in the "Melancholy Night." We started out at eight o'clock, on a dazzling morning, rather weakly and apologetically within ourselves and to each other, in a carriage, which took us through the Paseo to Popotla and Tacuba and Azcapotzalco, where we descended and crossed some maguey-fields fringed by squat, half-ruined adobe huts. We jumped endless ditches, made after the antique pattern, until we finally reached an uncovered horse-tramway, crowded with such specimens of the _plebs_ as had the superfluous _centavos_ for wheeled conveyances. We were finally deposited at San Bartolo Naucalpam, and then did the rest of the way, several kilometers, decently and fittingly on foot, climbing over the white, shining, pathless _tepetate_, which, with the pink _tezontle_, has been from all time the building material for Mexico City. We were in the foot-hills of the Sierra de las Cruces, covered with a scant vegetation, various kinds of cactus, or an occasional _árbol de Perú_. The Indians seem to partake of this thinness of the soil, this strange, vanishing quality of light, this dissolving of horizons, this pulsing of colors. A generative, effective something is underneath all the unrest and disorder of the miserable political systems they seem to produce, and if a race is constantly being born into a world of wondrous light and color, it can persist in spite of everything else being impossible. Indians were rapidly and silently approaching from all sides as we neared the church, which I had only seen pressed against the purple hills, wonderfully transfigured at sunset or catching the light in the morning hours. Mexico can hold the fancy quite independent of the work of man. But when one adds the activities of that creative, potent, Spanish race, infinitely inspired by the background already perfect, with the building materials, _tepetate_ and _tezontle_, white and pink, giving them what they wanted to place against green and blue, the beauty of the result, wrapped in the strange transparence of the plateau, is not to be wondered at.