The whole place was waking up now to a new day. All was gay with business and bustle. Canoes glancing swiftly up and down the canals, the streets crowded with people in their bright and picturesque costumes, fountains playing in courts adorned with porphyry and jasper. Stone footways, revenue offices, and numerous bridges, over which people were hurrying in all directions; whilst the enormous market was already becoming thronged with an animated company of many thousands of buyers and sellers, and commodities of all kinds, from slaves for work or sacrifice, down to pastry, sweets, and flowers. Cotton dresses and cloaks, curtains and coverlids, toys and jewellery of the most delicate and exquisite workmanship. Pottery stalls, graceful wood-carvings, helmets, quilted doublets, copperheaded lances and arrows, feather-mail, and the broad maquahuitl or Mexican sword, with its sharp blades of itztli. Itztli razors and mirrors, and barbers to use the razors and lend or sell the mirrors, hides raw and dressed, and live animals. Fish, game, poultry, and building materials. Flowers everywhere, and also, almost everywhere, in and out amongst the motley throngs, the royal officers of justice to keep the peace, collect the duties, and to see to weights and measures, and good faith and order generally. This Empire of Mexico, and above all its heart, this fair city of Tenochtitlan, was decidedly no abode of savage ignorance, but rather the region of a civilization but very little lower in the scale than that of its conquerors. The deep astonishment and wonder they felt at the discovery is but reproduced in us, as we read of all these marvels. And the wonder in our minds must but be a hundred-fold increased as we remember that this great and far-advanced nation, was utterly conquered and overthrown by a handful of rough, half-taught adventurers! Meantime, to return to these same adventurers, with no apology either for having given you Prescott's descriptions of this most astonishing Mexico almost word for word, as he, in his turn, has copied it from the letters of one of the very adventurers themselves who accompanied Cortes, that 8th of November morning over the south causeway into ancient Mexico. On the causeway, at the distance of about half a league from the capital, the small army of conquest encountered a solid wall of stone twelve feet high stretching right across the dike, and strengthened by towers at the extremities. In the centre was a battlemented gate which was opened to admit the white-faced warriors. "I confess," muttered Alvarado to Velasquez, who rode beside him, as those gates clanged to behind them, "I confess that I should not think him quite a craven among my brethren who should indeed, at this moment, show a real white-face for once." Velasquez shrugged his shoulders. "Well, it is true we have walked into the jaws of death. It but remains to see whether our Captain-General be a wedge strong enough to split them."