Bernal Diaz does not take the trouble to agree with himself. After stating that the rear, on which the loss fell heaviest, consisted of 120 men, he adds, in the same paragraph, that 150 of these were slain, which number swells to 200 in a few lines further! Falstaff’s men in buckram! See Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 128.--Cano’s estimate embraces, it is true, those--but their number was comparatively small--who perished subsequently on the march. The same authority states that 270 of the garrison, ignorant of the proposed departure of their countrymen, were perfidiously left in the palace of Axayacatl, where they surrendered on terms, but were subsequently all sacrificed by the Aztecs! (See Appendix, No. 11.) The improbability of this monstrous story, by which the army with all its equipage could leave the citadel without the knowledge of so many of their comrades,--and this be permitted, too, at a juncture which made every man’s co-operation so important,--is too obvious to require refutation. Herrera records, what is much more probable, that Cortés gave particular orders to the captain, Ojeda, to see that none of the sleeping or wounded should, in the hurry of the moment, be overlooked in their quarters. Hist. general, dec. 2, lib. 10, cap. 11. [191] “Pues de los de Narvaez, todos los mas en las puentes quedáron, cargados de oro.” Bernal Diaz, Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 128. [192] According to Diaz, part of the gold intrusted to the _Tlascalan_ convoy was preserved. (Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 136.) From the document already cited,--Probanza de Villa Segura, MS.,--it appears that it was a Castilian guard who had charge of it. [193] Gomara, Crónica, cap. 109.--Oviedo, Hist. de las Ind., MS., lib. 33, cap. 13.--Probanza en la Villa Segura, MS.--Bernal Diaz, Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 128. [194] Lorenzana, Viage, p. xiii. [195] The last instance, I believe, of the direct interposition of the Virgin in behalf of the metropolis was in 1833, when she was brought into the city to avert the cholera. She refused to pass the night in town, however, but was found the next morning in her own sanctuary at Los Remedios, showing, by the mud with which she was plentifully bespattered, that she must have performed the distance--several leagues--through the miry ways on foot! See Latrobe, Rambler in Mexico, Letter 5. [196] The epithet by which, according to Diaz, the Castilians were constantly addressed by the natives, and which--whether correctly or not--he interprets into _gods_, or _divine beings_. (See Hist. de la Conquista, cap. 48, et alibi.) One of the stanzas of Ercilla intimates the existence of a similar delusion among the South American Indians,--and a similar cure of it: