Again I was in the saddle, and soon upon that noted causeway by which Cortez entered the city of Mexico. It has lost none of its attractions in the course of centuries, but has been kept in fine repair as a carriage-road, while the venerable trees that line it on either side look as old as the time of the Conquistadors. This noble carriage-way, through the marshy ground of the valley of Mexico, is an enlargement of the old causeway of the Indians, or, rather, it has been built over and around it, that having been less than thirty feet in width. I soon arrived at Churubusco, the scene of one of the bloody battles of the American campaign in this valley. There was little here to look at, and I hurried on and entered the south gate of the city, and soon arrived at the _Hotel de Paris_, to which I had been directed. My poor old mustang here ended a twelve days' journey, over mountains and plains of _pedregal_, without a shoe to his hoofs. A party of Californians, who had been stopping here for some weeks, had left the day before, and I was ushered into French society, in which to form my first impressions of Mexico. Still, there was an exquisite pleasure in once more getting clean, and eating food cooked after a civilized manner. Not that I had in any wise become tired of drinking porridge, extracted from corn, called _atola_, or dissatisfied with eating bits of fowl, which the maid of honor to General Garay so ingeniously served up with her fingers, after having it well flavored with Cayenne or Chili pepper! He that does not love Chili must keep out of Spanish America. And he will prove a poor traveler who can not sit down with a good appetite to a supper of small black beans (_frijoles_), and a dozen Indian cakes (_tortillas_), as thin and as tough as a drum-head, which serve the double purpose of spoon and plate. ABODE IN MEXICO. My room was on the roof, and when my inner and outer man was fully in order, I used to walk till a late hour of the day upon the paved house-top, now leaning against the parapet and looking up to the snow-covered mountains, whose shadowy forms could be made out even by moonlight, and upon the shadowy towers and domes of the city. Thus pleasant days and weeks flew on. Sometimes I rode about the valley, carefully searching after the relics of times past, and at other times surveying the curiosities of the city. Once this order was broken in upon, in order to accompany that noble-hearted man and excellent embassador, Governor Letcher, to the palace, where I had an interview with Arista, then the President of Mexico, who strikingly resembled our own President of that day, Millard Fillmore. CHAPTER XVIII.