saying, “What, my husband, shall I shrink from that which you must face? Come, let us go and make report of our mission. If the sickness takes me and I die, it will be because my hour has come.” [7] This treatment is followed among the Indians of Mexico to this day, but if the writer may believe what he heard in that country, the patient is frequently cured by it. So we went and were ushered into a chamber where Cuitlahua lay covered by a sheet, as though he were already dead, and with incense burning round him in golden censers. When we entered he was in a stupor, but presently he awoke, and it was announced to him that we waited. “Welcome, niece,” he said, speaking through the sheet and in a thick voice; “you find me in an evil case, for my days are numbered, the pestilence of the Teules slays those whom their swords spared. Soon another monarch must take my throne, as I took your father’s, and I do not altogether grieve, for on him will rest the glory and the burden of the last fight of the Aztecs. Your report, niece; let me hear it swiftly. What say the clans of the Otomie, your vassals?” “My lord,” Otomie answered, speaking humbly and with bowed head, “may this distemper leave you, and may you live to reign over us for many years! My lord, my husband Teule and I have won back the most part of the people of the Otomie to our cause and standard. An army of twenty thousand mountain men waits upon your word, and when those are spent there are more to follow.” “Well done, daughter of Montezuma, and you, white man,” gasped the dying king. “The gods were wise when they refused you both upon the stone of sacrifice, and I was foolish when I would have slain you, Teule. To you and all I say be of a steadfast heart, and if you must die, then die with honour. The fray draws on, but I shall not share it, and who knows its end?” Now he lay silent for a while, then of a sudden, as though an inspiration had seized him, he cast the sheet from his face and sat upon his couch, no pleasant sight to see, for the pestilence had done its worst with him. “Alas!” he wailed, “and alas! I see the streets of Tenoctitlan red with blood and fire, I see her dead piled up in heaps, and the horses of the Teules trample them. I see the Spirit of my people, and her voice is sighing and her neck is heavy with chains. The children are visited because of the evil of the fathers. Ye are doomed, people of Anahuac, whom I would have nurtured as an eagle nurtures her young. Hell yawns for you and Earth refuses you because of your sins, and the remnant that remains shall be slaves from generation to generation, till the vengeance is accomplished!”