While these scenes were enacting in the city, the palace was shrouded in the deepest gloom. When the monarch arrayed himself, in the morning, to go forth to meet the strangers, several incidents occurred, which were deemed peculiarly ominous, confirming all the superstitious forebodings of the king, and tending to take away from the yet trusting hearts of his household, their last remaining hope. The imperial clasp, which bound his girdle in front, bearing as its device, richly engraven on the precious _chalchivitl_, the emblem of despotic power, which was the eagle pouncing upon the ocelot--snapped in twain, scattering the fragments of the eagle's head upon the marble pavement. The principal jewel in the royal diadem was found loose, and trembling in its setting. But, more portentous than all to the mind of the devout Montezuma, the priest, who had charge of the great altar on the Teocalli of Huitzilopotchli, had been seized with convulsions during the preceding night, and fallen dead at his post. The perpetual fire had gone out, for want of a hand to replenish it, and when the morning sun shot his first beams upon that high altar, there was not a spark among the blackened embers, to answer his reviving glow. It was impossible to shake off the influence of presages like these. From infancy, he had been taught to read in all such incidents, the shadowy revealings of the will of the gods, the dark lines of destiny foreshown to the faithful. The soul of Montezuma was oppressed almost to sinking. But he roused himself to his task, and went forth, feeling, as he went, that the ground trembled beneath his feet, while an untimely night gathered at noon-day over the sky. * * * * * Among the noble princes who graced the court of Montezuma, there was no one of a nobler bearing, or a loftier heart, than his nephew Guatimozin, the favored lover of Tecuichpo. Unlike her disappointed suitor, the Prince of Tezcuco, he had uniformly and powerfully opposed the timid policy of the king, and urged, with Cuitlahua, a bold and unyielding resistance to the encroachments of the intruding Spaniards. His reluctance to their admission to the capital was so great, that he refused to witness the humiliating spectacle; preferring to shut himself up in the palace, and sustain, if he could, the fainting courage of the princess, and her mother. All that could be done by eloquence, inspired by patriotic zeal and inflamed by a pure and refined love, was attempted by the accomplished youth, till, excited and inflamed by his own efforts to comfort and persuade others, and nerved to higher resolves, by a new contemplation of the inestimable heart-treasures, which were staked upon the issue, a new hope seemed to dawn upon the clouded horizon of their destiny.