Montezuma was always and every where munificent. When he had, though reluctantly, admitted the strangers into his capital, he prepared to give them a royally hospitable entertainment. Partly by way of triumph in the success of their movements hitherto, and partly by way of amusing, and at the same time overawing their entertainers, the Spaniards, the day after their arrival in the city, made a grand military display in their quarters, and in the neighboring streets. They exercised their prancing steeds in all the feats of horsemanship, racing, leaping, and careering, in all the wild majesty of the trained charger, under the three fold discipline of bit and spur, and cheering shout. They rushed upon each other in the mock warfare of the tournament, with clashing sword and glancing spear, and then, discharging their carbines in the air, separated amid clouds of dust and smoke, as if driven asunder by the bolts of heaven in their own hands. The astonished natives, accustomed only to the simple weapons of primitive warfare, looked on with undisguised admiration, not unmixed with fear. The strange beings before them, wielding such unwonted powers, seemed indeed to have descended upon earth from some higher sphere, and to partake of that mysterious and fearful character, which they had been wont to ascribe to inhabitants of the spiritual world. But when, in closing off the day's entertainment, they brought out the loud-mouthed artillery, and shook the very foundations of the city with their oft-repeated thunders, the spirit of the Aztec sunk within him, and he felt, as he retired to his dwelling, that it was for no good end, that men of such power, having such fearful engines at their command, had been permitted to fix their quarters in one of the fortresses of Tenochtitlan. "Alas!" said an ancient Cacique from the northern frontier, "we are fallen upon evil times. Our enemies are even now in the citadel--enemies whom we know not, whose mode of warfare we do not understand, whose weapons defy alike our powers of imitation and resistance. Let us abandon the field, and retire to the far north, whence our fathers came, and rear a new empire amid the impregnable fastnesses of the mountains." "Who talks of abandoning the field to the enemy?" interrupted Guatimozin,--"Let no Aztec harbor so base a thought. Rather let us stand by our altars and die, if die we must." "Right," cried the youthful prince Axayatl, from the southern slope of the Sierra, "why should the all-conquering Aztec tremble at this display of the mysterious strangers? Are not the millions of Anahuac a match for a few hundred of their enemies, in whatever form they come? Be they gods, or be they demons, they belong not to this soil, nor this soil to them, and, by all our altars and all our gods, they must retire or perish, though we, and our wives, and our children perish with them."