When, therefore, we relate any very curious and marvellous matters, appertaining to Mexican _literature_, though we speak upon the authority of historians, we invite the reader to receive our accounts with some grains of allowance. With the exception of a few arbitrary symbols, expressive of numerals, and a few other objects of constant recurrence, the picture-writing of Mexico spoke in ideas, not words; and it may therefore be assumed, that it could express nothing that did not, or by a stretch of ingenuity, could not be made to, address and explain itself to the eye.] A few ruins--a cluster of dilapidated houses--a galloping Creole on his high Spanish saddle, with glittering _manga_ and rattling _anquera_,--and, now and then, an Indian skulking moodily along, in his squalid _serape_,[2]--are all that remain of Tezcuco. [Footnote 2: The Manga and Serape are Mexican cloaks worn scapulary-wise, the one of richly embroidered cloth, the other of blanket, or some such coarse material. The Anquera is a leather housing, embossed and gilt, with a jingling fringe of brass or silver ornaments.] In the spring of 1521, the year that followed the flight of the Spaniards from Mexico, the city of the Acolhuacanese presented all its grandeur of aspect, and, to the eye, looked full as royal and imperishable as in the best days of its freedom. But the molewarp was digging at its foundations; and the cloud which had ravaged the Mexican valley, and then passed away into the east, where it lay for a time still and small, 'like to a man's hand,' had again crept over the mountain barriers to its gates, and was now brooding among its sanctuaries. A group of Christian men sat under a cypress-tree, without the walls, regarding the great pyramid, on whose lofty terrace, overshadowing the surrounding edifices, floated a crimson banner of velvet and gold, on which, besides the royal arms of Spain, was emblazoned, as on the Labarum of the Constantines, a white cross, with the legend, imitated from that famous standard of fanaticism, _In hoc signo vincemus_. If other proof had been wanting of the return of the Spaniards to the scene of their discomfiture, their presence in Tezcuco, and their unchangeable resolution to complete the work of conquest so disastrously begun, it might have been traced abundantly in the strange spectacle, which, equally with the desecrated temple, divided the attention of the group of Castilians at the cypress-tree. They sat on a little swell of earth,--a natural mound which jutted into the lake, whose waters, agitated by a western breeze, dashed in musical breakers at its base; while the rustling of the leaves above, mingled with these sounds of waves, a tone that was both melancholy and harmonious. The beautiful prospect of Tezcuco, rising beyond fertile meadows in the livery of spring, flanked, on the right hand, by a sheet of dark and glossy water,--with white towers, turrets, and temple-tops, painted, as