In the midst of her preparations for getting out, the Señora Comacho pressed a little slip of paper into Dick’s hand with something written upon it. It gave him a start, for he did not know what it could mean. Was the lieutenant’s wife trying to begin a flirtation with him? That was so absurd that it almost made Dick laugh; but he had heard that Spanish women are given to that sort of thing. When he looked at the paper he saw the words, written in a fine Italian hand:-- “Calle Estampa de Jesus Maria, Numero Cinco.” In his ignorance of the language he could only look at the lady and smile and bow. “Maybe she’s asking me to call and see her,” he reflected. “Calle may mean ‘call ye’; perhaps it’s an invitation to meet her under the shadow of the cathedral spire at midnight. It’s a pity I’m not more romantic.” He kept the paper in his hand, not knowing what else to do with it; and when they reached the street and the lady held up her finger to the nearest cabman, and pointed smilingly to the paper, he saw that his suspicions were unfounded. The words were nothing but the address to which the lady desired to be driven--the address of the lieutenant’s father. “Si, si!” the driver exclaimed when Dick handed him the paper; “Haysoos Mar-eea, Numero Cinco.” “‘Jesus Maria’ is rather an odd name for a street,” Dick thought; “but it doesn’t sound quite as irreverent when they pronounce it Haysoos Mar-eea, as these Mexicans do.” Dick kept his eyes wide open, as usual, and he had not gone far before he discovered that almost every street in the city is named after some saint. And, more than that, that every block of every street has a separate name, a method bewildering to most strangers. He saw his fair charge and her child safely within the doorway of a fine old stone mansion, and ten minutes later he was in his room in the Hotel Iturbide, the vast building that was erected by the Emperor Iturbide for a palace. To present his letter to the American minister was Dick’s first work; and he went about it so promptly that before dark he was informed that President Diaz would give him an audience in the palace the following morning at eleven o’clock. The exterior of the palace was a disappointment. With its long range of low, plain walls, it reminded Dick of the old Madison Square Garden. But when the six soldiers at the gate presented arms as he drove in, his opinion of it rose; and he was soon following an orderly through an endless series of handsome apartments, to the throne room in which he was to meet the President. “I am glad to meet a representative of one of the foremost American newspapers,” the President of Mexico said as he gave Dick’s hand a warm shake. And Dick was delighted to be so agreeably surprised in the President. The Comacho incident had given him a bad impression of the Mexicans; but here was a Mexican of a very different sort.