There are fears that the Zapatistas will arrive in the city; but they are nothing compared to other fears that stalk the town to-night. During the French intervention many people remained in Mexico City, reached a ripe old age, and died in their beds; which every one seems anxious to do, though I have never felt that dying in one’s bed is all it is cracked up to be. “Bury me where I fall. Everywhere will be heard the judgment call.” I don’t much care when or where or how it comes.
April 18th. 4:30 P.M.
No news as yet from Washington. I have just returned after lunching at the Russian minister’s. Everything was very soigné, as it always is, with blinis and delicious caviar and all sorts of good things. I feel as if I had eaten the Legation instead of at it. One has so little appetite at eight thousand feet above sea-level. There were von Hintze, Kanya, Marie Simon, in one of her smart Drecoll dresses, and myself. They all think the situation in the south is very bad, but I am no more to be scared by the cry of Zapatistas, having heard it ever since I first put foot in Mexico.
The Mexican Herald remarks this morning (dealing with the situation in glittering generalities) that “When each party to an agreement gets the idea that the other side is going to back down, it is certainly trying to the patience of an Irish peacemaker.”
One of the great dust-storms of the end of the dry season is on us to-day; all the color is gone out of the air, which has become opaque, gritty, non-refracting.
6.30.
Callers all the afternoon. Now McKenna comes in to say that the final word, en clair, from Washington has been received. It was given out at the White House at noon. “General Huerta is still insisting upon doing something less than has been demanded, and something less than could constitute an acknowledgment that his representatives were entirely in the wrong in the indignities they have put upon the United States. The President has determined that if General Huerta has not yielded by six o’clock on Sunday afternoon, he will take the matter to Congress on Monday.”
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It makes me sick with dread to think of the probable fate of Americans in the desert spaces and the mountain fastnesses of Mexico. Some one has blundered, somewhere, somehow, that we should come in to give the coup de grâce to this distracted nation, who yet clings, and rightly, to those tattered shreds of sovereignty we have left her. The foreign Powers think we are playing the most cold-blooded, most cruel game of “grab” in all history.