November 5th, 10.30.

We are just home from the big dinner offered to-night by Carbajal y Rosas to the members of the Corps Diplomatique and contiguous Mexican officials. The Foreign Office is, as you know, in the Plaza at the head of our street, and it was a blaze of light as we approached.

The music of a magnificent military band in gala uniform—the Mexican brass is most inspiring—was echoing through the patio and halls as we went up the broad stairs, flower- and palm-banked and covered with a thick, red carpet, into the big rooms on the first floor overlooking the Plaza.

Here the various officials, according to their rank, have their offices—handsome rooms, with large pieces of Louis XV. furniture done up in blue and gold, and some paintings of Juarez, Diaz, and others. It was almost too brilliantly illuminated, with great festoons of green and white and red electric bulbs, in addition to the usual lighting. All were out in their bravest. Mrs. Wilson had on a white-and-gold satin gown, that she had worn at court in Brussels, and I wore the pink-velvet brocade I had for the Buda-Pesth court ball.

This sounds very magnificent, but when the time came to move into the banqueting-room and a personage much more richly gowned than any of us dream of being approached to give me his arm, a grin overspread the faces of the chers collègues near by. It was the Chinese minister, in the most beautiful lavender-and-gold costume I have ever seen. Useless to compete with the Celestials, when they are really in form. On his gorgeous arm, feeling decidedly diminished, I went to the great front hall where a long, narrow banquet-table was spread. Some official, a small, dark, youngish man, who did not speak English, or French, or German, or anything in which I could lightly communicate, was on the other side.

I had a chance to "choose" between Spanish or Chinese, and, being under the necessity of saying something, began with my Mexican friend about the weather, which you get through with quickly here at this season when it is always fine. Then the conversation got onto the usual subject of niños (children). He said, with the air of one not having yet abandoned hope, that he had only nine. I asked, thoughtlessly, what was the distance between their ages, and he answered, quite simply: "El tiempo regular"—ten months.

After the repast, which began with bouchées Romanoff and finished with coupés à la Brésilienne, touching delicately at other international points, there was more or less talking, with presentations to various persons of the incoming régime—surprised-looking ladies in high-necked gowns, and eager-looking men. We disbanded about ten o'clock to the sound of more really gorgeous martial music echoing through the big patio, stepping across the plaza to our house in a great flood of moonlight. The "Iron Horse," the bronze equestrian statue of Charles IV., giving the note of other times and other rulers, was shining with a dim radiance. Humboldt found it in the Plaza Mayor in 1803, vis-à-vis the cathedral and the palace of the viceroys, set in a large space paved in squares of porphyry, inclosed by a richly ornamented, bronze-gilt railing and placed on a pedestal of Mexican marble. Thirty-five years afterward Madame Calderon de la Barca, in 1838, found it in the courtyard of the university. Now I find it in the Plaza de la Reforma, and an excellent spot it is, if they will only leave it there, instead of trotting it about the town. It is placed where one can see Chapultepec Castle at the end of the Paseo, where one can look down the broad Calle Bucareli—still named after that enlightened viceroy (they periodically change the names of the streets here), and which in its day was one of the most beautiful avenues in the city, having a large fountain, with a gilt statue, where now we have a very ugly clock-tower on artificial stucco stones. The whole street was planted with beautiful trees, which modern claptrappy houses have crowded out. It now ends in the dusty, trolley-laid, modern avenue of Chapultepec.

The Calle de Rosales, a short street of handsome dwellings mostly of the epoch of Calle Humboldt, gives another vista looking toward San Fernando and San Hipólito; down still another one can see the iron frame of the new Palacio Legislativo, planned to cost ten million pesos. Work has lagged on it since the Diaz government was overthrown, and experts are beginning to say that the great iron frame, so long exposed to rain and air, is corroding.

Now I must put out my light, a poor thing, anyway. There is a shaft of moonlight on the wall, a "purest ray serene," that shames it.

November 6th, Inauguration Day.