Then the Governor spoke a word. Every Indian doffed his hat and bent his eyes, as Colonel Alarcon walked solemnly towards me, and in deep tone, with evident feeling, explained that the President of Mexico had sent on the news to tell the English señora—
“QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD.”
A historic telegram, truly, announcing a national calamity, and received amidst the wildest possible surroundings in the strangest possible way.
The Queen was dead. The English-speaking people had lost her who had been their figure-head for sixty-three years. The monarch, to whom the whole world paid homage as a woman and respect as a Queen, had died at Osborne on the previous day, while we, wandering over Aztec ruins at Xochicalco, had not even heard of her illness.
Impressed as we were by the mystic grandeur of the caves, amazed at the wonders of nature, this solemn news seemed to fit the serious thoughts of the day, thoughts which had grown in intensity with each succeeding hour. Cacahuimilpa appeared a fitting spot in which to hear of a great public loss. Time and place for once were in no wise “out of tune.”
It was dark and the way steep as we rode back to the village in silence.
Like the proverbial bad penny, I rolled home again with my pocket full of notes on men, women, and things. I had collected my material, written bits in railway trains, on steamboats, and almost in the saddle, and as soon as I felt well enough, put together Mexico as I saw It.
The beginning of the manuscript was sent off to the publishers in the June following, just two months after landing at home, and the remainder was printed, chapter by chapter, as I managed to finish each: a most terrible and anxious manner of proceeding and one certainly not to be recommended. The first proof of Mexico as I saw It was returned on July 10th; the slips, or galleys, finished on August 10th; the whole was paged and passed for press on September 10th. It appeared in October at a guinea net, the illustrations mostly from my own camera. So I was just six months in Mexico, and just six more getting out the book; in my own souvenir copy there is written on the fly-leaf: “It is done, but it has nearly done for me.”
Reviews were more than kind, but then the subject was new, so people found it interesting. As Frederic Harrison wrote in the Positivist Review: “The marvellous restoration of Mexico, from being a hot-bed of anarchy and the victim of superstition to its present condition of one of the best governed and most enlightened of modern countries, has often attracted the attention of political observers. In Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s most interesting volume we find suggestive sketches of the institution of the Republic, and a personal character of the President, General Porfirio Diaz, the noble statesman who has achieved such triumphs.” How could one help being gratified that other influential organs of public opinion felt with me the “fascinations of the Southern haciendas and of the natives of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,” and held the information, that had been zealously collected, of practical and informing value?