"It was at Papotla," said this much-travelled invalid, "a village some three miles from that capital, that we saw this remarkable tree, which is called 'The Tree of the Noche Triste' (the Dismal Night), because Cortez in his disastrous midnight retreat from the Aztec capital is said to have sat down and wept under it. Be that as it may, the Noche Triste is undoubtedly a tree of great age. It is of the cedar family, broken and decayed in many parts, but still enough alive to bear foliage.
"In its dilapidated condition it measures ten feet in diameter, and exceeds forty feet in height. Long gray moss droops mournfully from its decaying branches, and, taken altogether, it is indeed a dismal tree.
"It is much visited, and held sacred and historic by the people, who guard and cherish it with great care."
"It calls up singular reflections," commented the Journalist, "to look upon a living thing that has existed a thousand years, though it be but a tree. Though so many centuries have rolled over the cypresses of Chapultepec, they are yet sound and vigorous.
"These trees are the only links that unite modern and ancient American civilization; for they were in being when that mysterious race, the Toltecs, rested under their shade; and they are said to have long been standing, when a body of Aztecs, wandering away from their tribe in search of game, fixed themselves upon the marsh at Chapultepec, and, spreading their mats under these cypresses, enjoyed in their shadow their noontide slumber. Then came the Spaniards to people the valley with the mixed races, who respected their great antiquity, so that during all the battles that have been fought around them they have passed unharmed, and amid the strife and contentions of men have gone quietly on, adding many rings to their already enlarged circumference. 'Heedless,' says Wilson, 'of the gunpowder burned over their heads and the discharge of cannon that has shaken their roots, as one ephemeral Mexican government succeeded another, these cypresses still remain unharmed, and may outlive many other dynasties.'"
"Apropos of the subject," said the Antiquary, "Nezahualcoyotl, according to his descendant, the native historian, embellished his numerous villas with hanging gardens replete with gorgeous flowers and odoriferous shrubs. The steps to these charming terraces—many of them hewn in the natural porphyry, and which a writer who lived in the sixteenth century avers that he himself counted—were even then crumbling into ruins. Later travellers have reported the almost literal decay of this wonderful establishment. Latrobe describes this monarch's baths (fabled to have been twelve feet long by eight wide) as 'singular basins, perhaps two feet in diameter, and not capacious enough for any monarch larger than Oberon to take a ducking in.'
"The observations of other travellers confirm this account. Bullock tells us that some of the terraces of this apparently mythical palace are still entire; and that the solid remains of stone and stucco furnished an inexhaustible quarry for the churches and other buildings since erected on the site of that ancient Aztec city.
"Latrobe, on the contrary, attributes these ruins to the Toltecs, and hints at the probability of their belonging to an age and a people still more remote. Wilson, on the other hand, positively accords them to the Phœnicians."
"In reading up on this famous empire, Tezcuco," said Leon Starr, "one is inclined to believe that every vestige of this proud magnificence could not possibly have been obliterated in the short period of three centuries, leaving on the spot only an indifferently built village, whose population of three hundred Indians, and about one hundred whites, maintain themselves in summer by gardening, and sending in their canoes daily supplies of 'herbs and sullers' (whatever this last may be) to Mexico, and, in winter, by raking the mud for the 'tegnesquita,' from which they manufacture salt."
"Wilson," said the Grumbler, "tells us that 'the Tezcucan descendant of an emperor "lied like a priest."' However that may be, one cannot quite swallow his own relation 'in its entirety.'"