Arrived at Mexico City my wife and I sped along the Avenue Juarez to the Hotel Cosmos where we spent a night. Next day we repaired to the quieter and more comfortable Iturbide, a fine old structure built around stone courts and a garden of palm trees and flowering shrubs, with a fountain playing. I think we were fortunate, for while we paid only a moderate price we yet had a large airy room with writing desk and table and a pleasant outlook on the unfurling green of the banana palms. By no possibility could we have been shot from the street whilst standing at the window.
We wondered much whether Wilfrid Ewart were in the city. Although I knew he had only ten days wherein his ticket would be valid I knew the temptation was to stay longer. There is one perfectly safe and conventional hotel in Mexico City, and that is "The Regis," run in the American style and patronized chiefly by Americans and English. Its agents circulate on the Pullman cars of the trains and make sure of the English-speaking passengers. A hotel omnibus meets all trains and takes off guests for the hotel. We felt sure, therefore, that Ewart would have stayed there. So on our first morning we went thither and asked for him. He was not there. We consulted the register. He had not been there. Next day I called on Mr. Norman King, the British Consul General, but the consulate had not heard of him. Dr. E. J. Dillon and his wife had, however, arrived in the city and were staying at the "Princess," but Ewart was not registered at the "Princess." We wondered where he could have stayed. As a matter of fact a Spaniard on the train had given him the address of a hotel several streets distant from the center—the Hotel Isabel on the Street of the Republic of San Salvador, a hotel chiefly patronized by Germans and Spanish.
On Friday, the 29th of December, we went to the shrine of "Our Lady of Guadeloupe" and saw that famous image worshiped more by the Indians than by any other. We watched the Aztecs of to-day, candle in one hand, sombrero in the other, walk on their knees up the aisle to the altar, and looked on those grandiose ecclesiastical pictures which adorn the gilded church telling the story of the revelation of the Virgin and the Pope's remark, "Such things are not done for all nations." We recalled to mind December 12, the festival of the Guadeloupe Virgin and the resonance of it at Santa Fe among the Mexicans there; the firing of guns promiscuously in the streets, the lighting of festive fires. It had much astonished Wilfrid Ewart then.
Next day, the thirtieth, at noontide we met our friend by chance on the streets of the city. It was on the corner of San Juan de Latran and the street of the 16th September. We were in the act of choosing at which new restaurant we would partake of luncheon when suddenly we saw Ewart's tall figure on the edge of the curb; he was gazing in his short-sighted way up into the sky and did not see us till I cried out.
Then we moved joyfully together to a restaurant and had lunch.
"Well, Wilfrid Ewart, you are a wicked fellow!" I said to him reproachfully.
He ruffled a little.
"Well, I don't know," said he. "Isn't it the chance of a lifetime? I've been looking for a place like this all my life."
He seemed utterly charmed with Mexico City and spoke with a sort of rapture of Chapultepec Park. We agreed to go together on the morrow to San Angel to have lunch together on the last day of the year at the fine inn there. It was a place nine or ten miles from the center of the city, literally buried in flowers and palms, and he seriously thought of taking a room at the inn and staying there for three months.