"You will be interested in learning that they had a regular system of knighthood here centuries before Columbus discovered America. When a candidate was to be presented the knights accompanied him to the temple in a solemn procession. At the temple a priest pierced the cartilage of his nose with an eagle's claw, and then twigs were inserted in the wound to keep the flesh from uniting as the sore healed. He was clad in a coarse tunic, and then they painted him black all over, gave him one tortilla and a little water once a day to save him from starvation, and compelled him to lie on a mat on the cold ground. They allowed him to sleep only a few minutes at a time, and waked him by a prod with a thorn. Several times a day they sat down and feasted in front of him, called him every mean name their language contained, and heaped all sorts of insults upon him. They kept this up for sixty days; if he lost his temper at any time and 'talked back' at their insults, or asked for any of their food, the ceremony stopped and he wasn't made a knight.
"If he held out bravely and patiently to the end of the sixty days, he was then taken to the Temple again, and the whole order of the knights received him with high honors. His mean garments were removed from him by the oldest knight in the assemblage, and he was decorated with the insignia of the order and dressed in fine clothes. The use of the hole in his nose was now apparent, as the jewel that indicated his rank was hung there. The Apache and other south-western Indians occupy the country dwelt in by the Toltecs before their migration to Mexico. These Indians wear ornaments in their noses, and are supposed to have derived the custom from the ancient inhabitants.
THE PYRAMID OF THE SUN AT TULA.
"So much for the past. Let us see what there is here now. Here are the ruins of the Temple of the Sun, where the people worshipped that great luminary; they made offerings of fruits and flowers, and sometimes of birds, and, unlike the Aztecs, they did not indulge in human sacrifices. The temple is now only a heap of stones partly overgrown with trees, and it is said that a great deal of material was taken from it for building the houses of the Tula of to-day.
"We went from the temple to the ruins of the palace. These ruins were unearthed by M. Charnay, and cover a considerable area of ground. The guide who accompanied us was the same that aided the author of 'Ancient Cities of the New World,' and he pointed out the different rooms in the palace and their probable uses. One room, he said, was supposed to have been devoted to a sort of 'Happy Family' of wild and domestic animals, as it was the fashion of those times for every palace to have a menagerie attached to it. Then they had coops and cages for turkeys, ducks, and other fowls destined for the table, yards for goats and other domestic quadrupeds, tanks for fish, and chambers for reptiles and birds of prey. Servants' quarters were arranged very much as in modern palaces; and altogether the Toltec kings had a good deal of comfort about their residences.
PARTS OF A COLUMN, TULA.