It was at the inn where we stopped to breakfast that we made our first acquaintance with the great Mexican institutions—­tortillas and pulque.  The pulque was being brewed on a large scale in an adjoining building.  The vats were made of cow-skins (with the hair inside), supported by a frame of sticks; and in them was pulque in every stage, beginning with the sweet aguamiel—­honeywater—­the fresh juice of the aloe, and then the same in different degrees of fermentation till we come to the madre pulque, the mother pulque, a little of which is used like yeast, to start the fermentation, and which has a combined odour of gas-works and drains.  Pulque, as you drink it, looks like milk and water, and has a mild smell and taste of rotten eggs.  Tortillas are like oat-cakes, but made of Indian corn meal, not crisp, but soft and leathery.  We thought both dreadfully nasty for a day or two; then we could just endure them; then we came to like them; and before we left the country we wondered how we should do without them.

CHAPTER III.

CITY OF MEXICO.

[Illustration:  VIEW OF PART OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO.]

Some thirty years ago, Don Agustin Yturbide, the first and last Emperor of Mexico, found that he wanted a palace wherein to house his newly-fledged dignity; and began to build one accordingly, in the high street of Mexico, close to the great convent of San Francisco.  It could not have been nearly finished when its founder was shot:  and it became the Hotel d’Yturbide.  We are now settled in it, in very comfortable quarters.  There is a restaurant down below, where the son of the late Yturbide dines daily, and everybody points him out to us, and moralises over him.

Mr. Christy’s drawer-roll of letters of introduction has produced an immediate crop of pleasant acquaintances, whose hospitality is boundless.  We are not idle, far from it; and a long day’s work is generally followed by a social dinner, and an evening spent in noting down the results of our investigations.

Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico has been more read in England than most historical works; and the Mexico of Montezuma has a well-defined idea attached to it.  The amphitheatre of dark hills surrounding the level plain, the two snowy mountain-peaks, the five lakes covering nearly half the valley, the city rising out of the midst of the waters, miles from the shore, with which it was connected by its four causeways, the straight streets of low flat-roofed houses, the numbers of canals crowded with canoes of Indians going to and from the market, the floating gardens moved from place to place, on which vegetables and flowers were cultivated, the great pyramid up which the Spanish army saw their captured companions led in solemn procession, and sacrificed on the top—­all these are details in the mental picture.