and adopted various contrivances for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes were floating in the street.  The city looked like this some two hundred years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for five years.  It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from the impending destruction.  A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water disappeared.  For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe got so much credit as for this.  To be sure, it is not generally mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened.

Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a district where they are of continual occurrence.  If one looks carefully at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to bottom.  There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly out of the perpendicular.  Any one who has noticed how the walls of the Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico.  On different occasions the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great.  By the way, the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of the building of the houses.  A modern English town with two-or-three-storied houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico.  Here, the houses of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are too low to suffer much by being shaken about.  A few days before we arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja,[8] the Merchants’ Exchange; and Pepe described to us the feeling of utter astonishment with which he saw his ball, after striking the other, go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket.  The shock of an earthquake had tilted the table up on one side.  While we were in Mexico there was a slight shock, which set the chandeliers swinging, but we did not even notice it.  In April, a solemn procession goes from the Cathedral, on a day marked in the Calendar as the “Patrocinio de Senor San Jose”, to implore the “Santissimo Patriarca” to protect the city from earthquakes (temblores).  In connection with this subject there is an opinion, so generally received in Mexico that it is worth notice.  Everybody there, even the most educated people, will tell you that there is an earthquake-season, which occurs in January or February; and that the shocks