specimen of the bulldog’s abilities fresh in my recollection, I preferred not making any attempt to resent his impertinent intrusion, but lay still, till he had satisfied himself with walking about the room and sniffing at our beds, when he lay down on my carpet; I soon fell asleep again, and next morning he was gone.  The foreigners in Mexico seem to delight in fierce bull-dogs.  The Casa Grande at Tezcuco is not by any means the only place where they form part of the garrison.  One English acquaintance of ours in the Capital kept two of these beasts up in his rooms, and not even the servants dared go up, unless the master was there.

Every one who has read Prescott’s ‘Mexico’ will recollect Nezahualcoyotl, the king of Tezcuco; and the palaces he built there for his wives, and his poets, and the rest of his great court.  These palaces were built chiefly of mud bricks; and time and the Spaniards have dealt so hardly with them, that even their outlines can no longer be traced.  Traces of two large teocallis are just visible, and Mr. Bowring has some burial mounds in his grounds which will be examined some day.  There is a Mexican calendar built into the wall of one of the churches; and, as we walked about the streets of the present town, we noticed stones that must have been sculptured before the Spaniards brought in their broken-down classic style, and so stopped the development of native art.  As for the rest of old Tezcuco, it has “become heaps.”  Wherever they dig ditches or lay the foundations of houses, you may see the ground full of its remains.

As I said before, when speaking of the stuccoed floors near Teotihuacan, the accumulation of alluvial soil goes on very rapidly and very regularly all over the plains of Mexico and Puebla, where everything favours its deposit; and the human remains preserved in it are so numerous that its age may readily be seen.  We noticed this in many places, but in no instance so well as between Tezcuco and the hacienda of Miraflores.  There a long ditch, some five feet deep, had just been cut in anticipation of the rainy season.  As yet it was dry, and, as we walked along it, we found three periods of Mexican history distinctly traceable from one end to the other.  First came mere alluvium, without human remains.  Then, just above, came fragments of obsidian knives and bits of unglazed pottery.  Above this again, a third layer, in which the obsidian ceased, and much of the pottery was still unglazed; but many fragments were glazed, and bore the unmistakable Spanish patterns in black and yellow.

It is a pity that these alluvial deposits, which give such good evidence as to the order in which different peoples or different states of society succeeded one another on the earth, should be so valueless as a means of calculating the time of their duration; but one can easily see that they must always be so, by considering how the thickness of the deposits is altered by such accidents as the formation of a mud-bank, or the opening of a new channel,—­things that must be continually occurring in districts where this very accumulation is going on.  The only place where any calculation can be based upon its thickness is on the banks of the Nile, where its accumulations round the ancient monuments may perhaps give a criterion as to the time which has elapsed since man ceased to clear away the deposits of the river.[13]