CHAPTER III. CITY OF MEXICO.

our boatmen about them, we reach Santa Anita. Here there are swampy lanes and more swampy gardens, a little village of Indian houses, three or four pulque-shops, and a church. Outside the pulque-shops are fresco-paintings, representing Aztec warriors carousing, and draining great bowls of pulque. These were no specimens of Aztec art, however, but seemed to be copied (by some white or half-caste sign-painter, probably) from the French coloured engravings which represent the events of the Conquest. These extraordinary works of art are to be seen everywhere in this country, where, of all places in the world, one would have thought that people would have noticed that the artist had not the faintest idea of what an Aztec was like, but supposed that his limbs and face and hair were like an European’s. Here, with the real Aztec standing underneath, the difference was striking enough. One ought not to be too critical about these things, however, when one remembers the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses that adorn our English farmhouses. We drank pulque at the sign of The Cacique, and liked it, for we had now quite got over our aversion to its putrid taste and smell. I wonder that our new faculty of pulque-drinking did not make us able to relish the suspicious eggs that abound in Mexican inns, but it had no such effect, unfortunately.