We went one morning to the house of our friend Don Pepe, and were informed by the servant as we entered the courtyard that the niño, the child, was up stairs waiting for us. “The Child” seemed an odd term to apply to a young man of five and twenty. The young ladies, in the same way are called the nias, and keep the appellation until they marry.
We went off with the niño to his uncle’s house at Tacubaya, on the rising ground above Mexico. In the garden there we found a vegetation such as one would find in southern Europe—figs, olives, peaches, roses, and many other European trees and flowers—growing luxuriantly, but among them the passion-flower, which produces one of the most delicious of fruits, the granadita, and other semi-tropical plants. The live creatures in the garden, however, were anything but European in their character. There were numbers of immense butterflies of the most brilliant colours; and the garden was full of hummingbirds, darting backwards and forwards with wonderful swiftness, and dipping their long beaks into the flowers. They call them chupa-mirtos—myrtle-suckers, and the Indians take them by blowing water upon them from a cane, and catching them before they have recovered from the shock. One day we bought a cage full of them, and tried to keep them alive in our room by feeding them with sugar and water, but the poor little things pined away. In old times the Mexicans were famous for their ornaments of humming-bird’s feathers. The taste with which they arranged feathers of many