CHAPTER XVIII

wood fire, in a fire-place, with feet on fender and tongs in hand, listening to an animated conversation so mixed up of two languages that it was hard to tell which predominated. Not all the stateliness to be found in Mexican palaces, where, in a lordly tapestried halls, men and women sit and shiver over a protracted dinner, can yield pleasures like those grouped around an English fireside. The evening was not half long enough to say all that was to be discussed. As we sat and chatted, and drank our tea with a gusto we had never known before, we forgot altogether that we were indulging in plebeian enjoyments upon the spot where a king's palace had probably stood. Instead of such plebeian things as a wood floor and Brussels carpet, his half-clad majesty had here squatted upon a mat, and dealt out justice or injustice, according to his caprice, to trembling crowds of dirty Indians, whose royal rags and feathers made them princely. Dignity and majesty are truly parts of Indian character, but a good dinner and a clean bed are luxuries that an Indian, even though he were an emperor, never knew.