Gold dust was greedily exchanged for its weight in bright silver coins, and an ounce of gold was not unfrequently given for a bright-colored handkerchief. In a few months the means for the organization of a community were obtained from the gold-diggings. Nothing tends so much to elevate the lowly as the discovery of gold-washings, in which individual effort, and not machinery, is the ruling power, and the producer of wealth. But even a gold country has its evils; for nowhere have I ever seen so many disappointed men as at the very place where an abundance of gold could be had for simply washing it out of the mud; and nowhere have I seen so large a proportion of unemployed men as on the spot where the wages of labor were fabulously high. Still, with all these drawbacks, the city of Cortéz rapidly progressed under the stimulus of gold discoveries, until he found the wildest of his dreams falling short of the reality.
THE MONKS IN MEXICO.
The new city did not occupy the exact position of its Indian predecessor, but was clustered around the still remaining navigable canals, upon the southern border, while the main portion of the old city, which lay toward the northern limits of the island—where to this day such an abundant supply of earthen gods is to be found by digging—was left a mass of ruins. These were not, by any means, the ruins of fallen stone walls, or capitals, or columns, but shapeless masses of earth, which proclaim most unmistakably the kind of magnificence which distinguished the ancient capital of the Aztec empire.
The monks, who scented gold as buzzards scent carrion, began early to discover the growing wealth of this new city, and soon a party of a dozen Franciscans, in sackcloth with downcast visages, approached the city.