'We must suffer, Otomie, because we are born to it. Just so much
happiness is given to us as shall save us from madness and no more. Ask
me not why, for I cannot answer you! There is no answer in my faith or
in any other.'

And then, looking on that dead babe, I wept also. Every hour in those
terrible months it was my lot to see a thousand sights more awful, and
yet this sight of a dead infant moved me the most of all of them. The
child was mine, my firstborn, its mother wept beside me, and its stiff
and tiny fingers seemed to drag at my heart strings. Seek not the cause,
for the Almighty Who gave the heart its infinite power of pain alone can
answer, and to our ears He is dumb.

Then I took a mattock and dug a hole outside the house till I came to
water, which in Tenoctitlan is found at a depth of two feet or so. And,
having muttered a prayer over him, there in the water I laid the body of
our child, burying it out of sight. At the least he was not left for the
zapilotes, as the Aztecs call the vultures, like the rest of them.

After that we wept ourselves to sleep in each other's arms, Otomie
murmuring from time to time, 'Oh! my husband, I would that we were
asleep and forgotten, we and the babe together.'

'Rest now,' I answered, 'for death is very near to us.'

The morrow came, and with it a deadlier fray than any that had gone
before, and after it more morrows and more deaths, but still we lived
on, for Guatemoc gave us of his food. Then Cortes sent his heralds
demanding our surrender, and now three-fourths of the city was a ruin,
and three-fourths of its defenders were dead. The dead were heaped in