every word was made known to the audience in confidence, before it came out
upon the stage officially. The whole pit smoked, the galleries smoked, the
boxes smoked, the prompter smoked, a long stream of smoke curling from his
box, giving something oracular and Delphic to his prophecies.

"The force of _smoking_ could no further go."

The theatre is certainly unworthy of this fine city.

3ist.--We have spent the day in visiting the castle of Chapultepec, a short
league from Mexico, the most haunted by recollections of all the
traditionary sites of which Mexico can boast. Could these hoary cypresses
speak, what tales might they not disclose, standing there with their long
gray beards, and outstretched venerable arms, century after century:
al ready old when Montezuma was a boy, and still vigorous in the days of
Bustamante! There has the last of the Aztec emperors wandered with his
dark-eyed harem. Under the shade of these gigantic trees he has rested,
perhaps smoked his "tobacco mingled with amber," and fallen to sleep, his
dreams unhaunted by visions of the stern traveller from the far-east, whose
sails even then might be within sight of the shore. In these tanks he has
bathed. Here were his gardens, and his aviaries, and his fish-ponds.
Through these now tangled and deserted woods, he may have been carried by
his young nobles in his open litter, under a splendid dais, stepping out
upon the rich stuffs which his slaves spread before him on the green and
velvet turf.

And from the very rock where the castle stands, he may have looked out upon
his fertile valley and great capital, with its canoe-covered lakes and
outspreading villages and temples, and gardens of flowers, no care for the