to be abandoned, and the people had made a raised
pathway of planks along tho street, and adopted various contrivances
for getting dryshod up to their first floors; and in some places canoes
were floating in the street. The city looked like this some two hundred
years ago, when Martinez the engineer tried an unfortunate experiment
with his draining tunnel at Huehuetoca, and flooded the whole city for
five years. It was by the interference, they tell us, of the patroness
of the Indians, our Lady of Guadalupe, who was brought from her own
temple on purpose, that the city was delivered from the impending
destruction. A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the
ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water
disappeared. For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe
got so much credit as for this. To be sure, it is not generally
mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to
the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened.

Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a
district where they are of continual occurrence. If one looks carefully
at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls
slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to
bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly
out of the perpendicular. Any one who has noticed how the walls of the
Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the
settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general
appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico. On different occasions the
destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great. By the way, the
liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of the
building of the houses. A modern English town with two-or-three-storied
houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid in ruins by a shock
which would hardly affect Mexico. Here, the houses of several storeys
have stone walls of such thickness that they resist by sheer strength;
and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are too low to suffer
much by being shaken about. A few days before we arrived here, our
friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja,[8] the
Merchants' Exchange; and Pepe described to us the feeling of utter
astonishment with which he saw his ball, after striking the other,
go suddenly off at an absurd angle into a pocket. The shock of an
eart