master was there.

Every one who has read Prescott's 'Mexico' will recollect
Nezahualcoyotl, the king of Tezcuco; and the palaces he built there for
his wives, and his poets, and the rest of his great court. These
palaces were built chiefly of mud bricks; and time and the Spaniards
have dealt so hardly with them, that even their outlines can no longer
be traced. Traces of two large teocallis are just visible, and Mr.
Bowring has some burial mounds in his grounds which will be examined
some day. There is a Mexican calendar built into the wall of one of the
churches; and, as we walked about the streets of the present town, we
noticed stones that must have been sculptured before the Spaniards
brought in their broken-down classic style, and so stopped the
development of native art. As for the rest of old Tezcuco, it has
"become heaps." Wherever they dig ditches or lay the foundations of
houses, you may see the ground full of its remains.

As I said before, when speaking of the stuccoed floors near
Teotihuacan, the accumulation of alluvial soil goes on very rapidly and
very regularly all over the plains of Mexico and Puebla, where
everything favours its deposit; and the human remains preserved in it
are so numerous that its age may readily be seen. We noticed this in
many places, but in no instance so well as between Tezcuco and the
hacienda of Miraflores. There a long ditch, some five feet deep, had
just been cut in anticipation of the rainy season. As yet it was dry,
and, as we walked along it, we found three periods of Mexican history
distinctly traceable from one end to the other. First came mere
alluvium, without human remains. Then, just above, came fragments of
obsidian knives and bits of unglazed pottery. Above this again, a third
layer, in which the obsidian ceased, and much of the pottery was still
unglazed; but many fragments were glazed, and bore the unmistakable
Spanish patterns in black and yellow.

It is a pity that these alluvial deposits, which give such good
evidence as to the order in which different peoples or different states
of society succeeded one another on the earth, should be so valueless
as a means of calculating the time of their duration; but one can
easily see that they must always be so, by considering how the
thickness of the deposits is altered by such accidents as the formation
of a mud-bank, or the opening of a new channel,--things that must be
continually occurring in districts where t