e, an
eastern richness which is lacking in our well schooled English women,
that at one and the same stroke touched both the imagination and the
senses, and through them enthralled the heart.

For Otomie seemed such woman as men dream of but very rarely win, seeing
that the world has few such natures and fewer nurseries where they can
be reared. At once pure and passionate, of royal blood and heart, rich
natured and most womanly, yet brave as a man and beautiful as the night,
with a mind athirst for knowledge and a spirit that no sorrows could
avail to quell, ever changing in her outer moods, and yet most faithful
and with the honour of a man, such was Otomie, Montezuma's daughter,
princess of the Otomie. Was it wonderful then that I found her fair, or,
when fate gave me her love, that at last I loved her in turn? And yet
there was that in her nature which should have held me back had I but
known of it, for with all her charm, her beauty and her virtues, at
heart she was still a savage, and strive as she would to hide it, at
times her blood would master her.

But as I lay in the chamber of the palace of Chapoltepec, the tramp of
the guards without my door reminded me that I had little now to do with
love and other delights, I whose life hung from day to day upon a hair.
To-morrow the priests would decide my fate, and when the priests were
judges, the prisoner might know the sentence before it was spoken. I was
a stranger and a white man, surely such a one would prove an offering
more acceptable to the gods than that furnished by a thousand Indian
hearts. I had been snatched from the altars of Tobasco that I might
grace the higher altars of Tenoctitlan, and that was all. My fate would
be to perish miserably far from my home, and in this world never to be
heard of more.

Musing thus sadly at last I slept. When I woke the sun was up. Rising
from my mat I went to the wood-barred window place and looked through.
The palace whence I gazed was placed on the crest of a rocky hill. On
one side this hill was bathed by the blue waters of Tezcuco, on the
other, a mile or more away, rose the temple towers of Mexico. Along the
slopes of the hill, and in some directions for a mile from its
base, grew huge cedar trees from the boughs of which hung a grey and
ghostly-looking moss. These trees are so large that the smallest of them
is bigger than the best oak in this parish of Ditchingham, while the
greatest measures twenty-two paces