the Spanish race, yet it is surprising to
see how much they will often accomplish with what would appear to us
totally inadequate means. Such was eminently the talent of Cortez.
Surrounded by disappointed men, who had been lured to the country by
magnificent pictures of its resources, he still went on extending his
conquests among the surrounding tribes.

Fortunately, the most precious of all metals is obtained by the most
simple process, and the gold-washings of the Mescala and other parts of
the south, which the Indians had but partially wrought, received more
attention as soon as they learned how readily the precious metal could
be exchanged for the gewgaws of the Europeans. Gold dust was greedily
exchanged for its weight in bright silver coins, and an ounce of gold
was not unfrequently given for a bright-colored handkerchief. In a few
months the means for the organization of a community were obtained from
the gold-diggings. Nothing tends so much to elevate the lowly as the
discovery of gold-washings, in which individual effort, and not
machinery, is the ruling power, and the producer of wealth. But even a
gold country has its evils; for nowhere have I ever seen so many
disappointed men as at the very place where an abundance of gold could
be had for simply washing it out of the mud; and nowhere have I seen so
large a proportion of unemployed men as on the spot where the wages of
labor were fabulously high. Still, with all these drawbacks, the city
of Cortez rapidly progressed under the stimulus of gold discoveries,
until he found the wildest of his dreams falling short of the reality.

THE MONKS IN MEXICO.

The new city did not occupy the exact position of its Indian
predecessor, but was clustered around the still remaining navigable
canals, upon the southern border, while the main portion of the old
city, which lay toward the northern limits of the island--where to this
day such an abundant supply of earthen gods is to be found by
digging--was left a mass of ruins. These were not, by any means, the
ruins of fallen stone walls, or capitals, or columns, but shapeless
masses of earth, which proclaim most unmistakably the kind of
magnificence which distinguished the ancient capital of the Aztec
empire.

The monks, who scented gold as buzzards scent carrion, began early to
discover the growing wealth of this new city, and soon a party of a
dozen Franciscans, in sackcloth with downcast visages, approached the
cit