March 24th
I am sitting in the motor, jotting this down in the shade of some trees by the beautiful Alameda, waiting for N. to finish at the Foreign Office. Afterward he goes to “Guerra” and I to shop.
Yesterday afternoon, on our return from Vera Cruz, N. dashed to the telephone and communicated with the Fletchers. They came to tea at four. Later Nelson went out with the admiral, and I drove to San Angel with Mrs. Fletcher and her two pretty daughters. She is most agreeable. Her appreciation of the sunset on the volcanoes, which were in their most splendid array for the occasion, was all my heart could have asked. They return to Vera Cruz to-night.
I am feeling very fit, after a good night’s rest; the air envelops me like a luminous wrap, and the sun is softly penetrating.
The arms and ammunition are not yet delivered. Nothing was done in N.’s absence, of course. He didn’t want them, anyway; of what use are they in civilian hands?...
The War Ministry is just off the Zocalo, in one side of the great, square building of the Palacio Nacional. From where I am sitting I see the soft, pink towers of the cathedral, in their lacy outlines. On the left is the Museo Nacional—a beautiful old building of the pink, tezontle stone the Spaniards used to such effect in their buildings. It contains all the Aztec treasures still remaining after centuries of destruction, and has a cozy, sun-warmed patio where the sacrificial altars and the larger pieces are grouped. Most of them were found in the very site of the cathedral, which replaced the teocalli of the Aztecs—the first thing the Spaniards destroyed, to rear on its site the beautiful cathedral. I am surrounded by an increasing crowd of beggars, drawn by a few indiscreet centavos given to an old Indian woman, who too loudly blessed me; cries of “Niña, por el amor de Dios!” and “Niña, por la Santa Madre de Dios!” make me feel that I would better move on. The name of God is invoked so unceasingly by the beggars here that the word pordiosero (for-Godsaker, beggar,) has passed into the language.