of trade being kept up by a few men who act as interpreters and attend to the business of the tribe. In recesses among the mountains far to the south are tribes which have held entirely aloof from white men, whose very existence is known only by hearsay. Many others that are better known have been so reduced in numbers and so broken by oppression that scarcely a trace of their old character remains.
Some who took the wrong, or unfortunate, side in the struggle constantly going on between Cortez and his Spanish enemies were punished with fire and sword. Many a chief was hung from his own roof tree or burned at the stake, while thousands of the common people were branded as slaves and sold to the highest bidder, to wear out their lives in cruel bondage.
Poor Guatemozin, the young Aztec "chief-of-men," lost his life in these contentions. It was in 1525. Cortez had gone to Honduras, a journey of fifteen hundred miles, to put down D'Olid, one of his captains, who had been sent to the south on a colonizing expedition and undertook to set up for himself. Besides his Spaniards, horse and foot, Cortez had three thousand Mexican troops. The wild mountain-ravines echoed with the strains of martial music as they passed along, while buffoons in gay attire cheered the way with jest and song. But during this almost kingly progress through the land food and provender gave out, and the whole army were in great peril from famine. For days they subsisted on grass and the roots of an herb which burned the lips and the tongue. The poor fool who rode near Cortez was the first who died. The Indian guides lost the way, and the whole party would have perished in those pathless forests but for the mariner's compass which Cortez always car-
