white aigrets—sitting motionless on the surface of the water—white as the flowers of the water-lily, a few water-hens, wild ducks, and huge reptiles which shake the aquatic plants as they pass, and here and there an Indian angler standing up to the middle of his legs in water, are the only living beings to be seen in these solitudes. The heavens and the mountains are alone unchanged; and the same volcanoes, their tops covered with eternal snow, still shoot up aloft into the air as they did three hundred years before.
Having arrived at Buena Vista, which commands a view of the whole valley of Mexico, I stopped to take a last look of the beautiful plain at my feet. In the midst of a belt of blue hills and small villages, whose white houses contrasted beautifully with the green of the willows, the lakes assumed, owing to the distance, something of their ancient glory. Mexico seemed still the city of the New World. I stopped for a moment to contemplate the distant domes with a feeling of in voluntary dejection. I looked for the last time upon. a city to which I had come with all the curiosity and enthusiasm peculiar to youth. Mexico was my halting place when I returned from my excursions in the country round. It was like a second country to me; for, if infancy has its souvenirs dear to that state of childhood, youth can not forget the place where the flower of adolescence has shot up, and withered, alas! too soon. I looked again at this fertile valley, where smiles an eternal spring; and, to escape from the sadness which possessed me, put my horse to the gallop, and the lofty towers of that city which I was never more to behold were soon quickly lost to my view.
After passing a night at the venta of Cordova, my road lay through the woods of Rio Trio, so notorious
