and that makes their occupants content with humbler luxuries. From Montezuma to Maximilian, the occupants of this hill palace have many of them made a violent exit from their troublous honors. Juarez dared not stay here after night-fall without a large body-guard; and it is abandoned to occasional state breakfasts, the heart of the city being judged a safer residence. Maximilian enjoyed the retreat, and filled the palace with his own pictures and the imperial symbols, the only remnants of which are a few pitchers and basins with his monogram upon them. This is pretty near the estate to which the first and imperial Cæsar sunk. If his day was utilized to a chink filling, the crown of Maximilian turns into this clay of a wash-basin.
A dining-hall in the rear of the front rooms, on the backbone of the hill—hog's back it might be called for sharpness and roughness—opens pleasantly upon both northern and southern views. Here Juarez gave Seward a breakfast, the last public entertainment in this hall, and one worthy to be made, the saved fêting his savior; for had it not been for Mr. Seward's army of sixty thousand men at the Rio Grande, under General Sherman, and his letter to M. Drouhn L'Huys, requesting his master to gratify the President of the United States by withdrawing his troops from Mexico, Juarez would have still been at Washington, if alive. Both chiefs died in a few months after that breakfast; died at scarcely a moment's warning. So all that are to come to greatness here must turn to dust, as all have turned. Not much to choose between the Spanish blooded prince slain by an Aztec, and the Aztec slain by a Spaniard. Ecclesiastes is profitable reading at Chapultepec. "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. " Its woods are old, its rocks, its landscape, its mountains.
"Stars abide—
Shine down in the old sea:
Old are the shores:
But where are the old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen,"
