II.
QUERETARO.
Into the Town.—Maximilian's Retreat.—Capture and Execution.—Hill of Bells.—Factories and Gardens.—Hot-weather Bath.—A Home.—Alameda.—Sunday, sacred and secular.—A very Christian name.—Crowded Market, and empty Churches.—Chatting in Church.—Priestly Procession.—Among the Churches.—Hideous Images.—Handsome Gardens.
As I came rattling down the steep place into this fair city with the setting of the sun, I could only think of another sun that set here, and whose sad brilliance shot a lurid flame across the orb of the world. Here Maximilian met his fate.
This was the last landscape he ever saw; such a sunset on these same hills the last he ever looked upon. It brought a shadow over the picture, a shadow not of time, but of man. These are the fields and hills which
"Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."
Maximilian and Montezuma, three hundred and fifty years apart in their history, are blended in a historic unity. They had much in common. Men of refined rather than of strong nature, loving art rather than arts, put in command of a turbulent people at a crisis in its history, with an instinct of honor rather than of government, they each fell into hands more powerful than themselves, and perished with regret, and yet with dire military necessity.
Maximilian retreated to Queretaro, after the French left the country, a step of exceeding unwisdom; for Mexico the city is Mexico the State, and the possession of that is nine points in the possession of all the country. He fled to this city probably because
