FOREWORD
An incomparable picture-story told long ago how a few hundred Spaniards subdued a militarized country and its tens of thousands of warriors mustered against them. After going up from a sea-board to a capital city—this time to the splendid, Aztec city of Mexico—another Xenophon wrote another Anabasis. It is a wonderful tale, and no one can say why, before this book, it has not belonged, in part at least, to a public as avid as the American for straightforward stories of pluck, pertinacity, foresight and a final dazzling success.
Seventy years or so ago Prescott said the story was one of the two pillars on which history of the Conquest mainly rested. The fastidious scholar wondered at what the Conquistador called his own "plain and rude" tale, where "truth supplies the place of art and eloquence," and although he found Diaz' matchless narrative "vulgar" in several phases, he confessed it would be read and re-read by scholar and school-boy while compositions of phrase-polishers slept undisturbed on their shelves.
To us of to-day Bernal Diaz del Castillo is not "vulgar." Profounder sentiments strengthen our
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