of these Indians speak very good Spanish,
and come incognito into the towns and villages
to find a market for their tobacco.
When they have got rid of their merchandise
they disappear, and never come again to the
same market. I have been told that they have
whites among them. The place of their
abode is known, but there is only one way
of approach to it, and nobody has been bold
enough to venture thither except a tax-gatherer,"
(the most all-pervading of all creatures)
" who" (of course) "never reappeared.
These men, whose life is surrounded by so
singular a mystery, all carry fire-arms, and are
thought, rightly or wrongly, to be very civilised.
Of their religion nothing at all is known."

This race, no doubt, lay at the bottom of
the story which the padre decorated a little;
and which Signer Velasquez or his representative
has decorated a great deal more by
a little out of Layard's Nineveh, a little out
of the old tales of the terror caused at the
first sight of fire-arms, &c., a little out of the
accounts of Copan, and a great deal out of his
own head.

Fifteen years of antiquarian and traveller's
experience upon the ground in question may
qualify M. de Waldeck to gave a somewhat
decisive criticism on the Aztec story. In his
opinion the courtesy of the Spanish merchant
who neglected his business to go on a wild
goose chase with a couple of Tudios—as the
English and North Americans are called
contemptuously by the Spaniards and Creoles
in those parts—is very wonderful. As for the
Indians who marched to Iximaya with the
three gentlemen, they must have differed
greatly from their class; who cannot usually
be got for money or even for spirits to undertake
a journey upon unknown ground.

The Indians met with other Indians whose
language they could not understand. Yet
the Maya tongue and the Tehol (the remains
of the language of the old Palenquiens) are
spoken for more than eighty leagues south of
Peten, and Velasquez is said to have known
the idioms of the country.

The padre is said to have seen an immense
plain from the top of the Sierra. The whole
district is covered with thick virgin forest.
"I myself," says M. de Waldeck, "searched
unsuccessfully for the mysterious city in the
situation indicated by the Indians " most
likely to know something authentic about the
place, namely, the smugglers who are engaged
daily in the transport of prohibited merchandize
from Belize to Peten, and thence (always
through the thick forests) to Yucatan. " The
priests throughout central America take
their information from the old and incorrect
books written by other priests shortly after
the conquest, and so perpetuate errors in
which they firmly believe. I have been
regaled with numbers of wild theories during
my travels in central America, wherein I
believe no more than in the stone-swinging
hammock of the ruins of Copan."

Such names as Vaalpeor given to a native,
Kaanas to a set of idiotic priests, Cowana for
intruders, stamp also, M. de Waldeck states,
the whole story as an obvious fraud; since no
such words could occur among people speaking
—as the people of Iximaya were said to
speak—a Mayan dialect. The letters r. s. w.,
for example, are altogether foreign to the
Mayan language. As for the Aztec language,
it must be remembered that the Aztecs
were confined by the Chiapanec boundary to
the south, and to the east by their natural
enemies the Tlascaltecas, and could not pass
to the coast without their permission, unless
they went a great way round. The Aztec
language has never been spoken in Chiapas,
Yucatan and Tabasco. Those districts have
their distinct idioms, which blend together
as they border on each other. Malinche,
the mistress of Fernando Cortés, was born,
on the limits of Tabasco and Anahuac;
therefore she was enabled to be his inter-
preter to the Mexicans.

M. de Waldeck is not only acquainted with
the Maya races; but dwelt also for six months
in a village of pure Aztecs, who had lived
without an admixture of strange blood since
the time of Montezuma. The people of the
village called Huichilaqué were induced to
receive the traveller by a pressing recommendation
to the Alcalde, though he was the first
white man allowed to make a home among
them. He there studied their language, and
of their appearance he gives the following
report:—Both sexes are finely built; their
features are severe, and rather of a handsome
character, the hair coarse, black and very
straight, beard very scarce, the external angle
of the eye raised as in Asiatics. The height of
the men five feet and four or five inches; of
the women about two inches less. They lived
chiefly on maize, with vegetables, fruit, and
rattlesnakes. The Aztecs never got so
far south as the imagined Iximaya. They
came from a spot a hundred and seventy
leagues above North California, and took
more than a century to get to Mexico.
In and before the time of Montezuma,
the Mexicans used to cross the gulf to
Yucatan in pilgrimage to the great deity
of the island of Cuzamil (now Cosumul)
and there was no other intercourse between
the distinct nations. Aztecs, of course,
would not speak any dialect of the Mayan
language.

More we need scarcely say about the fable
coined to heighten the attraction of the dwarf
children. They are, doubtless, a couple of
dwarf children, bought from Indians, and
made into a show. When we went to see them,
a candid gentleman told to the assembled
visitors the Velasquez story, in an artless and
ingenuous way, that oiled its passage into our
heads. He acknowledged that it looked here
and there rather incredible, but there it was,
just as it came to him: Velasquez might be
a great cheat, but he hoped not; if he was, it