the largest part; the hand-rail, from six to eight inches wide. Upon the top of this hand-rail, at the distance of six or eight feet apart, are images, beautifully wrought and about two feet high, used as candelabras. All of these—the balustrade, the hand-rail and the images—are made of a compound of gold, silver and copper, more valuable than silver. It is said that an offer was once refused to take this balustrade and replace it with another of exactly the same size and workmanship, of pure silver, and to give half a million of dollars besides. As you walk through the building, on either side there are different apartments filled from floor to ceiling with paintings, statues, vases, huge candlesticks, waiters and a thousand other articles of gold and silver."[1] The jeweled vestments of the Virgin enshrined in this magnificent building are said to have cost three millions of dollars, while the garments of the priests who minister to her on state occasions are proportionate in worth, and so heavy that the wearers can scarcely stand under their weight when pronouncing the benediction. The cathedral was but one of seventy or eighty churches in the City of Mexico whose wealth and splendor made them remarkable in an age when the Church claimed a monopoly of the treasures of the world.
When Cortez was demolishing old Tenochtitlan, as the city was then called, it was found to be impossible to break up some of the heathen monuments with which it abounded, and he therefore ordered them to be buried in the great square. . Besides the calendar stones, the old stone of sacrifice, with a heavy yoke once used in holding fast the victim, was dug up in 1790, also a huge stone image of Humming-Bird, with some of the carved
- ↑ Mexico and the United States, by G. D. Abbott, LL.D.
