They have little balls in them which shake about, and they puzzled us much as the apple-dumpling did good King George, for we could not make out very easily how the balls got inside.  They were probably attached very slightly to the inside, and so baked and then broken loose.  We often got little balls like schoolboys’ marbles, among lots of Mexican antiquities, and these were most likely the balls out of broken rattles.

Burning incense was always an important part of the Mexican ceremonies.  When the white men were on their march to the capital, the inhabitants used to come out to meet them with such plates as we saw here, and burn copal before the leaders; and in Indian villages to this day the procession on saints’ days would not be complete without men burning incense, not in regular censers, but in unglazed earthen platters such as their forefathers used.

[Illustration:  THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF AN AZTEC MASK. Sculptured out of hard brown lava.  Twelve inches high; ten inches wide. (From Mr. Christy’s Collection.)]

Our word copal is the Mexican copalli.  There are a few other Mexican words which have been naturalized in our European languages, of course indicating that the things they represent came from Mexico. Ocelotl is ocelot; Tomatl is tomata; Chilli is the Spanish chile and our chili; Cacahuatl is cacao or cocoa; and Chocolatl, the beverage made from the cacao-bean with a mixture of vanilla, is our chocolate.

Cacao-beans were used by the Mexicans as money.  Even in Humboldt’s time, when there was no copper coinage, they were used as small change, six for a halfpenny; and Stephens says the Central Americans use them to this day.  A mat in Mexican is petlatl, and thence a basket made of matting was called petlacalli—­“mathouse.”  The name passed to the plaited grass cigar-cases that are exported to Europe; and now in Spain any kind of cigar-case is called a petaca.

The pretty little ornamented calabashes—­used, among other purposes, for drinking chocolate out of—­were called by the Mexicans xicalli, a word which the Spaniards made into jicara, and now use to mean a chocolate-cup; and even the Italians have taken to it, and call a tea-cup a chicchera.

There is a well-known West Indian fruit which we call an avocado or alligator-pear, and which the French call avocat and the Spaniards aguacate.  All these names are corruptions of the Aztec name of the fruit, ahuacatl.

Vanilla and cochineal were first found in Mexico; but the Spaniards did not adopt the unpronounceable native names, tlilxochitl and nocheztli.  Vanilla, vainilla, means a little bean, from vaina, which signifies a scabbard or sheath, also a pod. Cochinilla is from coccus, a berry, as it was at first supposed to be of vegetable origin.  The Aztec name for cochineal, nocheztli, means “cactus-blood,” and is a very apt description of the insect, which has in it a drop of deep crimson fluid, in which the colouring matter of the dye is contained.