When the feast was done and we had drunk of the cocoa or chocolate, and smoked tobacco in pipes, a strange but most soothing custom that I learned in Tobasco and of which I have never been able to break myself, though the weed is still hard to come by here in England, I was led to my sleeping place, a small chamber panelled with cedar boards.  For a while I could not sleep, for I was overcome by the memory of all the strange sights that I had seen in this wonderful new land which was so civilised and yet so barbarous.  I thought of that sad-faced king, the absolute lord of millions, surrounded by all that the heart of man can desire, by vast wealth, by hundreds of lovely wives, by loving children, by countless armies, by all the glory of the arts, ruling over the fairest empire on the earth, with every pleasure to his hand, a god in all things save his mortality, and worshipped as a god, and yet a victim to fear and superstition, and more heavy hearted than the meanest slave about his palaces.  Here was a lesson such as Solomon would have loved to show, for with Solomon this Montezuma might cry: 

’I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces:  I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, and musical instruments, and that of all sorts.  And whatsoever my eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy.  And behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.’

So he might have cried, so, indeed, he did cry in other words, for, as the painting of the skeletons and the three monarchs that is upon the north wall of the aisle of Ditchingham Church shows forth so aptly, kings have their fates and happiness is not to them more than to any other of the sons of men.  Indeed, it is not at all, as my benefactor Fonseca once said to me; true happiness is but a dream from which we awake continually to the sorrows of our short laborious day.

Then my thoughts flew to the vision of that most lovely maid, the princess Otomie, who, as I believed, had looked on me so kindly, and I found that vision sweet, for I was young, and the English Lily, my own love, was far away and lost to me for ever.  Was it then wonderful that I should find this Indian poppy fair?  Indeed, where is the man who would not have been overcome by her sweetness, her beauty, and that stamp of royal grace which comes with kingly blood and the daily exercise of power?  Like the rich wonders of the robe she wore, her very barbarism, of which now I saw but the better side, drew and dazzled my mind’s eye, giving her woman’s tenderness some new quality, sombre and strange, an eastern richness which is lacking in our well schooled English women, that at one and the same stroke touched both the imagination and the senses, and through them enthralled the heart.