I looked from Urania’s unfathomable eyes to Enriquez’s impenetrable countenance.  I might have been equal to either of them alone, but together they were invincible.  I looked hopelessly at the baby.  With its sharp little eyes and composed face, it certainly was a marvelous miniature of Enriquez.  I said so.

“It would be singular if it was not,” said Mrs. Saltillo dryly; “and as I believe it is by no means an uncommon fact in human nature, it seems to me strange that people should insist upon it as a discovery.  It is an inheritance, however, that in due time progress and science will no doubt interrupt, to the advancement of the human race.  I need not say that both Enriquez and myself look forward to it with confident tranquillity.”

There was clearly nothing for me to do now but to shake hands again and take my leave.  Yet I was so much impressed with the unreality of the whole scene that when I reached the front door I had a strong impulse to return suddenly and fall in upon them in their relaxed and natural attitudes.  They could not keep up this pose between themselves; and I half expected to see their laughing faces at the window, as I glanced up before wending my perilous way to the street.

I found Mrs. Saltillo’s manuscript well written and, in the narrative parts, even graphic and sparkling.  I suppressed some general remarks on the universe, and some correlative theories of existence, as not appertaining particularly to the Aztecs, and as not meeting any unquenchable thirst for information on the part of the readers of the “Daily Excelsior.”  I even promoted my fair contributor to the position of having been commissioned, at great expense, to make the Mexican journey especially for the “Excelsior.”  This, with Mrs. Saltillo’s somewhat precise preraphaelite drawings and water-colors, vilely reproduced by woodcuts, gave quite a sensational air to her production, which, divided into parts, for two or three days filled a whole page of the paper.  I am not aware of any particular service that it did to ethnology; but, as I pointed out in the editorial column, it showed that the people of California were not given over by material greed to the exclusion of intellectual research; and as it was attacked instantly in long communications from one or two scientific men, it thus produced more copy.

Briefly, it was a boom for the author and the “Daily Excelsior.”  I should add, however, that a rival newspaper intimated that it was also a boom for Mrs. Saitillo’s husband, and called attention to the fact that a deserted Mexican mine, known as “El Bolero,” was described graphically in the Aztec article among the news, and again appeared in the advertising columns of the same paper.  I turned somewhat indignantly to the file of the “Excelsior,” and, singularly enough, found in the elaborate prospectus of a new gold-mining company the description of the El Bolero mine as a quotation from the Aztec article,