180 BEAUTIFUL BIRDS 
This Mexico is such an interesting country. It 
belongs, now, to the Spaniards, whom I dare say you 
have heard about, but once it belonged to a quite 
different people, an old people who had been there 
for hundreds and hundreds of years, long before 
Columbus discovered America. These people were 
civilised, only in a different way to ourselves. They 
did not wear the kind of clothes that we do, but only 
light linen things, dyed all sorts of colours, which were 
prettier and suited the climate. They had many 
cities, as we have, though they were built in a different 
way, and the largest was built all overa great lake, with 
bridges going from one side of it to another. One 
can build houses in the water, you know, for there is 
Venice in Italy, and Rotterdam in Holland, which 
are both built in the sea, and which your mother will 
tell you about. 
These people, who were called Aztecs, were very 
clever workmen, and such wonderful goldsmiths and 
silversmiths, especially, that they used to make imita- 
tion gardens, with all sorts of flowers beaten out of 
gold and silver. Then they used feathers as we do a 
paint-box, to make pictures of things with. They 
would paint houses and ships and men and boats and 
landscapes with them, putting the right-coloured 
feathers just where they were wanted, blue ones for 
the sky, green ones for the grass, and so on. For the 
