The aloe has thick, pointed leaves sometimes ten feet long. It blossoms about once in ten years, when it sends a flower stalk twenty or thirty feet up into the air. At the very top an immense cluster of greenish-yellow blossoms appears. All the strength of the plant goes into these blossoms for, as they open, the leaves wither and die.
The Indians have learned to tell when the plant is getting ready to send up its giant flower-stalk. Just before it appears they cut out the heart with a sharp knife, leaving only the thick, outside rind of the stem. The sweet sap that should have gone to feed the flower-stalk begins to ooze into the hollow and continues to do so for several weeks. The Indians, who have discovered the right time to cut into the plant to prevent its flowering, have also learned that the sap can be used in making the drink which they call pulque.
The city of Mexico is a beautiful one, with high stone walls around it, a large square in the centre, and broad streets running at right angles to each other. Nearly all the houses are built of stone, with flat roofs on which the people sit in the evening to enjoy the cool breezes and watch the stars twinkling merrily in the heavens above.
The children of the big stone houses can play in inner courtyards among flowering plants and fountains. But when they leave their homes to go out into the city they must pass through heavy doors studded with nails and heavily chained. The house windows that face the street have iron bars across them, so that at first these houses seem like fortresses. But when one passes to the back part of such a building and looks out through the windows there upon the pretty courtyard with its fountains and flower-beds, or takes a comfortable chair on one of the balconies, with its gilded balustrades covered with trailing vines, he begins to feel as though he were in a beautiful palace.
The great square in the middle of the city is beautiful with trees and flowers, statues, and walks paved with snowy marble. In the long-ago a temple stood here where hundreds of people were sacrificed to the gods in whom the Aztecs believed. On one side of the square stands the house of the president, and on another there is a grand cathedral where the Mexicans and their children go to worship. The cathedral doors are always open so that any day you may go inside and find people kneeling there. Rich and poor, grand ladies in delicate muslins and jewels, and the poorest Indians with their packs of fruit or coops filled with chickens still on their backs, kneel in prayer side by side.