“What’s this?” Laura questioned the next morning when she came upon Amelia in her hotel room reading diligently from a book.

“Oh, nothing.” Amelia barely looked up.

“Come on, tell aunty,” Laura teased. “Nobody else is up yet and I’ve simply got to talk to someone.”

“You mean there’s no one else about, so you’ll talk to me. Well, I like that!” Amelia returned to her book as though she were really indignant.

“You know I didn’t,” Laura sounded very conciliatory—for her. “It’s just this; I’ve got the whim-whams something terrible. Did you ever have the whim-whams, Amelia?”

“Can’t say I did,” Amelia answered. “At least I didn’t call them any such name as that.”

“Then you know what I mean?” Laura looked very serious.

“You mean,” Amelia turned the open book over on her lap and answered Laura’s question, “that you have awakened early in a hotel in a strange city, that you want like anything to go off exploring, that you know you can’t, and that the next best thing you can find to do is to annoy someone else who can’t go either.”

“My dear professor,” Laura assumed as serious a mien as possible, “you have hit the well-known nail squarely on the head. It must be that you have the whim-whams too. Now what is that you are reading?”

“Well, if you must know,” Amelia gave in, “It’s a guidebook to Mexico.”

“Ah, what could be better.” Laura herself reached for the book. “Let’s see what this country across the street from this hotel is like.”

“It does seem funny, doesn’t it,” Amelia said, “that when we look out our hotel windows we are looking into a foreign country. It doesn’t look any different. It doesn’t sound any different. And it doesn’t—”

“Smell any different,” Laura finished, “and that’s the most surprising thing of all, because according to Mr. MacKenzie, Mexico is just the smelliest place on God’s green earth.”

“Did he tell you that too?” Amelia asked. “Really, when he finished the tirade against the country that he delivered to me after dinner, I began to wonder why in the world he ever brought along five such nice girls as we.”

“Five? What’s the matter, ’Mealy, can’t you count before breakfast? There are six of us.”

“I said five nice girls,” Amelia insisted. “He might have had one of several reasons for bringing you along.”

“Such as—” Nan had come into the room just in time to hear this last.

“Oh, he might have wanted to make the world a better place for the rest of us to live in by losing Laura, making her a target for the revolutionists, feeding her to the bulls, or just leaving her here as food for the fleas,” Amelia responded airily, and then she put her arm around Laura’s shoulder as though to show her that she didn’t mean a word of what she was saying.

“They do say,” Grace added as she joined the group, “that the fleas here are man-sized. That reporter told me last night that the reason they give us mosquito netting to put over us at night is that the fleas and the mosquitos wage a nightly battle as to who is going to carry off the Americans.”

“And you believed him?” Laura laughed.

“Well, not exactly,” Grace answered, “but I did carefully tuck my netting all round me last night.”

“He told me lots of things about Mexico, too,” Nan added, “and I don’t know which of them to believe. This is a queer country we are going into, full of so many strange legends, so many different kinds of people that any wild tale at all might be true.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Amelia agreed, “when Laura came into the room this morning. This guidebook here is full of all sorts of queer tales.”

“Such as—?” Nan queried.

“Oh, you people in there,” Bess called from another room, “wait until Rhoda and I come before you talk any more about Mexico. We want to hear too.”

“All right, slow-pokes,” Nan called back, “but you’ll have to hurry. We’re supposed to be downstairs for breakfast with Cousin Adair in exactly one-half hour.”

At this, Bess and Rhoda came into Amelia’s room and the girls, all dressed in sports clothes, settled themselves to learn something about the country they were going to visit.

“It says here,” Nan began, for she had long ago lifted the guidebook from Amelia’s lap, “that Mexico is a Latin-American country south of the United States of America. The Gulf of Mexico is to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.”

“Oh, we know that,” Bess interrupted impatiently, “tell us something that is different.”

“Well, how’s this?” Nan queried, “Mexico is a land of great contrasts. About sixty percent of its population are Indians who live in a backward civilization that weaves its own clothes, grinds its own corn, does everything for itself by hand. The other forty percent is advanced and modern. The first can neither read nor write. The latter attends modern schools and universities.

“Nothing in Mexico, in its history, its climate, its people, or its landscape is dull or monotonous.”

“That’s better,” Bess approved. She was not one to care much for facts or figures.

“Oh, there are more interesting things than that in the book,” Amelia reached for it. “Here let me read you something that I found this morning.”

“Just a second,” Nan held on to it, “How in the world do you pronounce these words with all their z’s and x’s. No wonder there are so many people that can’t read or write. I wouldn’t be able to write myself if I lived here. Imagine living in a place called Ixmiquilpan or Xochimilco.” She spelled them all out because she couldn’t possibly pronounce them. “They must all be Indian words dating from the time of the Aztecs,” Nan went on. “Look, they all have beautiful meanings.

“Chalchihuites is translated into ‘Emeralds in the Rough’, Tehuacan, ‘Stone of the gods’, Chiapas, ‘River of the Lime-leaved Sage’, and Tzintzuntzan, ‘Humming Bird’. And here’s a place I want to go, Yecapixtla or ‘Place Where People Have Sharp Noses’.”

“What a funny place that must be,” Laura laughed with Nan, “I’ll bet they all spend their time minding one another’s business.”

“They probably have a factory there,” Nan went on, “for turning out people like Mrs. Cupp and they have catalogues showing the sharp, sharper, and sharpest noses.”

“And when a school principal wants to hire an assistant that will see everything and hear everything he pays top price and gets the sharpest,” Laura liked the idea. “We ought to go there,” she ended, “if it’s only to get a postcard so that we can send it back to Mrs. Cupp with the words ‘Wish you were here’.”

“Oh, Laura, you old meany,” Nan laughed. “You know she isn’t half as bad as you make her out to be.”

“No, she isn’t,” Laura agreed. “Lakeview Hall certainly wouldn’t be complete without her. Why, down here in Mexico—well, on the border of Mexico—when I’m going farther and farther away from her all the time, I can almost believe that I’m fond of her. But don’t let me talk about it,” she pretended to sniff as though she was going to cry, “or I’ll be getting homesick for her.”

“Small chance of your ever getting homesick for anyone,” Bess remarked, “but let’s hear what it is Amelia wants to tell us about and then go downstairs, I’m almost starved.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Amelia,” Nan handed over the book, “I didn’t mean to monopolize it.” These Lakeview Hall girls, together for so many years under all sorts of circumstances, were still polite to one another and thoughtful about little things. They teased one another, laughed at one another’s faults, and quarreled sometimes among themselves, but they were always eager to forgive and more than anxious to please. This was why they had been friends for so long. They were never really jealous of one another and were always ready to praise anyone in the group who did anything outstanding.

“It’s all right, Nan,” Amelia answered as she reached for the book. “I merely thought that this story of the founding of Mexico City might be fun to read. It’s short, Bess, so we’ll be downstairs in just a few minutes. Here it is.

“‘When the Aztecs, a people that inhabited this part of Mexico long before the coming of the white man from across the water, were wandering from place to place in search of a spot on which to establish themselves, their head priest had a vision.

“‘In it, he saw their War God and heard him telling them to go on and on until they found an eagle on a cactus growing from the rock. The cactus, the War God said, was the heart of his treacherous nephew who had waged war against him and lost. As punishment, he had been put to death and his heart was torn from him and thrown into the lake. It fell upon a rock among the reeds, and from it grew a cactus so big and strong that an eagle, seeking a place to build his nest, had made his home upon it.

“‘The Aztecs heeded the words of their War God as told them by the priest. For years they wandered, until finally, one morning very early, their long search was rewarded. They came upon the eagle on the cactus! His wings were extended to the rays of the sun and in his claws he held a snake.

“‘So it was here that they built their city and even to this day, the cactus and the eagle, holding a snake in his beak, is Mexico’s emblem.’” With this, Amelia closed the book.

“So that’s why I’ve been seeing that symbol on so many Mexican things all these years,” Nan commented. “I’ve wondered what it meant, but was always too lazy to look it up. How strange the history of this country is that we are going into! I wonder what will happen.”

“Probably everything,” Laura said, “so, now I think we’d better go downstairs and eat, fortify ourselves so to speak for any emergency.”

“Guess you’re right,” Nan laughed. And with this, Nan and her friends all hurried down to breakfast and to the beginning of another day in their Mexican adventure.