This is a long story, but to the editor's taste, it is simply the best true story in the world, the most unlikely, the most romantic. For who could have supposed that the newfound world of the West held all that wealth of treasure, emeralds and gold, all those people, so beautiful and brave, so courteous and cruel, with their terrible gods, hideous human sacrifices, and almost Christian prayers?

That a handful of Spaniards, themselves mistaken for children of a white god, should have crossed the sea, should have found a lovely lady, as in a fairy tale, ready to lead them to victory, should have planted the cross on the shambles of Huitzilopochtli, after that wild battle on the temple crest, should have been driven in rout from, and then recaptured, the Venice of the West, the lake city of Mexico—all this is as strange, as un-looked for, as any story of adventures in a new planet would be.

No invention of fights and wanderings in No Man's Land, no search for the mines of Solomon the King, can approach, for strangeness and romance, this tale which is true, and vouched for by Spanish conquerors like Bernal Diaz, and by native historians like Ixtlilochitl, and by later missionaries like Sahagun.

Cortés is the great original of all treasure-hunters and explorers in fiction, and here no feigned tale can be the equal of the real. As Mr. Prescott's admirable history is not a book much read by children, the editor hopes they will be pleased to read the "Adventures in Anahuac" here. Miss Edgeworth tells us in Orlandino how much the tale delighted the young before Mr. Prescott wrote his excellent narrative of the world's chief adventure here reduced by Miss Wright. May it please still, as it did when the country was young!

From the Foreword