CHAPTER XIX.
FROM PUEBLA TO ORIZABA.
HAVING hurried through Puebla as rapidly as possible, giving ourselves but half the time we should have taken earlier in the trip to inspect that old, historic city, its churches and its ruins, and the interesting country surrounding it, we left on the 23d of December for Orizaba. Mr. Fitch was placed under the care of Col. Geo. M. Green as a military and moral precaution, and sent off in advance by the regular diligence which left at 2 a. m., and the rest of the party, accompanied by Señor Bossero, the commissioner sent out to Guadalajara by the Mexican Government to escort Mr. Seward through the entire Republic, left at sunrise in a special coach. Miss Parkman, daughter of an American thirty-two years resident in Guanajuato and married to a Mexican lady, had joined the party at the City of Mexico to go home with Mr. Seward, to remain a year and learn the English language, of which she was, up to the time of our arrival, entirely ignorant.
The morning air was chilly and raw when we left Puebla, and for the first time since leaving Manzanillo, we saw a fog hanging over the landscape. This fog came from the Gulf of Mexico, and was, we were told, the effect of a Norther blowing down the coast.
After a time it lifted, and rolled up the mountains in thin wreaths of snowy vapor, which softened the
