BOOK III.
FROM MEXICO TO MATAMORAS.
I.
TO QUERETARO.
The Start.—First and last Church in the City.—The Game-cocks.—First Scare.—Guatitlan again.—Barrenness.—Gambling and Tortilla-making.—Descent to Tula.—A Bit of English Landscape.—Tula.—Hunt for a Statue.—A silver Heavens and Earth.—Juelites.—Mountains and a mounting Sun.—Vista Hermosa.—Napola.—A stone Town.—An Interior.—The Stables.—Sombrero Walls.—Eagle Tavern.—Playing with the Children.—Gamboling versus Gambling.—Cazadero, the Bull Prairie.—Hacienda of Palmillas.—Blacksmith Idolatry.—Misterio de la Santissima Trinidad.—'Tother Side up.—Descent into the Valley of San Juan.—Lone yellow Cone.—Longfellow and Homer.—Elysium after much Turmoil.—A Dissertation on Beggars.—A Market Umbrella.—In Perils among Robbers.—The beautiful Valley of San Juan.—Colorado.—A Turner Sunset.—Sight of Queretaro.—The Aqueduct.—The Bed.
Do you want a trip of twenty days and twelve hundred miles in a stage-coach, through charming scenery, the ride made piquant with possible kidnapings, robbings, slaughters, and such like pleasantries? Then come to the office of the Diligence Company, in the Street of Independence, back of the Hotel Iturbide, and get your billet and place. The ticket will cost you ninety-nine dollars. You can deposit another hundred or two if you wish, and receive a bill of credit, on which you can draw every night, where the coach stops, of an administrador, or agent, of the company. This avoids the necessity of carrying much silver about you, and so of tempting overmuch the rapacity of the robbers among whom your journey lies. A few dollars it is desirable to carry with you in order to satisfy them partially for their trouble in stopping and searching you, and to prevent their giving you their pistol because of your refusal to give them your pistoles. If they should rob you of your bill of credit, you can telegraph back the fact, prevent its further use, and get a new one covering the amount then undrawn.
Armed with the ticket and the bill of credit, and with no other weapons, I take my seat in the coach. It is number one, the best back seat. I am the only through passenger from the city to the northernmost port. Three friends were there to see me off. One, a Mexican, parted with me in true compadre style, hugging and kissing, which were as compadrially returned. Three months had made a cold Yankee into quite a warm Mexican. It is a delicious morning in March but as all mornings here are delicious, the remark is superfluous. The March wind is a June zephyr, and "December's as pleasant as May." The sun is not quite up, but the sky is gray with his sub-horizon radiance. The streets are silent and empty but for the rattle of the coach, which makes all the more noise seemingly because of the surrounding stillness.
We pass the first church built by Cortez.[1] It is well in the fields to-day, and only frequented by a few poor neighbors. Close by it is the penitentiary, and here military and other executions frequently occur. Death is the regular punishment. A captain, a day or two before, insulted his superior, was marched out here of a morning, and shot. Three men robbed a carriage on the paseo, and, as soon as captured and condemned, were shot. Four kidnappers of a gentleman in the city were treated with like summary justice. The action of General Burriel is after the fashion of the race: drum-head court-martial and instant execution.
The church is surrounded by heaps of ruined huts, the adobe brick dissolving into its original dust. Mexico looks like Rome, half a ruin, both in its central streets, where convent ruins abound, and in these dust heaps, black and homeless, that fill up its eastern sections. We pass the gate and emerge on a hard pike, which leads to Tolu, about sixty miles away. We traverse broad haciendas belonging to Mexican gentlemen, devoted chiefly to the culture of the maguey. The first village is like most we pass—a string of whitewashed huts flush with the roadway, no sidewalk coming between the door and the rider. This one, unlike the others, is largely occupied with
game-cocks. A breeder of them is giving his brood the early morning air. They stand on a raised seat running along the front of his cabin, prevented from general perambulation by a fastening to the foot. The trainer is teaching the young ones how to fight, holding a gray one up to a black beauty, and making each strike the other artistically. They are splendid birds, putting to shame the Shanghais and other gentry of bloodless and fightless fame. But even if of a fighting race, they have to be taught to bite and devour each other, and patiently taught. So brave nations drill their braver soldiers to fight, and then declare their natural animosity causes war.
My first scare occurs just out of this gamy town. A company of horsemen come riding down on us from a rocky hill-slope up which our half-sick mules must slowly pull, for the epizootic is in the land, and I take this thousand-mile ride and risk with that accompaniment. The gay-caparisoned riders, as they appear wrapped in their red and blue zerapes, are sufficiently brigandish to stir the fever in the timid blood. No weapon was mine save my mother-wit, and that was an exceeding dull weapon, and would be very clumsily used in the unknown tongue. So I wait patiently the coming of the foe. On they drive, nearer and nearer to us, on us, past us. "Adios " is the only shot they fire. They are muleteers from Chihuahua and Durango, going to town, a long three weeks' trip, to dispose of a few sorry mules. Time is of no value here. Two months and twenty dollars profit are good equivalents. Thus ends our every fright the whole journey through.
The Valley of Guatitlan is entered—a broad, pleasant country, well cultured, and inclosed with bare brown hills. At Lecheria, or Milk-place, we change one set of eight sick mules for another. Guatitlan is galloped through, or would have been had the mules been well. The San Pedro hotel looks as familiar and uninviting as ever. I shiver as I think of that den where, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, I laid me down, but, unlike him, did not get a good sleep or dream. The town is large. Protestant service has been held here, and will be again.
Tecepitlan appears on the left, embosomed in trees, at the base of hills—a city of priests, all Church property, till the day of vengeance came: now a city of poverty and fanaticism. Cyotepec, a pretty village, is passed; and ten miles from Guatitlan we stop to breakfast at Huahuatoca, a sleepy little town, but with a good table. I can not promise for the correctness of this spelling. It is phonetic, and that should be the only way to spell.
CACTUS, AND WOMAN KNEADING TORTILLAS.
Now comes barrenness of barrenness. For ten leagues, or nearly thirty miles, all is a wilderness. Rocks lie loose over the earth, which is baked, and hard, and worthless. Half-way, we change horses at a hacienda.
I watch the men gamble for cents, and the women make tortillas. The former bet on two who pitch, putting up eight or ten centavos on the throw. The latter are more sensible in their vocation. They do not grind the maize, but soften it by potash, pulp it, and then prepare it for cooking. A smooth stone, inclined downward, two feet long, is the table. Behind it, on the ground, kneels the lady of the house. She rolls out the soft dough with a stone roller, takes up some of it, pats it and repeats it over and over, and lays it on a brazier—a large, slightly-hollowed dish, over a small fire kept up by dried maguey leaves. The cakes look nice in the making, and do not taste bad.
The rest of the ride is through softer scenery—rough along the roadside, but opening into broad fields and hollows of rich earth and culture. Zumpango and its lake lie over to the right or north, a little, nice town, and a handsome water. To the left you see a deep vale, crowded with trees. The stage turns toward it almost by instinct. We wind down, and enter among green fields and trees, all out in their new spring attire. A square in a preliminary village, called Santa Maria, is especially charming. On we drive amidst these tender and brilliant fields and foliage, the barley a foot high, the grass velvety, and ash and oak superb in volume and color. The river Tula is crossed, English in its quiet, shallowness, and munificence of trees; and we put our sick mules to the jump, and run through the plaza of Tula. This is a town not less than a thousand years old. It was settled by the Toltees in the eighth century. Stone pillars still attest their presence and power. It was too late to visit them; but one called Malinehe was pointed out to me in a hill-side overhanging the green hollow. I tried to get a boy to go with me, but failed; so I started alone.
The country always whips the town when brought into fair competition. As I strolled through these rural lanes, with their fresh fields and pastures, even their trees all in their best attire, I thought "Mexico is cheap to this." I crossed a bridge which had little openings on each side, with iron railings, to let you look down into the stream. What bridge in America is equally excellent? Not one of our costly spans has a place for rest and observation. Will the East River be thus favored? If it is, few spots for rest and observation will be more popular.
I climbed the hill where the white face of the Toltec Malinche had been marked out to me. I could not find it. A ghost of the ages it represents, like all other ghosts, it flies on near approach. The sun went down, the moon came up, each brilliant in its work and way. But Malinche hid her white face before the white face of the moon among the tall cacti of the hills, and I came back disappointed to my hotel. Several huge gray shafts in its patio carved over (specimens of the pinea I found not) solaced me for my loss.
At two o'clock in the morning I was awakened by the mozo, as the house or body servant is called, of the Casa de Diligencias. The moon was up, and the sky, like the earth under it, was full of silver. A cup of excellent coffee and a fresh sweet roll, and I am safely stowed away in the coach. Fortunately, the whole back seat is mine, so that I can take my ease, if any ease can be taken in this peripatetic inn. The mules leap out of the court-yard and whirl away, crazy as the Pegasus of a new-fledged poet.
The cold is sharp, and the road rough, rougher, roughest. But sleep is too much for any road, and, lying on a pillow of coats, with a shawl for a blanket, I am tossed unconsciously for three solid hours; unconscious save for the cold that bites the toes, and which a redistribution of the shawl causes to retreat. The sun is up, and a hill-top station (also up), for changing the mules, gets me up. I get out, stretch legs, and renew coffee. It is called Juelites (pronounced Wheyletes), the name of an herb the Indians eat, which is worse of smell than garlic. These half-dozen "huts of stone" are such as Dr. Holmes would not be content with, I fear, despite his declaration to the contrary. There is existence here, and that only. Yet a school is held here, and some day the newspaper and the true Church will follow, and the hut of barbarism give way to the cottage of civilization, which has not been the case these three hundred and fifty years, in which a spurious Christianity has subdued, not elevated, this people.
The land slopes softly and prettily. The fields are frosty, the first I have seen, with one exception, all this winter; each was a light September frost. They are good for grazing, and their hollows ample for grain. There is no need of poverty and degradation so unspeakable. The hills, black, blue, and purple, and, when the sun lights them, golden-brown, as everywhere in Mexico, "brown in the shadow, golden in the sun," like Willis's beloved's tresses, form a grand background, the rising sun being in this case a grander background to the hills.
Our mules fly as fast as the fearful road and a partial epizootic will let them, to the stone-house village of Napola. Before we reach it, we note the superb roll of the land. It sweeps away in majestic breadth, black with the plow, or awaiting in yellow dryness the near approaching rains that shall set every germ alive. A hacienda in the heart of this grand landscape is rightly called "Vista Hermosa" (view beautiful). I had never seen one prettier. Nor did it lose its beauty because a tiny lake lay at the bottom of the valley, flashing in the morning rays. Some upper Minnesota views were not unlike it, only those lacked the mountains, a lack indeed.
The town disenchants you. Man is far below nature. It was burned twice by the French in their marches to and fro in the land, either because it did not give good enough pulqui or not enough of it, for their thirsty needs, or because it harbored republicans and patriots, and political Protestants, who resisted a triumphing foreign Church and army and tongue. "America for Americans," native or adopted, the motto of these United States, as well as those of the North, brought wrath upon Napola. It seems determined not to be caught that way again; for it rebuilt its town of stone. Not a stick in it that I could see, except the few that formed the doors. The stones are laid neatly, and even ornamentally in some cases, and then plastered over, so as to give a uniform whiteness when finished; for this city, unlike some in the West, and many in this country, can not be said to be finished. It has been finished twice in another way, and that gives it a chance to be a-growing again. Its name signifies cactus, and this hardy and useful tree is growing in orchards among its rocks. So it grows everywhere, and is well called the national tree.
Some of the stone cabins are of respectable height and size; but quite a number are of a type too common in the land. Look in at this door, or hole in the wall, for door I saw not. It is four or five feet by two. The room is six feet by eight, short. The floor is of stone, well swept and clean. Against the back wall kneels a comely-looking, youngish-housewife, of twenty or thereabouts, over a sloping stone, on which she is kneading her tortilla dough.
It is rolled out by a stone roller about the size and shape of the kneading-pin the women of the North employ. A pile unfinished lies at the upper end of the stone; the roller flattens and curls the lower portion into thin rolls, which drop off into a small bread-trough at the foot of the stone. This afterward she takes and pats in her hands several times, and lays it on the slightly hollowed frying-pan that stands near, in the corner of this room. It is a pleasant sight and sound, the slapping the dough and frying the cakes.
This is their only work almost, except that of washing, which is very similar, being also done over a smooth sloping stone, by the side of running water, with profusion of slapping, soaping, and rinsing, but with no boiling, except of the washer-women in the hot sun. They vary making tortillas and washing with combing their long black hair, and cleaning it of its contents, and with affectionate attentions of like sort to their friends and family. Besides the tortilla-trough and stone and pan, there are in this room half a dozen earthen pots and vessels of various sizes for culinary purposes. I hardly saw aught else. No chair, no table, no book, no paper, no bed—strangest of all, no looking-glass. Six feet by eight of space, walled in on every side, with only this hole for entrance, and the young matron as cheerful as if she were the wife of Lerdo.
You get an idea here also of the stables of the land. The burning of this town has compelled the erection of new stables. There is one thing always sure of good treatment in Mexico: the horse. House and wife and children may go uncared for, but not the horse. Look at this stable of the Diligence Company. Almost four hundred feet square is it. Along one side stables are built over three hundred feet long. The face of the stable, where the stall is, is a dead wall against the street. The court side is built up four feet of stone and plaster. Every few feet round pillars, eighteen inches through, rise from this wall to support the roof, which depends courtward, leaving the stall higher at the horse's head, and thus giving him air. The space between the stone wall and the top of the pillars which support the roof is left open, thus securing constant ventilation. The horses are not stalled in here as in their boxes in the North, and as men are in oyster saloons. All the space is open from end to end. There is ample room behind them and around them, and air as good as a pasture affords. It seems to me a great improvement on our narrow-boarded stalls, without liberty and without air. The mules and horses are so tethered that they can not disturb each other, and yet the whole stable and court is as sweet and wholesome as an orchard. Here, too, we note another peculiarity in the building of the stone walls. They make a science of this here, for stone is an incumbrance of the land as much as in New England, or as trees are in Wisconsin. They put them into fences which beat New England's "all hollow." They make these walls very high—six to eight feet, and very broad—three to five. They put the small stones at the bottom, and not less than four feet up. Then they put on the big rocks. These big stones overlap the base with their rough edges, and make the wall look like a trim lad with a huge, tall, ragged sombrero. The lower half is very compact and comely; the upper very rough, yet strong. This is probably a protection, for the rough tall top stones are not so easily surmounted or dismounted. Where these are not sufficiently defensive, thorns are thrust into the upper tier to keep the robbing boys and men from the inclosed gardens. Sometimes they build the walls lower and of Yankee fashion, and once I saw them reduced to our narrow meanness of a single row of stones; but that wall was nearly all down, and soon disappeared, leaving the field open to every beast and boy. The only walls that were walls were the handsome structures built after the sombrero pattern.
The landscape lies rich and warm all the next posta to Venta Aguilar (or Eagle Tavern), which is only a stage-house, and no village. Here I vary the monotony of waiting for the change of mules with helping three little girls, from three to five years old, make tortillas. They are pretty, laughing imps, brown of face, black of eye and hair, and would be called handsome by any mother or aunt of them, and will be by some not thus related not ten years hence.
They had a small piece of wood for the hearth, a little ground straw for the fuel, two or three black flakes of mud for the cakes, and a bit of earthenware for the frying-pan. The youngest and brightest of the three told me very chattingly what she wished to do. So, after all was in place, I astonished her by lighting a match and proceeding to kindle her fire. This was making the ideal into the actual a little too rapidly, and they declined the offered blaze. The mother came in from the next hut, and laughed with the children to see such a new friend of the family. Having been ordered by the doctor, a few years since, when prostrated with overwork, to play with the children, I am not quite weaned from that pleasurable medicine yet. But I will venture a guess that the mother and her tottlings of the Venta Aguilar will come to hear me preach when my Spanish is perfected, and I return to hold service at this solitary inn.
The soldiers who were busy gambling for coppers in the stable-yard, I fear will not so readily attend that service, for I made no impression on their minds while spending a moment watching their game. Two pitchers of cents followed the usual fashion of that game. Others sitting around put up their coppers on the throw. They got excited, and could easily have changed their laughs to blows. I prefer the gamboling of the little girls and their baby housekeeping.
From Venta Aguilar we have a delightful ride of six leagues, over as fine a prairie as ever gladdened the eyes of an Illinois former, finer, in fact, because encircled with grand hills. It is such a luxury, after our rocky roads and hideous joltings, to get on a plush carpet, and roll like a lad in the first spring grass on southern slopes. The air is warm and breezy. The fields lie twenty miles from hill to hill across our bows, and twelve from stem to stern. They are used for grazing, and were for a long while the favorite place for raising bulls for the bull-fights. These having been suppressed, the bull-raising has gone with them, and the splendid pastures are devoted to more honorable and peaceful grazing and tillage. I shall long remember with refreshing delight that posta, as the run of our team is called, across the airy plains of Cazadero.
We drive through the puerta of Palmillas, or gate of a gentleman of that name, and alight for breakfast at a high, cool, pleasant hacienda, where we get a warm and edible meal of the usual course: soup, three meats, salad, beans, dulce (or sweetmeats), and coffee, for one dollar. It is worth the money to us, though it cost the landlord hardly a quarter of that sum.
A blacksmith shop near the gate beguiled me of a few moments, and taught me a few lessons. An Indian boy was fusing some bits of iron in the usual fashion of his tribe. On the wall of the smithy hung a picture of the Virgin of Gaudalupe, and also one entitled "Misterio de la Santissima Trinidad," which was itself a sermon. The Father Almighty was depicted as a venerable man with gray beard, long locks, gown, and a triple crown on his head—the mitre of the pope. The Dove sat on his breast; and between his knees, with his arms over each begowned leg, on the ground half kneeling, half squatting, sat the Second Person in the Trinity, nearly naked, his wounded side exposed, his sad face crowned with a circlet of thorns. This cheap print is sold by the priests to devout lads like this; for a necklace of beads and charm attached beneath his open shirt showed that he was an honest devotee. I left that little smithy with a deeper ardor to give to this lad and his people a better Gospel than this idolatrous one.
"Kterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And after pain pleasure,
After pleasure pain lies."
This law exists even in postas. The last was so luxurious, I properly dreaded the one to come. I did not dread it too much. It was dreadful beyond description. We met it almost the instant we left the gate of Señor Palmillas. It was our descent into the Valley of San Juan. For six miles we plunged hither and thither over the rocky slabs and boulders and the gullies around them. The soil is worn away by the rain and the coach, and no attempts are made to build up an even pathway. It would not be difficult to make a pleasant drive-way down the hill; but mañana (to-morrow), and no denario (money), combine to make every hill-road I have seen in Mexico a torture to man and mule. The roads not ten miles from the capital that descend the hills into the city, and are frequented with teams and travel, are in the same condition. The landscape tries to soften the travel. It comes as a poultice to our bruised limbs. In the midst of the upheavals from beneath, we catch glimpses of a valley that shall soothe us for our tossings.
It is green with trees and fields, and stretches out along the base of the embracing mountains for a score miles and more. A mountain of a peculiar type comes into the landscape. It is off to our right, a cone of yellow rock with sub-cones truncated half up its sides. Alone it stands, not being connected with the ranges of ordinary volcanic hills that everywhere meet the eye in all these uplands. It seems a creation of another sort. Its color, shape, and solitariness are all its own. It stands back of the regular rim of the valleys, and looks at us through the openings between the hills. It may be fifty miles away, probably more. It is worth visiting, and were I here long enough I would make an excursion to the Lone Yellow Cone beyond the prairie of Cazadero and the hills of San Juan.
The road gets over its madness, or we over the road, and we scamper down, not easily, into the beautiful valley, reminding one of that finest line, rhythmically speaking, in all "Evangeline," which has many hexameters as musical as Homer's, as the world will find out when Longfellow is dead. How presumptuous of Bryant to put the hot and mellifluous "Iliad" into his cold blank (very) verse, when Longfellow was alive, who could do it into English hexameters as honeyed and galloping as its own Greek! Why will he not give his next ten years to this Conquest of Troy? But I have got a long way from my quotation in my dissertation. It may seem tame to give it now. Yet here it is:
"Into the Sweet-water valley precipitate leaps the Nebraska."
Our Indian words are as good as the Greek, and Longfellow has handled them as deftly. So we were precipitated into the beautiful Valley of San Juan, and flew through the streets of a large town of that name, halting short at the hotel in the plaza, and there resting.
A dissertation on beggars may as well come in here as anywhere. Beggars are an institution in Mexico, the most developed of almost any one of her institutions. They are especially so in the outer settlements, but few of them being seen in the city, where the police represses them. They have graced every station on our route. The most finished specimens of this class I have seen were at Cuernervaca. As I was leaving my dining-room, a gentleman met me at the door, dressed in a faded but cleanly suit, not unlike a retired clerk, or a superannuated preacher. He spoke low and courteous. I listened, but could not understand, and turned to a companion, and asked him what this gentleman wished. He listened a moment. "Only a beggar!" was his translation. I was shocked, or would have been, but that in my solicitations for help of feeble churches and Christian causes, I had been myself often called by that contemptuous name. So I put this gentleman among the clergy, and gave him what we get on such occasions—a smile, but no shilling.
Returning from a walk amidst the gardens of that delicious spot, a smiling lady of seventy or seventeen—her smile was of the latter age, certainly—met us, and beamed on us; asked us if we had been in the flower gardens (our hands full of bouquets showed that); inquired if we stopped at the Hotel Diligencias; and then prettily put her hands to her frock, as a courtesying girl would do, and sighed and smiled forth her soul for a sixpence. We were taken aback by the sudden unmasking of her battery, and staggered forth a broken promise, broken in language then, and in fact afterward, that when we returned we would grant her favor. But we did not return.
MEXICAN BEGGAR.
The beggars on this route have many arts. They whine and they smile. Blind men play the guitar and violin prettily; and one them would not desist, though bribed with a medio, saying, with true Mexican independence, that "I play for the pleasure of it! Money! that is a mere trifling consideration." Old men and old women abound. The former whine, the latter grin. A jolly type of this last came at us in San Juan and fairly beguiled our pocket of a penny by her bland mutterings and beaming eyes. Two ways I have learned of treating these visitors. One is to say in broken Spanish, "I don't understand you. If you will speak in English, I will give you a medio." This Irish bull answers the purpose of getting up a laugh at their expense, and of nonplusing their wits for a moment. They are not ready for the proposition. Another is to give them a piece of bread or a banana. They reverse every thing here; and if you give them bread when they ask for a stone, or metal, which is stone actually, they are not pleased with your action any more than your children would be in the opposite process. So, standing among these beggars of St. John, and buying bananas and oranges, I courteously offer each of them one. They declined the offer, all but the one laughing old woman, and a make-believe crying girl. These accepted the less in hopes of getting the greater.
The market-place of this town was in the centre of the street, and each dealer had over him or her an umbrella eight feet high, consisting of a rude pole with a ruder canvas, six to eight feet square, spread across its top. It served as a narrow covering for themselves and their fruit, though its "looped and windowed raggedness" afforded about as much sun as shade.[2]
We are near the haunts of robbers. As we leave San Juan and climb the hill on the opposite side, they will surely assail us, it is said, with clubs and stones. Farther on, at Colorado, they are more sure to attack us with revolvers and Winchester rifles, which they lately stole, half-armed, from full-armed gentlemen in a stage. So we nerve ourselves for the coming possibility. One gets out three ounces, each of sixteen dollars' value, wraps them in a paper, and shows a cleft in the coach-door, where the window drops down, into which he proposes to drop them. Another, a French Jew and jeweler, has a box of precious stones with him. He is especially afraid of the stones and the metal not so precious as his own, and nervously describes the hoot and shout. A third is a clerk, with the only gold watch in the crowd. All these are armed with revolvers. One of the group has no revolver, and no gold ounces nor watches. He finds the Petrine admonition valuable here, as elsewhere, against the putting on of gold or costly apparel, and so leaves his watch in Mexico, while, as for weapons, he must rely on woman's and a minister's weapon—the tongue.
We take in another man at St. John, and rush madly out of town, and up the moderately high and immoderately hard hill. The men of the sticks and stones do not appear. The robber, as he has always been, thus far in my history, non est. We are in
jeopardy every hour. But the jeopardy is no worse than it was in England a century ago, when Dick Turpin reigned, and John Wesley traveled. Methodism will help do for this country yet what she helped mightily to do for England; make it safe everywhere. There are three prayers a day all over the land by all the people, and life is not safe three miles from any town. Yet it should be also said that most of the people are not robbers in act or sympathy. They are toiling, law-abiding, obedient, respectful. I have seen no Indian that looked ugly or dangerous. They treat you with great respect, take off their hats as you pass them on the road, and say, Bueno dios, señor, or Adios,señor, in the most courteous manner. The robbers are of their complexion, but not of their nature. These are getting less and less. They were created by poverty and politics, and with the cessation of pronunciamentos and the coming in of railroads they will die.
The Valley of San Juan is one of the loveliest I have ever seen. Irrigated by the rivers that come from the hills in the edge of Tierras Calientes, it glows in green as perfect as Cortez's emeralds. For more than twenty miles its enchantments lie under the eye. Trees are sprinkled over it; haciendas glitter here and there, white ships anchored in a green sea. There was one field of wheat which was not less than a hundred acres of level and rich color. I would say two hundred acres did I not wish to keep within bounds. This was a bit only of the big farm. Two of these haciendas belong to one man. They contain severally twelve square leagues, or over thirty square miles, and twenty-two square leagues, or about sixty square miles. They are called Ajuchitlan cito and Ajuchitlan grande, or small and great Ajuchitlan. Rodriquez y Helquera is the fortunate, or unfortunate, possessor of these vast tracts—well on to half the valley, and which ownership makes the people poor and robbers.
We pass two miserable villages, Arroyasecca and Sauz, fringing the magnificent fields with the rags of humanity, and stop at Colorado, the chief robber haunt, whose scowling gentry are sitting round a beer-table, or its Mexican equivalent, a pulqui stand. No place or people sink so low or soar so high as to get out of the reach of alcohol. We do not admire their looks or their bamboo like homes. Both are as bad as bad can be. It is hardly possible to make these men better till their condition is bettered. Grace is needed here, and then will come law, protection, progress. These horrid huts must first have family prayers, and then they will have goodly apparel, books, comfort, small farms of their own out of these broad farms, and true prosperity. Pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into this harvest.
This is the favorite robber haunt along the road. Stages are frequently overhauled between here and Queretaro. Only yesterday was there such a visit to the coach. Though government troops in large numbers are lazily lounging in that city, and though a few score of riders could clean out the whole pest, yet they are undisturbed, and the travelers are left to the cruelty of their tender mercies.
As we enter their paveless street, they eye us from under the coats of dirt upon their faces, and evidently reckon on some game in that stage for their rifles. When the mules are changed, the driver rushes from the stables with the usual whirl and mad display with which he enters and leaves the towns. But in this case it is evident that his scare adds wings to his speed. We fly through the village and in among the stunted oaks of a moderate hill-slope, up the rough road, hardly abating our speed, for such oaks are splendid for ambuscade, and we scarcely walk our tired mules until we emerge from the last low thicket that overhangs the valley and the city of Queretaro. The meadows of St. John are gone with their beauty, not unlike that of the St. John at Cambridge, England. The sun is setting in our eyes, sending a blaze like that of a furnace into the clouds he is looking down upon. What would not Turner have given to have seen that copper-smelting glow? No tint of canvas could approach it.
Far down the steep incline lies the city. One seldom sees a lovelier sight than this. We run down, over rocks and boulders, the terrible road knocking the passengers, if not the coach, to pieces. The city ever allures us on. Its towers and domes glisten in the dying light, half hidden among abundant foliage Damascus never looked lovelier.
AQUEDUCT OF QUERETARO.
Though I never saw that earthly Eden, I fancied I saw it in this sunset view. The hollow of the hills looks small from this, height, and the city seems embossed on the bottom of a bowl of radiant green. It looks large and majestic from this hill-top. It is perfectly in the grasp of the eye. A farther descent brings the aqueduct to view, the stateliest Roman that is extant in America, and there is no grander in Italy, nor one so grand. It strides across the hollow, forty feet high, with massive pillars and broad arches. We rush beneath it, fly round and round dirty, mud-faced streets, into the thick of the town, and halt suddenly at the Hotel of the Diligence. The day's ride of over one hundred miles is done, and gladly the couch is sought and found.