XI.
A GARDEN IN EDEN.
A Temptation.—Up the Mountains.—The Cross of Cortez.—Sight of the Town and Valley.—The downward Plunge.—A Lounge.—Church of Cortez.—The Enchanted Garden.—Idolatry.—The Market-place.—The Almanac against Protestantism.—Palace of Cortez.—The Indian Garden of Maximilian.—A Sugar Hacienda.—The latter End.—All Zones.
In Eden was a garden. Eden itself was paradise, but the paradise had an inner paradise to which the outer delights were the same as brass and iron to the gold and silver in the age of Solomon. So Mexico may be an Eden, but there is a garden eastward and southward in this Eden that makes its other beauties tame.
My stay was drawing to a close, and a temptation to unite a little pleasure with business was too much for my feeble will to resist. So far I had made only one excursion of which the Church was not the sole end and aim—that was the two days and a night to the Convent of El Desierto, and even there I could not resist the conceiving, if not the planning, of a camp-ground in its ancient and magnificent woods.
But a cave of huge dimensions, second only to the Mammoth of Kentucky, if second to that, is reported to be three days to the south, less than two days beyond Cuernervaca. A party of ladies and gentlemen arranged to visit the cave. I was invited to join them. I hardly saw how I could take four days for recreation. In addition to the two already taken out of the sixty spent here, this would make a week's vacation—altogether too much time to throw away in this luxuriating clime. But if we were going back to some Ante-romanistic usages as well as faith, we might utilize the cave for hermit purposes, as the Desierto grounds are to be utilized, I hope, for camp-meetings; but we can hardly get Methodists to immure themselves in celibacy and huts, even in Mexico. So it is not possible to make that a negocio, as they say here; a "biz," as the rougher Yankee of the West puts it.
I go to Cuernervaca because there business lies; but the cave, I fear I must say, through a glimmer as to the possibility of reaching it, allures me on.
The city I seek lies to the south, over the mountains, between Popocatepetl and Ajusco, the third peak of the valley, and occasionally specked with snow. The morning is gray and misty, and if in the States would insure rain. Here it is an anomaly that will perhaps yield a shower, but more probably be burned up by the torrid sun on his way over Iztaccihuatl.
We ride through a long avenue, well lined with trees for several miles, a finer drive out of the city than New York or Brooklyn can boast, yet only one of half a dozen equally delightful and equally unsafe; for cavalry patrol these roads away up to the city's gates to protect the traveler from the robber, the foreigner from the native.
It is fifteen miles before the spurs of the mountains are struck. A charming landscape it is, and a morning of exhilaration, despite the threatening clouds—nay, because of them. What lovely haciendas appear on the roadside, with trees sprinkled over them, brooks running through them, green beds where the sickle is busy cutting down green food for the market, broad plains, green and brown; surely here is paradise before we start for Eden! Yet these splendid properties can be bought for a song. Who wants to found a Christian college near the city? Now is your chance. For thirty to fifty thousand dollars you can buy immense estates with stone buildings, including often the chapel, all ready for occupation.
Mexacalcingo and other "cingoes" lie off to the left in moist meadows and lakes, with trees rising, like the earth itself, being out of the water and in the water, and islands floating, or unsteady to the tread. They float up and down only. Amidst these amphibious luxuries the people dwell in a Venice of perpetual greenness.
The road turns up the hills, and becomes very rough and steep. A long, sharp, strong pull of a mile brings us to San Mateo—St. Matthew—a village of bamboo houses, standing in black, fat sand, and among tall and very green and very beautiful ash-trees. It is as lovely and as dirty and as dangerous as you wish or do not wish. Robbers are thick, but we are safe, for the guard is our defense.
On we climb, through a frigid vegetation and temperature, as I found it on my return—"a steady pull at the collar," as Murray puts it in his "Swiss Guide"—for a dozen miles. Behind us glowed the Mexic valley, green and glossy, where lake and tree met together. It is a magnificent landscape, and naturally set Cortez violently in love with it, as it had the Aztec and the Toltec before him. One does not tire in admiring its wonderful combination of snow range and purple mountains, of broad lake and ever-green foliage, of pretty town and grand city. The lakes here are an important part of the landscape, if landscape it may be called which they make up. Tezcoco, the largest, seems to fill all the outer section of the valley. The lesser ones near at hand are be-sprinkled with trees and towers, green and white, mingling prettily with their level lustre.
The summit is reached at La Guardia, a small collection of huts, where a breakfast that I ate not was paid for. Its contents I do not presume to describe. It takes time to learn to like cod-fish, and beans, and sauerkraut, and tomatoes, and corn-bread, and all local luxuries; why not, also, to learn to like tortillas and chili, a hot and not a cold piquanté, and other dishes I do not dare to spell any more than to taste?
Breakfast over, we cross the summit through black and barren scoria, the tossings, evidently, of craters, and ere long sight a red stone cross upon a round gray pedestal, two or three feet high, called the Cross of the Marquis. This, it is said, is the boundary mark of the possessions of Cortez, who was created Marquis of the Valley of Ojaca, and placed this cross as the beginning of his possessions.
Woods now appear, pine chiefly, not large, sprinkled over much space, and suggestive of a cold climate. We are over ten thousand feet above the sea; surely it has a right to be cold. For several miles we gradually slope downward, until suddenly the valley we seek opens at our feet, ablaze with the hottest beams. Clouds cover us, and make the sunny hollow of Cuernervaca look the warmer.
It is a bowl, at this height seemingly not ten miles from rim to rim, yet probably fifty would not pace its base. The bottom is not level, even at this height, but embossed, as it were, in many forms and colors. That curved knot, looking not unlike the cow's horn which its name signifies, lying not far from this side of the embracing hills, is Cuernervaca. A belt of emerald surrounds it, especially deep in color and in extent on its farther or lower side. A little farther on you see spots of a light and very brilliant green. They are patches here, but miles there, of the sugar-cane, portions of the sugar haciendas, the chief produce of the valley. One rarely sees such a vivid green. "Living green" indeed these fields stand dressed in, like those beyond the swelling flood and the rocky rampart of death.
The valley is small as compared with the Mexican, but not small of itself. It is hemmed in by mountains, the tall Popocatepetl forming its north-eastern tower. This looks uncommonly grand in contrast with the fiery beauty which it coolingly overshadows and protects, like a calm and loving father bending over his beautiful and passionate daughter.
We scamper down a horrible road; through an Indian town named Huachilaqui; down a steeper and more horrible road, amidst boulders tossed up from the never-mended pavement; jumping from rock to rock, almost, in our mad plunging; the ladies, perched above the driver, scared and delighted with the leaping coach and the glorious landscape. For two hours we thus go head-long, until the hollow is struck, and we race merrily on, still slightly descending, and run down the rattling pavements of the clean town, every door and window of which seems occupied, to note the welcome arrival of the stage, which only once in two days is visible to the naked eye, and which is the only vehicle I have seen in all the town—a rarity, therefore, of a double value, in its contents and in itself. They gaze at the top seat, whose occupants are so busy, bobbing their heads to escape the lamps hanging on ropes across the middle of the street, that they can not gaze back in return.
The scamper ends in flying through a portal and coming to a sharp halt in the court of the Hotel Diligencias, as all the best hotels are called in this country.
To give you a taste of tropical perfection, I shall have to make a journal of my two days' stay in Cuernervaca. I hardly expected to stay as many waking hours. The cave, forty miles away, I could but dimly see by faith, and did not see at all by sight. One of the party was sick, and delayed his coming. We waited for him, but I did not go with them after his arrival. My vacation was no vacation. I made an inspection of the town for business, but also had some time to spare for enjoying its less official aspects.
Do you remember Poe's lines "to Ellen?" If not, get it, and read in it the description of this tiny city and its not tiny surroundings:
"A thousand
Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,
Where no wind dared to stir except on tiptoe."
You have, of course, read William Morris's "Earthly Paradise?" It is cold in its warmest colorings to this natural and actual paradise. It is just the right length, too, for this lassitudinarian climate and people. Its oversweet prolixity exactly fits a land where "dulces," which are sweetmeats, preserves, and pastry all in one, are of very many varieties, and the tart and lemon-juice never acetate their sweetness; where even the lemons themselves lose their acidity, and are sweet to tastelessness, and lemonade is only half- sweetened ice-water. Tennyson's "Lotos -Eaters" also is a sample of the clime, except that he puts too much vigor into the thought, a blunder of which Morris is never guilty, thought being as far from his mind as from a Cuernervaca belle's or mule's.
Come with me on a saunter. It can be nothing else. The busy trot of New York or whirl of Chicago would degenerate into a "loaf" here.
First, let us go to that which is the most ancient, the Church. It is well to give our firstlings of a walk and a talk to the Lord as well as of all other things. Cortez, wicked as he was, was very careful to make these oblations. Oblations concerning which often, I fear, the Lord said, "My soul hateth." It is one of the most ancient on this continent, though very juvenile as compared with many in the older, but not Old, World. A large open square has three not large chapels at three of its corners. The southernmost is that erected by the conqueror. It has Maximilian's arms over the door-way, which Juarez sought to remove; but the citizens forbade his officers. They had a kindly heart for the fallen emperor. It has nothing especially attractive about it except a flying buttress and one or two high arches.
Just above it is the enchanted garden, rich in tropical fruits and flowers. It was built, that is, its walls, walks, fountains, steps, and other costly arrangements, by Laborde; not its present fruits and flowers, which are its chief attractions. Laborde was one of the discoverers of silver, who amassed wonderful fortunes. It was afterward a resort for Carlotta and Maximilian, and, though in decay, is still full of rare luxuries of vistas and trees and bowers and flowers. The roses run up on tall mangoes, and hang in white and wild luxuriance from their lofty branches; lilies with delicate and drooping leaves, the most delicate I ever saw, bow their graceful heads in fragrant silence. The mango's branches and leaves are so compact and dark that it makes a shade and a coolness like a lofty roof. The time of its fruit is not yet, so one can not repeat as quite apropos to this hour Hood's subtle and pungent sarcasm on Constantinople as the place
"Where woman goes to market as the man goes."
It is said to be as delightful to the taste as the Circassian marketings of the Stamboul are to the sight.
Bananas, cocoa and other palms, oranges, coffee, and all manner of precious fruit, abound; while the vistas along the broken arches, half-empty pools, and flowering trees, to the black mountains near at hand, are as beautiful as desolate. Like its once profusely wealthy builder and its profusely pompous occupants, it has itself become a ruin. How much better to have used this wealth in founding of hospitals and schools, that would have remained a perpetual illumination and elevation of this still degraded population! Will the overflowing wealth of America to-day be any more wisely spent?
Nowhere have I seen idolatry more rampant, or the Church authorities more faithfully upholding it, than here. On the walls of one of the chapels in the Cortez church-yard are proclamations by the Archbishop of Mexico and Bishop of Puebla offering eighty days and more of indulgence for a certain number of repetitions of the Lord's Prayer, Ave Marias, and the sweet numbers of Jesus, before pictures in that chapel of St. John, and that of the Magdalen, and the Virgin. These were all printed and put up as a permanent institution. I saw none earning the indulgence. Perhaps they had a number of days yet left from previous exercises, and did not need to go through any labor of prayer at present; as the Neapolitan lazzaroni refused to carry a valise because he had no need of money, since he had had his breakfast and the time of dinner was not yet. In fact, I saw hardly any worship of any sort in this city. It seemed as if the Church at all hours was, like the climate and the town, fast asleep. It can wake up like these mountains about us in blood and fire and vapor of smoke. It is reported to be already thus reviving. I heard a rumor, on the first day of my arrival here, that there had been a riot at Oajutla (pronounced Wahootla), forty miles from here, and that forty Christians had been killed. This rumor is not confirmed, but it shows something of the state of the atmosphere, and possible earthquakes and eruptions, that such rumors could get current.
But let us get away from the torpid present, and the perhaps volcanic future, into a once powerful past. Leave the gardens and churches on the highest ridge of the town, the backbone of the back, along which it lies. We pass down a clean and narrow street; the narrower the better here, for the narrower the cooler. A few rods and we come to the market-place, the prettiest, and one of the largest, I have seen in Mexico. It is surrounded by a pillared arcade broad enough for many hucksters to sit in the cool breeze and do their petty traffic. Walk around this shaded quadrangle, not halting long in the meat department, for those raw and bloody strips that dangle by the yard are not especially attractive to sight or smell. The fruit department makes it up, however. The women sit on the ground or on a mat, their stalls being on the ground likewise. Here are oranges, water-melons, peaches, bananas, and unnumbered fruits whose names you know not, nor their natures. They are pleasant to the taste, most of them too pleasant. Beans of many sorts and colors, mats, hats, maize, toys, and knickknacks, fill up the space with wares, and make it busy all the morning with buyers and sellers.
Here, too, I bought an almanac which shows the danger there is of a Romanist eruption. It was a common little duodecimo, entitled "Calendario de Mariano Galvan Rivera, para el ano de 1873." It is the popular "Old Farmers' Almanac" of the people. Over a hundred thousand are said to be circulated. The months are filled with Church annals, and the whole is more of a Church annual than the almanac of any American church. In the middle is injected twelve pages of fine type, giving what it calls "Origen del Protestantismo." The most of it deals in harangues against the old Reformers, Luther and Calvin, and in praises of the Jesuits. But it carefully shows that it is meant for modern purposes by its introductory passages, wherein are these paragraphs:
"The political dissensions which so lamentably separate Mexicans from each other, even in the bosom of the family, were not enough for the misery of our poor Mexico. There was still wanting the far more lamentable religious schism, to which origin was given by the toleration of forms of religion which were not in the country, both whose principles and whose very names were quite unknown among our people.[1] Hence, to give effect to the law of toleration, it was necessary either to invent new forms of religion, which was not easy, or else to import them from abroad. The second expedient was the simpler, because by the dollars (hard cash) of the missionaries, with its wonted efficacy and persuasion, innumerable adepts were to be procured; these missionaries being not a little aided by the ignorance especially of the people concerning the origin, principles, methods, and objects of the sects dissenting from the Catholic Church.
"As our almanac is an essentially popular publication, we think that in no place would an article be more appropriate which aims to make known the fathers of the distinct sects comprehended under the common name of Protestants. Indeed, let us copy from a Compendium of Universal History by a friend, still unpublished for immaterial reasons, the part which relates to the origin of the Protestant Reform. From this will appear the corrupt manners, the excessive pride of the Reformers, and the vile motives which impelled them to separate from the Church in which they were born, and to attack doctrines which they had believed from parental instruction when young, and through personal conviction when grown up. We shall see, like Tertullian, the confirmation of the proscription of Catholic doctrine against the innovators of all times, since it alone has sprung from the apostolic fountain, and runs limpid, unpolluted with corrupt and foreign elements, down to our days, precipitating foreign ideas into the impure gutters of heresy, and vigilantly guarded by two hundred and sixty popes in uninterrupted succession from Saint Peter: a phenomenon which has given it a character of truth and divinity in eyes less thoughtful or more prejudiced against it."
How cunning is this putting of the case against "our illustrious neighbors, the Yankees." It shows the fear of the papacy and the power of the new movement, that such falsehoods as these are so diligently and widely circulated. It shows, too, where the persecutions arise, and who foster them. A priest undoubtedly wrote this perversion of history. The archbishop approves its circulation. They will create confusion and bloody work, but will not stop the new revival.
Opposite this fine plaza, on the opposite ridge of the backbone from the Empress's Garden, stands the palace of Cortez.
It is now a court and a prison. It was somewhat of both when he lived here, for he was a sort of prisoner, banished from the city of Mexico, and living as near it as he dare, under a surveillance, doubtless, all the time, of the emperor, for he was too great to be trusted with power and place.
When he was besieging the capital he made a raid on this town. The deep ravine which incloses it on either side was crossed at the eastern or lower side by a tree being thrown across the chasm, and thus making a bridge for his soldiers.
He was forbidden by the empress, as regent, from coming within ten miles of the city, because, as it is said, he gave his new wife four magnificent carved emeralds instead of giving them to the empress. So much for being more of a lover than a courtier. But he evidently gave them to his lady expecting to get them again, which he did. But he had better lost his gems than his capital.
He made this city his capital, and tried and hoped to make it the capital of the country. He built a large palace on the edge of the ravine we first crossed, that in its decay is a noble structure. It towers above the ravine for seventy feet or more, and covers with its courts several acres. The view from its azatea, or roof, is exceedingly charming. The snow mountains seem almost at the gate. The fields stretch toward them for a few miles in easy slopes. Then ragged black peaks of every contortion—a saw of iron—range along beneath the calm summits. They look like columns of lava, black, ragged, tall, and huge. The fields stretch off westward and southward in green and brown and gold, and all around stand the comforting and strengthening hills.
But just adjoining is the fairest scene of all. Right under the castle to the south-west, in a ravine and on its inclosing banks and upper rims, lies a paradise of perfect green. It is half a mile to a mile long and wide. The trees are lustrous as velvet, and every tropical delight of herbage greets us from these clinging gardens. They were a part, probably, of the grounds of the castle. Here sat Cortez and enjoyed their fragrant breath, unless, like his successors, he preferred to enjoy that of his cigar. Here he plotted to return to power; annoyed those who ruled after him and over him; got up expeditions to Honduras and California at immense loss of life, money, and almost fame, including among his losses that of the four grand emeralds, the holding on to which too closely caused his first and chiefest loss: that of the city he conquered and the government he craved. The emeralds were lost in the Mediterranean, on an expedition to Africa with Gonzalez. If any body doubts it, let him go and pick them up. In his case, as in so many others, it was proved that
"Quiet to quick bosoms is a hell."
This exquisite valley, this lordly castle that has such "a pleasant seat," the thirty cities that paid tribute to him, the wife and children that revered him, the fame he had won and never lost, all these were nothing to "the hungry heart" that set him a-wandering even to his grave.
Let us get into these delectable bowers at the foot of the palace, where they rest and toil contented to this day, the self-same sort that rested and toiled contented in his day.
The debate as to the superiority of nature or art would never arise if you walked through the Empress's Garden, and then through that of the Indos. These lanes are as beautiful as England's, and that is giving them the highest praise. More beautiful in all save the dwellings of the people, and not much less so in that particular, for neither land lifts its peasant to his proper seat. Trees of every known and unknown sort line the roadway.
How would you "get on" if, inquiring of a gardener the name of a certain tree, he should generously and abundantly reply: "Esta es la zapote amarylla, esta zapote chico, esta el mango, esta la mamme, esta huave," and, pointing to the most beautiful of all, "esta coculi sutchel?" You would delight in recovering your English and your senses by saying "That is the ash." And as handsome as any is the ash, grand and green above its fellow of the North. Yet these trees are worth praising, and the flowers, especially that of the odd name, "cocoli sutchel." It is a bouquet of fragrance and beauty unsurpassed. It grows at the end of tall, gnarled, homely boughs and trunk, a dozen separate flowers, each as large as the largest pinks, but of few petals. Red and white, it crowns this homely tree, a perfect vegetable beauty and beast.
Magnificent roses blossom by the wayside, blush, crimson, white, as sweet-smelling as their best brothers next June in New York, and finer of tint and body than any you will meet there and then. Oleanders hang out their blazon, and huge white lilies depend parasitically from appropriated boughs. The orange bears its three-fold burden of flower, and green, and yellow fruit. One bunch of eight big yellow boys on a single stem is bought for four cents, and sent with the regards of the wife of the consul-general to the wife of Dr. Butler—a present, like all the best gifts, valued much above its cost.
Brooklets trickle by the roadside, and banana groves stand thick and tall as Illinois corn, thicker, if not taller, with bunches of fruit, and purple flower-buds big as pine-apples, and like them in shape.
Two children are playing bull-fight in the street, the boy on horseback, astride a stick, varying that Yankee-boy pleasure with throwing a lasso around the neck of a younger brother, who follows him around, bellowing and bullying. They laugh in wild glee over the childish imitation.
A school in these bowers keeps up the noisy rattle of studying aloud, the tinkling bell not suppressing but encouraging the tumult. It was amusing, in one of these schools, to see how some boys showed their assiduity in study, on the presence of these strange visitors, by a great increase of their volubility. Schools are everywhere, and these poor people can read and write very well, but have not any thing to read, and no occasion to write.
They are catching zapote from a tall tree, and I learn how to gather nice apples and peaches without a basket, or without hurting them. A boy far up in the tree picks the fruit, and cries out, Vaminos" (here we go). A man below holds his blanket, or zerape, and catches the apple-shaped zapote, and rolls it easily upon the ground. The cry, the catch, the roll are instantaneous. It will be well to copy this in other orchards.
The emperor had a garden here also, given him by the Indians, with their centavos, tlaquas, or cent-and-a-half pieces, and cuartillias (I spell these phonographically), or three-cent bits. A cottage was nearly finished, but never occupied, the veranda opening on a bath. It was a spot of luxurious idleness. He liked to come here and hide from the cares of state. In a little school-room near the church, in the farther of the two school districts, he gave a ball to the natives. They hold his memory dear; the only place in Mexico that it is thus esteemed. His garden is fast becoming a desolation, and ere many years his brick, open, unfinished cottage will be buried under this abounding life.
A sugar hacienda completed our Cuernervaca experiences. It is four miles from town. Horses carry us easily hither over a road impassable to carriages. High walls and strong inclose the court-yard of the hacienda. Indian workmen have their cane-huts just outside. Inside the wife of the administrador welcomes us gracefully, and offers coffee, chocolate, cognac, and cold water. We accept the last and best. She takes us round the works.
The first apartment is devoted to grinding the cane, which is crushed between heavy rollers, the husk passing out, literally squeezed to death, the juice running a steady stream, of the volume seen in an open water-spout in a steady rain, along channels or troughs to vats in the next compartment. Then it passes into boilers about ten feet deep, four feet of copper, two of brick, and four of wood. The copper only holds the liquid; the upper part, opening widely, is for the froth and scum, good and evil, to disport in. The boilers under fire are filled to the brim with this bubbling, which is constantly skimmed by workmen, with flat skimmers half a yard across. They deposit their refuse in a trough running along the front of the boilers, and this flows into other receptacles, to be distilled into the rum of the country. So the bane becomes more baneful by the banefulness of man.
The sirup is taken to other boilers, where it is condensed yet more, and is ladled into large earthen jars two feet long, of conical shape, with a hole in the bottom. These jars are set on earthen pots after a certain crystallization is attained, and the hole opened to let the uncrystallized centre drip away. They are covered with a blue clay, or marl, which is prepared carefully in a semi-liquid form; too liquid, it would permeate the sugar; too dry, not affect it. This black mud absorbs the yellow color, and makes the mulatto white, not the usual result of mixing black and yellow together. The white is a little dingy, and Mexican sugar is not as white as the American, they not using sufficiently powerful absorbents.
These loaves of sugar, the shape and size of the jars, weigh an aroba, or twenty-five pounds. Each donkey or mule has twelve of these put on his back, three hundred-weight, and marches off to Mexico with his burden. You meet hundreds of mules thus loaded. When a civil engineer said to an administrador of a hacienda that railroads would cheapen freight, he replied he got his freighting for less than nothing now. "How so?" "My mules I raise, and their feed costs nothing. I give the driver two reals a day, and he buys his necessities at my store, on which I make a profit of a real above what I pay him. How is the railroad to help me?"
But it will help the two-real laborer, and give him more money and better chance for its investment.
The corn-husks are dragged into the court, spread, dried, and used for fuel the next day. The fuel ready for to-morrow's burning was twenty feet high and wide, and two hundred feet long, the refuse of a single day. The clay, after serving as an absorbent, is used for compost, the field being enriched with its own sweetness, and the husk boiling its own juices. A chapel is connected with the hacienda, and will be a good place for a Protestant meeting one of these days.
This hacienda belonged, it is said, to Cortez, and is now owned by the Duke de Monteleone, who is said to be his descendant. It yields thirty thousand arobas, or seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds annually, worth ten cents a pound on the premises, or seventy-five thousand dollars a year.
The workmen ought to have over twenty-five cents a day. Some of them, it is said, get fifty to seventy-five cents. But of this there is doubt. The only thing that is cheap here is man.
SAW-MILL
Our lady guide is thanked much for her valuable guidance, and we canter home amidst a glowing sunset. The mountains are cones of gorgeous color, and the clouds are redolent of flame.
The dear, delightful Indian paradise of fruit and blossom is traversed, none the less agreeable in this setting.
But another setting is here, of life, as of the sun. The two little bells of the little church are chattering quaintly, a half-way between a toll and a ring. A company of white-dressed peasants are busily shoveling earth in the yard. Women, in blue and brown and black, are in the rear of these working-men, lamenting loudly. "What is it?" we ask our guide. "A funeral!" is his short and sad reply. The bells clang and moan rapidly, the women moan, and the men, as sad as either, sternly obey that unwelcome order of nature, and bury their dead out of their sight.
It was a painful conclusion of a gala day. What does all this overflowing of life in tree and plant avail, if death is here? What this luxurious, idle ecstasy of being, if it ends thus? Ah, well, there's a better side even here. This despised peon is made majestic by "long-stretching death." He is now the equal of the duke and marquis that have lorded it over him so long and so haughtily. Oh, how one wished for power to speak to these brethren in a common sin and common grave, of a common deliverance from both sin and the grave! Out of their own ranks the preachers are coming that shall speak the comforting experience, "Mourn not as others which have no hope."
I found a proof of this that very evening in visiting the saloon where a congregation is gathered through the labors of Dr. Riley. About forty attend worship. It is growing gradually, and will, I trust, ere long be a power in all this region.
At four in the morning we leave this garden-spot. Rattling upward, we soon enter a colder clime. Still up and still colder, so that blanket shawls and shivers are our portion. And the noon rest is employed in sunning one's self on the south side of the house, among the pigs and poultry, who always know the best place for comfort.
An hour later and the descent into the Mexic valley relieves us of shawls and zerapes, and in two hours we are sweltering in summer heat; so easily do extremes meet in this extreme country.
We look down on the sea of glass, mingled with fire, which blazes over half the valley; the sea of glass, mingled with green, which covers more beautifully the other portions. The majestic snowpeaks shine forth their clearest and brightest. A Mexican sawmill, off the road, but near the city, affords a quaint sight. The Spaniards stripped the plains and nearer mountains of wood, and so there is no need to-day of a more expensive mill than the old-fashioned handsaw pulled lazily along an occasional log. Our steam saw-mill rapacity will soon effect a like result in our own land. Popocatepetl looks quietly down on the quiet sawyer.
PLANTING CORN.
Down we hasten to the level plains and straight roads; past Cherubusco, a flat field with a big church, around which the battle raged; past the beautiful hacienda of San Juan de Dios (how pious are these names!), where men are planting corn in long rows, dressed all in white as snowy as the White Woman above them, a quaint procession—"there are forty hoeing like one"—over the long, shaded, half-well-roaded paseos, into busy burning Mexico. The city shows off best on this entrance, stretching wide and churchly along the open space. We have had all extremes in half a dozen hours. Our Garden in Eden is behind us. Our northern and better paradise before. Let us go.
- ↑ The following was appended to the original: "Only our illustrious neighbors, the Yankees, have this faculty, be it said, unless we except the new sect of the Mormons, so that we are in fear and trembling lest our friends who have done us so much good should bestow it on us, and with them should come polygamy, community of goods, and other happy gifts which afflict our friends just mentioned; and, moreover, they are not very scrupulous, as we say."