the lovely little valley of Aconcinga at our feet, and spreading out miles away into the plains of Orizaba, which are 4000 feet above the sea. This valley was quilted over with smiling crops in all the stages of growth, from the sprouting corn to the ripe grain. The reapers were in golden fields of the yellowest and the brightest barley I ever saw. The wheat was just coming up, and immense herds of cattle, as they fed on the rich pastures, lent a charm to the landscape that made it altogether lovely. Passing a cascade of milk-white foam as it leaped from the mountain, we entered the valley, and felt what old Job had said about the "scent of water." We were in the midst of fruits and flowers—orange-trees loaded with ripe fruit and the peach-tree in all its glory of blossom, hedges, and copses of roses. Oh, a wilderness of the loveliest flowers and the gayest colours, and such only as, I used to think, had never grown anywhere except in the garden of "Beauty and the Beast!" And it, too, has its beast—for 2 months ago it had been here in the shape of an earthquake, and had shaken down the adobe huts of the village, which the owners were reconstructing of bamboo-reeds, palm-leaves, and hides. After passing through these beauties for 12 or 15 miles, at 6.30 p.m. we drove into Orizaba in the midst of a rain-storm. Coffee, tobacco, the cereals, and the banana, with other fruits, seem to be the chief articles of cultivation. Here I pernocted again, in another menagerie, when, as before, there was little chance for sleep. I was called at 6, off at 6, and at 10 breakfasted at Cordova, and at 2 arrived at Paso del Macho; there I pernocted again, as unsatisfactorily as before; and the next day, at 6, started in the cars for this place. Total expenses, $45.50. The $5.60 being spent for extras, such as a cup of chocolate or so, between the early hour of starting and the late one of breakfast.
Two ship-loads of immigrants have just arrived. Sheridan had refused to let them embark at New Orleans,[1] as he was "determined to break up that Maury nest of Confederates which was agitating the public mind of the South, and
- ↑ The U. S. Secretary of State required that all Southerners who applied for passports to Mexico should take an oath never to return.
