depravity of man has never yet discovered. Rotten eggs are fragrant to its odor, and pigs' swill sweet to its taste. I wish that overseer would go into the business of spoiling the crops, and drive the whole iniquity from the face of the land and the face of the people. It has a sweet cider taste in the days of its youth, but rapidly corrupts as that does, only worse, the climate being hotter, into a sour, stinking, abominable beverage.
What would Dr. Bowditch do with this tropical drunkenness? He says lust is the vice of tropics, liquor of the temperate zones. As he would encourage, with modifications, the latter in Boston, of course he must the former in Mexico. Yet here is drunkenness as bad as any in Ireland, Germany, England, or the United States, and on a tropical plant of the country. He had better move his Board of Un-health here, and proceed to sit on this phenomenon. It will all be owed, I suppose he will say, to the lofty height of this table-land, which puts it in a temperate zone. "Logic is logic, that's all I say."
Another peculiar and proper quality of this plant is its animal productions; at least so I was informed, but I doubt the information. These are said to be three: a white rat, a white, and a brown worm. These nice creatures are made great, like Cæsar, by what they feed on; and, according to these people, are ahead of Cæsar, for they are not only great but good. They are served up as delicacies to rich and poor. Fried worms and broiled rat would make a proper accompaniment to pulqui. My informant rejoiced himself in the name of Julius Cæsar. He was also a famous cook. The punster of the crowd objected to this Diet of Worms. But it was rat-ional.
Hills rise on our left, as we move north by east, well clad in the hot and purple sunlight, well stripped of all other drapery; an aqueduct half a mile long strides across a deep gully, bearing water after the high Roman fashion, from Pachuquita, or Little Pachuca, to Omatuska. The half-way station is only a stopping-place under the trees, with a pulqui shop and a fruit-stand on the ground, of bananas, oranges, and pea-nuts. A cavalcade of horses drives up. Are
