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
- ↑ See illustration, page 195.
