the one or two feet of loam has left in some summer shower for parts unknown. The hills lose none of their grandeur. In fact, they increase therein. Nowhere in the country have I seen a more magnificent colonnade than accompanied us, on our left, this last ten miles. It was close at hand, and we could see far into the depths of these cavernous cliffs. Here are truncated cones, with their craters lying open half-way down their sides, a hollow to which sun and cloud-shadow give yet greater effect. Other portions of the vast façades are rent in twain from the top to the bottom. Chasms, hundreds of feet deep and wide, wind inward, and present, from this distance, rare effects. What would not nearer views afford?
The road rocks its way along on the level earth at the foot of this cliff range, and begins to slightly ascend a more ridgy but not more rough path, and suddenly the Valley of San Luis Potosi breaks magnificently on the sight. How exceedingly fortunate is Mexico in the location of her cities! If great rivers elsewhere flow by great towns, as Nature is said to condescend to man, here, for lack of great rivers, she surrounds the chief towns with superb circles of field, lake, wood, and hills—always the last, and one or more of the other three. Mexico has lakes for her chief circlet, a necklace of pearls: Puebla and Queretaro and Leon, fields of greenest green and brownest brown; Guanajuato is bound about with mountains only and closely; and San Luis Potosi with forests, a necklace of emeralds. The woods fill all the hollow for twenty miles by fifty, as seen from this slight eminence. Two villages peep above them, at least their church towers do, all that usually have height or right to arise and shine. La Pila the nearest one is called. The other perches on a shelf beyond the woods and under the hill-sides. To the north, look, and amidst the foliage you see many a steeple and dome, with which the setting sun is playing. The trees hide every thing but those dancing lights on the church tops. Even in the chief cities every thing is lowly but the church. That is every thing. San Luis Potosi is that congregation of flashing minarets, the chief city of Central Mexico. All
