eral or preacher, if he had had the chance of the one, or the grace of the other.
To-day's mozo is of another type. The driver slept all the morning under his seat, and I acted the part of the mozo, plying the lash to the rear mule, and the stones to the leaders, as if anxious to show my zeal in order to get promoted. The poor fellows were so sick with the epizootic that they could hardly move. And the only response they made to my applications, not sermonic, was a kick or two occasionally from the off-mule. Or was it the nigh one? My horsemanship can not answer that conundrum. They did right to kick. As Balaam's ass was wiser than he, so these, his half-brothers, were wiser than the half-brother of that prophet. For they had dragged the coach in on the last night's posta, and then, with only four hours' rest, had been compelled to drag it back again; and sick at that. No wonder they were no quiere to any request for them to urge their step beyond the slowest walk. I beg their pardon for my stony salutations. They made the five leagues in five hours, less than three miles an hour, and they did well.
Between the beatings with whip and stones, in which latter I became quite expert, I talked to the mozo on all sorts of subjects: home, business, prospects, religion. He said that he was thirty-seven years old; married at thirty. His wife was then fifteen. He had one child, Thomas, aged four. He had no more children; it cost so much to support them, and they all took to drink. He said ladies were called young at twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and as late as fifteen, but old at twenty. His wife attended church, but he was kept at work on the road Sunday, and rested Monday, just in order to break the Sabbath. He thought I must be rich: worth not less than two hundred thousand dollars, and was surprised to see that fortune dwindle to naught. What could I be? he asks. "Predicado," I say. It was a sort of Spanish he had never heard, nor I either before I used it; but it was a guess at "preacher." A "padre" he knew too well, and a friar; but a preacher was a new vocation. So I added, for his illumination, "a
