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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77881 ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: LAS CASAS PROTECTING THE AZTECS.
+
+By Felix Parra.]
+
+
+
+
+                                OLD MEXICO
+                          AND HER LOST PROVINCES
+
+                               A JOURNEY IN
+                 MEXICO, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, AND ARIZONA
+                              BY WAY OF CUBA
+
+                          BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP
+         AUTHOR OF “DETMOLD” “THE HOUSE OF A MERCHANT PRINCE” ETC.
+
+                            WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                 NEW YORK
+                    HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
+                                   1883
+
+        Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by
+                            HARPER & BROTHERS,
+        In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
+
+                          _All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                                      PAGE
+
+                           PART I.—OLD MEXICO.
+
+       I. _By Way of Cuba and the Spanish Main_                          1
+
+      II. _Vera Cruz_                                                   16
+
+     III. _Up the Long Mountain Slope_                                  24
+
+      IV. _The Capital_                                                 37
+
+       V. _The Projectors_                                              54
+
+      VI. _The Ferro-carriles_                                          70
+
+     VII. _The Railways at Work_                                        80
+
+    VIII. _The Question of Money, and Shopping_                         96
+
+      IX. _Social Life, and some Notable Institutions_                 107
+
+       X. _The Fine Arts and Literature_                               120
+
+      XI. _Some Traits of Peculiar History, and the Mexican
+             “Warwick”_                                                134
+
+     XII. _Cuatitlan, and Around Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco_          149
+
+    XIII. _To Old Texcoco_                                             162
+
+     XIV. _Popocatepetl Ascended_                                      175
+
+      XV. _A Banquet, and a Tragedy, at Cuautla-Morelos_               185
+
+     XVI. _San Juan, Orizaba, and Cordoba Revisited_                   192
+
+    XVII. _Puebla, Cholula, Tlaxcala_                                  210
+
+   XVIII. _Mines and Mining Traits, at Pachuco and Regla_              227
+
+     XIX. _A Week at a Mexican Country-house_                          245
+
+      XX. _On Horseback and Muleback to Acapulco_                      263
+
+     XXI. _Conversations by the Way with a Colonel_                    275
+
+                       PART II.—THE LOST PROVINCES.
+
+    XXII. _San Francisco_                                              295
+
+   XXIII. _San Francisco_ (Continued)                                  324
+
+    XXIV. _The Villas of the Bonanza Kings_                            343
+
+     XXV. _The Vintage Season, and Monterey_                           359
+
+    XXVI. _A Wondrous Valley, and a Desert that Blossoms like the
+             Rose_                                                     380
+
+   XXVII. _Visalia, Bakersfield, and Life on a Spacious Ranch_         399
+
+  XXVIII. _Los Angeles_                                                421
+
+    XXIX. _To San Diego, and the Mexican Frontier_                     448
+
+     XXX. _Across Arizona_                                             469
+
+    XXXI. _Tombstone_                                                  482
+
+   XXXII. _Camp Lowell, Tucson, and San Xavier del Bac_                496
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+                                                                      PAGE
+
+  LAS CASAS PROTECTING THE AZTECS. By Felix Parra            _Frontispiece_
+
+  MEXICO, SHOWING PRESENT AND OLD FRONTIER                               5
+
+  CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO                                                    9
+
+  DOMES OF VERA CRUZ                                                    17
+
+  MAP OF ENGLISH RAILROAD FROM VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO                      25
+
+  TRANSCONTINENTAL PROFILE OF MEXICO                                    31
+
+  A RAILWAY JUDAS                                                       33
+
+  A FLOWER-SHOW IN THE ZOCALO                                           43
+
+  COMPARATIVE LEVELS OF LAKES                                           46
+
+  THE HOMES OF THE POOR                                                 49
+
+  ENTRANCE TO A TENEMENT-HOUSE                                          51
+
+  OLD SPANISH PALACE IN THE CALLE DE JESUS                              56
+
+  SEMI-VILLA ON THE PASEO OF BUCARELLI                                  57
+
+  THE MODERN STYLE                                                      58
+
+  PORCELAIN HOUSE IN SAN FRANCISCO STREET                               59
+
+  THE DRIVE TO CHAPULTEPEC                                              63
+
+  GENERAL RAILWAY SYSTEM OF MEXICO                                      75
+
+  THE GREAT SPANISH DRAINAGE CUT                                        85
+
+  PAY CARAVAN ON THE MEXICAN NATIONAL ROAD                              91
+
+  “NOT HERE FOR THEIR HEALTH”                                           93
+
+  MODERN SHOP-FRONTS AT MEXICO                                          99
+
+  THE “PORTALES” AT MEXICO                                             102
+
+  A “MERCERIA” AT PUEBLA                                               106
+
+  INTERIOR COURT-YARD OF MEXICAN RESIDENCE                             111
+
+  MEXICAN COURTSHIP                                                    113
+
+  THE DEATH OF ATALA. By Luis Monroy                                   123
+
+  GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ, EX-PRESIDENT OF MEXICO                        139
+
+  GENERAL MANUEL GONZALES, PRESIDENT OF MEXICO                         143
+
+  ENVIRONS OF MEXICO                                                   150
+
+  SUNDAY DIVERSIONS AT SANTA ANITA                                     153
+
+  CREW OF “LA NINFA ENCANTADORA”                                       165
+
+  THE “FIND”                                                           169
+
+  IN TIERRA CALIENTE                                                   186
+
+  THE HILL OF EL BORREGO, AT ORIZABA                                   196
+
+  PRISONERS WEAVING SASHES AT CHOLULA                                  217
+
+  OLD FONT AT TLAXCALA                                                 222
+
+  THE FIRST CHRISTIAN PULPIT IN AMERICA. TLAXCALA                      223
+
+  PART OF CONVENT OF SAN FRANCISCO. TLAXCALA                           224
+
+  SUPERINTENDENT’S HOUSE AT REGLA                                      241
+
+  PLOUGHMAN IN GRASS CLOAK                                             243
+
+  THE HACIENDA OF TEPENACASCO                                          246
+
+  THE THRESHING-FLOOR                                                  249
+
+  THE TLACHIQUERO                                                      251
+
+  NURSE AND CHILDREN AT THE HACIENDA                                   261
+
+  THE “DILIGENCIA”                                                     267
+
+  OUR CAVALCADE AT IGUALA                                              281
+
+  THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS                                                290
+
+  ALCATRAZ ISLAND                                                      297
+
+  “NOB” HILL, FROM THE BAY                                             299
+
+  CALIFORNIA STREET, SAN FRANCISCO                                     305
+
+  LONE MOUNTAIN                                                        309
+
+  “HIGH JINKS” OF THE BOHEMIAN CLUB AMONG THE BIG TREES                313
+
+  GOLDEN GATE, FROM GOAT ISLAND                                        317
+
+  HIGH-GRADE RESIDENCES                                                327
+
+  CHINESE FISHING-BOATS IN THE BAY                                     331
+
+  CHINESE QUARTER, SAN FRANCISCO                                       335
+
+  A BALCONY IN THE CHINESE QUARTER                                     337
+
+  IN A CHINESE THEATRE                                                 339
+
+  RAILWAY ROUTE: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA                       345
+
+  PALO ALTO                                                            354
+
+  RALSTON’S COUNTRY HOUSE                                              357
+
+  BOTTLING CHAMPAGNE AT SAN FRANCISCO                                  361
+
+  A BRANDY CELLAR, SAN JOSÉ                                            363
+
+  A BIT OF OLD MONTEREY                                                365
+
+  LOOKOUT STATION                                                      367
+
+  CUTTING UP THE WHALE                                                 369
+
+  THE HOTEL DEL MONTE, MONTEREY                                        371
+
+  CLIFFS AND FOREST AT MONTEREY                                        373
+
+  CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE                                              375
+
+  SAN CARLOS’S-DAY AT THE OLD MISSION                                  376
+
+  DRYING FISH AT CHINESE VILLAGE                                       377
+
+  COURT-HOUSE AT FRESNO                                                387
+
+  PRIVATE RESIDENCE AT FRESNO                                          393
+
+  FIRST BUILDING IN VISALIA                                            400
+
+  AN OLD-TIMER                                                         401
+
+  LOGGING, BACK OF VISALIA                                             403
+
+  CHINATOWN, BAKERSFIELD                                               409
+
+  GYPSY CAMP AT BAKERSFIELD                                            411
+
+  A TYPICAL RANCH-HOUSE                                                414
+
+  SAN LUIS OBISPO                                                      416
+
+  A RODEO                                                              418
+
+  THE KERN RIVER CAÑON                                                 419
+
+  TEHACHAPI PASS                                                       422
+
+  MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES                                             425
+
+  DON PIO PICO                                                         428
+
+  MONGOLIAN AND MEXICAN                                                430
+
+  PARADISE                                                             437
+
+  A MEXICAN WEDDING AT SAN GABRIEL                                     441
+
+  THE VINTAGE, SAN GABRIEL                                             443
+
+  IRRIGATING AN ORANGE-ORCHARD                                         445
+
+  A SYLVAN GLIMPSE AT RIVERSIDE                                        449
+
+  ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE                                         451
+
+  ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE                                         452
+
+  OLD MISSION AT SANTA BARBARA                                         455
+
+  PLAZA OF SAN DIEGO, OLD TOWN                                         457
+
+  OLD MISSION AT SAN DIEGO                                             460
+
+  DON JUAN FORSTER                                                     461
+
+  SEÑORA FORSTER                                                       462
+
+  FORSTER’S RANCH                                                      463
+
+  SAN LUIS REY                                                         465
+
+  A TICHBORNE CLAIMANT                                                 466
+
+  THE COLORADO RIVER AT YUMA                                           473
+
+  PASQUAL, CHIEF OF THE YUMAS                                          476
+
+  YUMA INDIANS AT HOME                                                 477
+
+  DISTANT VIEW OF TOMBSTONE                                            484
+
+  “ED” SCHIEFFELIN                                                     487
+
+  A TOMBSTONE SHERIFF AND CONSTITUENTS                                 494
+
+  APACHE PRISONERS AT CAMP LOWELL                                      497
+
+  AN ARIZONA WATERING-PLACE                                            499
+
+  CACTUS GROWTHS OF THE DESERT                                         501
+
+  STREET VIEW IN TUCSON                                                503
+
+  EXTERIOR OF MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC                     505
+
+  INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC                             507
+
+
+
+
+PART I.
+
+OLD MEXICO.
+
+
+
+
+OLD MEXICO.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+_BY WAY OF CUBA AND THE SPANISH MAIN._
+
+
+I.
+
+Boom! Two ruddy old castles domineering a narrow harbor entrance; on the
+other side a city, gray, warm-colored, and time-stained, and the bells of
+the Church of the Angels chiming for very early morning service! It was
+Havana!
+
+I began this journey to Old Mexico and her Lost Provinces by sailing
+away from the foot of Wall Street, East River, on the 31st day of March,
+1881. Some would have begun it, no doubt, by taking the railroad to our
+Southern confines, and sailing by the steamers, of medium size, which ply
+from New Orleans, Galveston, and Morgan City—all places feeling very much
+the new stimulus lately given to Mexican trade. Others—and very likely
+they could not do better—would have taken direct the excellent Alexandre
+Line, which carries the mail from New York, calling at Havana, Progreso,
+Campeachy, Frontera, and Vera Cruz.
+
+Others, perchance, more adventurous, and fond of mixing as much hardship
+as possible in their pleasure, might have crossed the frontier at
+Texas, and, the new railroads being yet unfinished, been bumped and
+thumped a thousand miles to the capital in the wretched _diligencias_
+(stage-coaches) of the country.
+
+I did none of these. I shall not be guilty of the egotism of insisting
+that I did any better; but I had formed a little plan of infusing variety
+into the trip without making it too onerous. I stood boldly upon the deck
+of the luxurious steamer _Newport_, bound for Cuba only. From there I
+was to take the French packet making regular trips from the ports of St.
+Nazaire and Santander to Vera Cruz, and bringing much of the French and
+Spanish migration; or a British steamer from Southampton, or a Spanish
+one from Cadiz, might be taken in the same way. The fare by any and all
+of the direct sea routes is about the same, and may be set down roughly
+at $85.00. The time consumed, where all connections are expeditiously
+made, should be about eleven days.
+
+
+II.
+
+There was no uncontrollable excitement on that raw 31st of March when we
+took our departure. People in the great financial mart, hurrying about
+their stocks and bonds, even blockaded us in an unthinking way as we came
+down to the steamer. It might have been simply a case of going to Europe,
+or anything else quite usual and of little import. It was, instead, a
+case of going to a land remote far beyond its distance in miles; shrouded
+in an atmosphere of mystery and danger; little travelled or sought for;
+the very antipodes of our own, though adjoining it; venerable with age,
+though a part of a new world; and said to have been suddenly awakened
+from slumber by the first touches of a phenomenal new development.
+
+There are those of us whose conception of Mexico has been composed
+principally of the cuts in our early school geography, and the brief
+telegrams in the morning papers announcing new revolutions. We rest
+satisfied with this kind of concept about many another part of the
+globe as well till the necessity arrives for going there or otherwise
+clearing it up. I saw, I think, a snow volcano, and a string of donkeys,
+conducted by a broad-brim hatted peasant across a cactus-covered plain.
+I heard dimly isolated pistol-shots fired by brigands, and high-sounding
+_pronunciamentos_ and cruel fusillades accompanying the overthrow from
+the Presidency of General this by General that, who would be served
+in the same way by General somebody else to-morrow. To this should be
+added some reminiscence of actions in the Mexican War, and notably the
+portraits of General Scott and bluff old Zachary Taylor.
+
+To this, again, I would add fancies of buried cities in Central America,
+and of Aztec antiquity, and the valor and astuteness of Hernando Cortez
+and his cavaliers, remaining from Prescott’s history of the Conquest. One
+of the most captivating of volumes, this had seemed almost mythical in
+its remoteness; and as to the idea of actually verifying its scenes in
+person, it was beyond the wildest imagination.
+
+But now all at once this uncertain territory had become real. The
+railroad had penetrated it, and made it accessible to the average private
+citizen. Not that it could yet be reached by railway, for the first
+international line is still incomplete, though its termination is near
+at hand; but a multitude of lines, undertaken by American capital and
+enterprise, and aided by a Government of liberal ideas, were traced over
+every part of the land, and some of them in progress. The locomotive
+screamed along-side the troops of laden donkeys and in sight of the snow
+volcanoes. Even the brigands were said to have been dislodged from their
+fastnesses, the revolutions had ceased, and a reign of peace and security
+begun.
+
+Momentous rumors from these new enterprises were frequent in the
+newspapers, and predictions indulged in of the great increase of trade
+and population to result to Mexico by them. General Grant, to whose
+personal influence much of the turning of public attention in this
+unwonted direction, after his first visit, should certainly be ascribed,
+had taken the presidency of one of them. Their stocks and bonds were
+being prepared in bank-parlors, but as yet there was no “boom,” little
+that was overt.
+
+
+III.
+
+I did not quite know, when standing on the deck of the departing steamer,
+that I was to return to this dense New York, with its tall towers and
+mansards and fairy-like bridge, from the other side of the world. This
+journey lengthened out into a long, desultory ramble, beginning with
+Cuba, and, after Mexico, concluding with the most remote, novel, and
+characteristic of our own possessions on the Pacific slope. There is
+unity of subject, and even a certain pathos, in the recollection that
+this latter was once Mexican territory also. Its most obvious basis of
+life is still Spanish, and it may be sentimentally considered a kind of
+Alsace-Lorraine—a part of the sister republic when it was well-nigh as
+large and powerful as ourselves.
+
+[Illustration: MEXICO SHOWING PRESENT & OLD FRONTIER]
+
+It was naturally cold on the 31st day of March, and blustering weather
+followed us down the coast as far as it dared. Then I awoke one morning
+early, at the warm gleam of summer in the yellow lattices of my cabin
+window, and, looking out, saw that we were voyaging, on an even keel, on
+the placid blue sea of the tropics. Fragrant odors were wafted over to us
+from Florida, though we did not see the land. The Pan of Matanzas came in
+sight, and we studied the long, bold outline of the island of Cuba. It
+was the Spanish Main. It was the perfection of weather for piracy. If the
+“long, low, suspicious-looking craft, with raking masts,” which used to
+steal out from sheltered covers to plunder rich galleons, had many such
+days for their occupation, it was, so far at least, an enviable one.
+
+We had on board a Cuban who had married a Connecticut wife, and lived so
+long in a Connecticut village that he had a kind of Connecticut accent
+himself, and he was taking his wife to see his family, where, no doubt,
+much astonishment awaited her.
+
+The captain, a merry and entertaining soul, had promised us, for our
+last day’s dinner, a baked ice-cream. He endeavored to get up bets on
+the improbability of his being able to accomplish it; but there, sure
+enough, it was, and doubters were put to scorn. There was a form of
+ice-cream, frozen hard and firm, and a crust over it, brown and smoking—a
+dish, as it were, typical of our situation, as a hardy Northern element
+in the embrace of the tropics. Not to continue the mystery of it, and as
+an earnest that there shall be no “tales of a traveller” in this record
+which are not strictly true, let it be explained that the ice had been
+covered with a light froth of white of egg, which was rapidly browned
+and scorched at the cook’s galley before the interior had time to be
+dissolved.
+
+
+IV.
+
+And so, as I say, two ruddy stone castles, full of green old bronze
+guns (we found that out afterward), looking down upon a narrow
+harbor-entrance; and it was Havana!
+
+It was the morning of the 5th of April on which we entered it. We steamed
+up the strait to where it widens out into a basin, made fast to a buoy,
+and had our first glimpse of cocoa-palms, growing, unfortunately, around
+a cluster of coaling-sheds. Some harbor boats took us ashore. We landed
+at broad stone steps pervaded by smells, passed into the Custom-house
+(which had been an old convent), and out of it into paved lanes full
+of donkeys, negroes, soldiers, sellers of fruits and lottery-tickets,
+engaged in transactions in a debased fractional currency. The money of
+the debt-ridden island is that of our “shin-plaster” war period, of
+unhappy memory. A couple of boiled eggs in a common restaurant cost forty
+cents; a ride in a horse-car, thirty-five. The wages of a minor clerk at
+the same time were but $30 or $40 a month. How does he make ends meet and
+provide for his future? He buys regularly a certain amount of hope in the
+Government lottery. “A demoralizing system indeed!” I said, as I frowned
+over the wares of a dealer who had lost a leg in the insurrection. I
+think it was No. 11,014 I bought, however, in a grand extra drawing, the
+first prize of which was to be a million, in paper. I trust the gentle
+reader will feel that I repented when I heard the result, some months
+after, in Mexico, and that I should have tried just as hard to repent had
+I won.
+
+The Havanese were exercised just then over the discovery of great frauds
+in their Marine Department. Forty million dollars had been stolen, by
+collusion between contractors and the commissariat, since the outbreak
+of the rebellion in 1868. The Morro Castle was full of prisoners of
+distinction—officers, marquises, and counts, of the sugar aristocracy
+of the island, and Old Spain—awaiting their trial by court-martial. The
+principal operator, one Antonio Gassol, had already been sentenced to two
+years’ confinement and the restitution of a million of his ill-gotten
+gains.
+
+The talk of not a few intelligent persons was, that the ten years’
+insurrection had been purposely kept alive by rings of contractors
+for purposes of spoliation, and by ambition for military advancement.
+Dulce, they said—going through the list of Captains-General—had married
+a Cuban wife, and was secretly a traitor; De Rodas, when asked for
+re-enforcements at a certain place, withdrew a portion of the troops
+already there; Pieltan was occupied in intriguing for the republican
+cause in Spain, and the easy-going Concha for the cause of King Alfonso.
+Finally, Martinez Campos and Jovellar were sent out, and, yielding to the
+demand of the universal weariness, by a little display of vigor, the one
+in the cabinet, the other in the field, made an end of the languishing
+struggle.
+
+This may have been, however, merely the story of the discontented, which
+should be taken with a grain of salt. It is true, on the one hand, that
+the area of the island is not great, and the despatch of forces from
+Spain easy; the insurgents never held a town, and received no aid worth
+mentioning from without. But, on the other hand, there were no railroads
+of consequence, the ordinary roads were wretched, and there was the wild
+_manigua_, as it is called, half forest, half swamp, with which a good
+part of the island has abounded from the date of Christopher Columbus
+down. It was in the _manigua_ that the insurgents found refuge from
+pursuit.
+
+
+V.
+
+It so happened that the _Ville de Brest_ was delayed in her coming, and I
+had six or seven days of leisure in the island. I employed part of it in
+a run down to Matanzas, the second city. I saw on the way the _manigua_,
+which is sentimentally pretty, from a distance, with masses of laurel,
+cypress, and graceful palms; but within it is a thicket of intertwisted
+cactus, thorns, and creepers, through which a way must be opened with the
+_machete_, a formidable half knife, half cleaver, carried by the peasants
+for general uses on the plantations, and which served also as their
+weapon in the strife.
+
+[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO.]
+
+There was an International Exhibition in progress at Matanzas, easily
+rivalled by almost any American county fair. The railway ride of three
+hours and a half by a ram-shackle train, run by a Chinese engineer,
+was hot and dusty, but how well repaid by the first deep draughts of
+satisfaction in understanding at last the heart of a tropical country!
+There was the thatched cabin, shaded by the broad-leafed banana. It
+was like “Paul and Virginia.” Where was the faithful negro Domingo?
+The hedges were of cactus and dwarf pine-apple. There were groves of
+cocoa-nuts like apple-orchards with us, and unknown fruits too numerous
+to mention. It was as if each peasant proprietor had cultivated a
+gigantic conservatory, and were indulging himself in the luxuries of life
+in consideration of foregoing its necessities.
+
+Matanzas was dull, even with its Exposition, a pretty plaza, and the
+memory of a locally immortal poet, Milanes, of whom a tablet in a wall
+testified that he was born and died in a certain house. I looked into
+his works at a book-stall. He wrote on “Tears,” “The Sea,” “Spring and
+Love,” “The Fall of the Leaves,” “To Lola,” and “A Coquette.” “Your
+mother little thought, when she held you an infant in her arms,” he
+says, in substance, to the coquette, “of what wiles and perfidies you
+would be capable. Your beauteous aspect will in time fade away, and what
+remorseful memories will you not then have to look back upon!”
+
+With this dip into the poetic inspiration of the heart of the island of
+Cuba let me take the train back to town, having made a beginning of the
+discovery that a glib rhyming talent—and facility in speech-making as
+well—is common among the Spanish-Americans.
+
+I visited a sugar plantation, where the negro slaves, swarming out of a
+great stone barracks—the men in ragged coffee-sacks, the women in bright
+calicoes—were as wild and uncouth as if just from the Congo. Next I went
+to the bathing suburb of Chorrera, where there is a battered old fort
+that has done service against the pirates, and where the American game of
+base-ball has been acclimated.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Havana was gay with parks, opera-houses, clubs, and military music.
+Awnings were stretched completely across the two narrow streets of
+principal shops. Bright tinting of the modern walls contrasted with a
+gray old rococo architecture. An interior court of my hotel was colored
+of so pure an azure that it was puzzling at the first glance to say where
+the sky began and the wall ended. The more important mansions were of
+a size and stateliness within which is probably nowhere surpassed, but
+neither in them nor the shabby little attempt at a gallery were there any
+pictures worthy of the name.
+
+“You will find all that—the treasures of art—in Mexico,” the Havanese
+say. “Yes indeed! that is the place for them.”
+
+They speak with great respect of Mexico, with which, perhaps, they
+have no very intimate personal acquaintance. Up to the independence
+of the latter, in 1821, it was the richest and greatest of all the
+Spanish possessions; and Cuba, made more important in its turn by this
+independence, was but a stopping-place on the way to it.
+
+It is worth while to have seen Havana and Cuba as a preliminary to
+Mexico. The Spanish tradition pervading both is the same, with local
+modifications. It was here, too, that Hernando Cortez prepared his
+immortal expedition of discovery and conquest. Since I am preparing my
+own, to follow over exactly the same course, why should I repine that the
+_Ville de Brest_ is a day or two longer in coming?
+
+He was a wild young fellow in the island in early days, this Cortez,
+his chroniclers say, and gave little promise of the great qualities
+he developed in the enterprise which steadied him. The shilly-shally
+Velasquez would have stopped the sailing of his expedition and thrown
+him into prison, but he dropped down the harbor before his preparations
+were half completed and finished them elsewhere. He put to sea at last,
+with five hundred and fifty men, in nine small vessels, to undertake
+the conquest of an empire teeming with millions. The largest of his
+vessels was of a hundred tons, and some were mere open boats. In these
+he conveyed, too, sixteen horses, which cost him, it is said of them,
+“inexpressibly dear.”
+
+We make a boast of our hardihood sometimes, yet grumble at sea-sickness,
+delays, the ordinary mischances of the traveller. But think of it! To set
+out in such a fashion, without steam, without charts, subject to every
+bodily ill for which modern science has found a remedy, and carrying
+your horses, worth well-nigh their weight in gold, to proceed against an
+unknown empire! Why, we do not know the first principles of boldness!
+
+
+VII.
+
+At last, on the 11th of April, the _Ville de Brest_ came in, and went
+out again on the same day. She was a steady-going, _bourgeois_-looking
+craft, as compared with the elegant American steamer, and showed traces
+of hard knocks in her long, plodding journey of twenty days to this
+point. She treated us well enough, however, and presented the novelty of
+surroundings for which I had come aboard. There was a little, gold-laced
+captain, and the crew wore white canvas hats and suits of two shades of
+blue cotton, as if equipped for some charming nautical opera. I believe I
+was the only English-speaking passenger; and as it has never been known
+to occur to a foreigner to practise his English, it was an excellent
+opportunity for practising the languages likely to be needed in the new
+country.
+
+There was a young Frenchman who had been back to his own country to marry
+a wife, and brought her with him. There was a French engineer coming to
+report for principals in Paris on Mexican mines; an agent of a scheme
+for the establishment of a national bank. A young Italian of Novara, who
+had “Student” printed on his visiting-card, had secured an engagement as
+clerk in the capital for three years. An elderly Spaniard was coming over
+to look into the subject of forgotten heritages; another had obtained a
+position in the mines at Guanajuato. There were commercial men, and a
+well-to-do Mexican family, returning from their travels, with a son who
+had studied law at a Spanish university.
+
+It has been proposed to call this body of water—made up of the Caribbean
+Sea and the Gulf of Mexico—the Columbian Sea, in compliment to
+sadly-neglected Columbus; and it seems a good idea, but it will hardly
+now be carried out. My predecessors have seen many an interesting sight
+on this tropical old Spanish Main, the source, too, of that greatest of
+natural mysteries, the Gulf Stream. But these must have been in times
+long gone by. In the day of steam, with the swift prow always in motion,
+the ocean is vacant. There is no catching of sharks and dolphins, hardly
+even a covey of flying-fish. Those things were for the long, lazy periods
+of calm, when the denizens of the deep gathered curiously around the
+craft half quiescent among them.
+
+One of my predecessors in 1839—Madame Calderon de la Barca, whose book
+on Mexico remains full of interest still—was twenty-five days making
+the voyage from Havana to Vera Cruz. She saw, too, as she approached,
+the snow-clad peaks of Orizaba and the Cofre of Perote, thirty leagues
+inland. We saw nothing of these. The sky was of an opaque gray above
+low sand-hills, on which a white surf was tumbling. We made our transit
+in three days, including some stoppage by a “norther.” The norther is
+of peculiar moment to the Mexican harbors of the eastern coast; they
+are little more than open roadsteads, and when it blows they cannot be
+entered.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+_VERA CRUZ._
+
+
+I.
+
+The sea of the subsiding “norther” was still running heavily toward Vera
+Cruz, as if it would overwhelm it. It was a little Venice that we saw
+when we came to it. A half-mile or so of buildings, compact and solid,
+with blackened old rococo domes and steeples; yellow for the most part,
+scarlet, pink, green, and blue, in patches; a stone landing-quay, and a
+long, light iron pier projecting from it. At the end of the pier from a
+crane hung an iron hook, and to this the imagination instantly hooked on.
+It was the termination of the English railway to the capital. By that
+road, with all possible expedition, we should be borne up out of the
+miasmatic lands of the coast—the over-luxuriant _Tierra Caliente_—to the
+wonders of the interior.
+
+To the left a reddish castellated fort. No suburbs—not a sign of
+them—only long, dreary stretches of sand. Very far down on the sand, with
+the sea breaking white over her, was the English steamer _Chrysolite_,
+dragged from her moorings by the gale and wrecked. We came in at evening,
+and joined ourselves to a little cluster of steamers and sailing-vessels
+made fast to buoys under the lee of a coral reef, on which stands the
+disreputable old castle of San Juan d’Ulloa. It is whitewashed in
+part, and partly as blackened by time and powder as the reef itself.
+A revolving lantern moved round on its summit. It was told to the
+confiding that the Government kept prisoners there to turn it; and they
+were instructed to look for their dark, flitting forms and hear their
+lugubrious cries. We heard all night, at any rate, the creaking of the
+pumps of an American bark along-side, which had come disabled into port,
+with a freight of logs from Alvarado, and could barely keep afloat.
+
+[Illustration: DOMES OF VERA CRUZ.]
+
+It so happened that it was the anniversary of the arrival of Cortez, in
+the year 1519. He had arrived on the evening of Thursday of Holy Week,
+and so had I. It was on the morning of Good Friday that I went ashore.
+We were taken off in small boats, and our ship unloaded by lighters, for
+there is not one of these Mexican harbors where a ship can lie up to a
+wharf in safety.
+
+More than the usual embarrassments await the ordinary traveller on the
+quay at Vera Cruz, by so much as he is apt to know less of Spanish than
+of French—in which most of the dearly-bought early foreign experience
+is acquired—and nobody will tell him the truth. Let it be fixed in mind
+that but one train a day starts for the capital, and this at eleven at
+night. The designing bystanders make you take your baggage to a hotel,
+pretending that no other course is possible. Take it, instead, to the
+depot at once and get rid of it, and then see the town.
+
+For the town is by all means to be seen. One had not expected much of a
+place the reputed home of pestilence, and I shall not advise a lengthened
+stay; but, from the point of view of the picturesque, it has some
+pleasant surprises.
+
+Founded by the Count de Monterey in the early part of the seventeenth
+century—for it is not quite the site of the original Vera Cruz of Cortez,
+which was above—it has now attained a population of about seventeen
+thousand. The principal shops had a large, well-furnished aspect,
+especially those in groceries and heavy hardware. The Custom-house
+square was piled to repletion with bales of cotton, railroad iron, and
+miscellaneous goods awaiting transit.
+
+I walked, the very first thing, into a large, cool public library, which
+had once been a convent. It was not much of a public library, the books
+being few, and to a certain extent bound in vellum, as if they too had
+belonged to the convent; but it was public, and what one did not expect.
+
+The churches were of a well-proportioned, solid, grandiose, rococo
+architecture, and had charming bells. The principal one, in a little
+shaded plaza, had its dome encrusted with colored china tiles, which
+shone in the sun—a feature waiting in plenty farther on. They were draped
+in black, and crowded with worshippers to-day, and abounded in strange
+figures of bleeding Christs, with other evidences of a florid form of
+devotion.
+
+Grass grew in joints of the pavement in the minor streets, as I had seen
+it, for instance, in some such place as Mantua. Long water-spouts project
+from the tops of the flat-roofed white and yellow houses, and upon these
+sit the solemn zopilotes. All the world knows that the street-cleaning
+of Vera Cruz is conducted by the ravens, or buzzards; but all the world
+does not know with what a dignity these large zopilotes, of a glossy
+blackness, often pose themselves immovably on the eaves against the deep
+blue sky. They might be carved there for ornament. Many a street-cleaning
+department is at least less sculpturesque, and perhaps less efficient.
+
+The principal thoroughfare, called of the Independence, leads to a short,
+concrete-covered promenade, bordered with benches and a double row of
+cocoanut-palms, and this to the open country. It is an early discovery
+that the Mexican is patriotic. He is fond of naming his streets and
+squares after his military achievements, and particularly the Cinco de
+Mayo (the Fifth of May). We shall hear plenty more of it, this Cinco de
+Mayo. It was won at Puebla over the French, in 1862. He attaches also to
+cities the names of his heroes. Thus Vera Cruz itself is Vera Cruz of
+Llave, a general and governor; Oaxaca, Oaxaca of Juarez, the sagacious
+President; and Puebla, Puebla of Zaragoza, its commandant on the 5th of
+May above-named.
+
+There were notices of a bull-fight posted on the dead walls. Nearly all
+typical notes are struck at once—plaza, Renaissance churches, patriotism,
+bull-fight, and tropical vegetation. I took a tram-car of a peculiar,
+wide, open pattern (made, however, in New York) out to the open fields,
+and saw a dancing-place, a ball-ground, and the dark, heavily walled-in
+cemetery.
+
+The road to this latter should not be grass-grown, if half the tales
+of dread told abroad be true. And yet there are apologists even for
+the yellow-fever, or rather those who say that its ravages are greatly
+magnified.
+
+I fell in with the Yankee captain of the disabled bark which had lain
+by us during the night. He was sitting on a low stone post at a street
+corner, and was half disconsolate, half desperate, by turns. He could
+find no dry-dock in which to lie up for repairs; and he could get no
+steam-pump, by the aid of which he might have kept on his way. He was
+condemned to see his venture sold for a song, for want of means to save
+it.
+
+If little, as I say, was expected from the land at this place, a good
+deal, on the other hand, was expected from the water, at an ancient
+port, the New York of Mexico, receiving nine-tenths of the commerce of
+a nation of ten million people. But not a year passes without a number
+of disasters, which has led the underwriters to make their risks to Vera
+Cruz about five times higher than to most other ports. The aggregate of
+these losses for a brief time would pay the cost of works needed to make
+the inhospitable roadstead a harbor.
+
+A few rudimentary preparations are absolutely necessary before Mexico can
+enter upon the expected period of prosperity, and the creation of harbors
+in some degree commensurate with the new transportation facilities is one
+of them. A breakwater plan will, no doubt, have to be adopted like that
+so much in use on our great lakes and the Channel ports of Europe. It was
+of interest to hear, during my stay in the country, that this need had
+impressed itself upon the authorities at Vera Cruz and Tampico, and that
+they had taken the step of counselling on what was best to be done with
+the American engineer, Captain Eads, who was engaged in his unique scheme
+of a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
+
+
+II.
+
+I had the pleasure of spending the evening, pending the departure of
+the train, in a large, cool, roomy house, with the American consul. He
+had been a resident for twelve years, and had brought up a family of
+daughters here. It did not seem, at first sight, an attractive place in
+which to bring up a family; but they saw a good deal of company from the
+ships in port, took an occasional run to the capital, or a vacation at
+Jalapa or Cordova, above the danger-line, and seemed well content.
+
+The consul was himself a physician, and had much to say on the subject of
+the yellow-fever. He insisted that it was epidemic, but not contagious.
+The local authorities put afflicted patients in their hospitals
+along-side others suffering from ordinary sickness, and these latter do
+not take it.
+
+“Great damage,” he said, “is done to the commercial interests of both
+countries by the annoying restrictions of quarantine arising from this
+cause. There is no more need of quarantine against yellow-fever than
+against common fever and ague, since it cannot be transmitted.”
+
+He quoted eminent medical authority at New Orleans as sharing his views.
+From which it would seem that the subject is worth careful looking
+into from official sources, in order that, if there be a mere popular
+delusion, it may be dispelled. As I write the Mexican Government has just
+granted authority to the steamer line which carries the mail into New
+Orleans to reduce the number of its trips to one each month during the
+quarantine, increase its freight and passenger rates fifty per cent.,
+and, if the traffic does not pay even under the increase, to abandon it
+entirely.
+
+The consul, in conclusion, had known but one countryman of ours to die of
+it during his stay, and only a few to be attacked. I may say, however,
+that the consul succeeding this one—who has since gone away—arrived fresh
+from Minnesota, and died at his post within a week.
+
+Another interesting subject of talk with the consul was the tariff laws
+and the usages of the port of entry, naturally of leading importance
+here. The tariff system, based on an original law of 1872, has been
+greatly tampered with since, and is in a confused state; so that, with
+the best intentions, importers are apt to be visited with double duties,
+fines, detentions of goods, and law-suits. There are some three hundred
+and seventy-eight articles in the specified list. New articles are
+charged for after the manner of those which they resemble. Thus, when
+the article of celluloid was first introduced there was doubt whether
+it ought to be taxed twenty-nine cents a kilogram as bone, or $2.20 a
+kilogram as ivory, and the decision was finally in favor of the latter.
+
+The merchant must use the names employed in the country. Thus, our
+“muslin” should be merely “shirting” or “calico;” while what is
+understood here by muslin is really lawn, taxed twice as much. The least
+variation in a label or form of package is visited with penalties.
+Storage in the warehouses, too, is estimated, not by the space occupied,
+but by the package, which is a hardship. A case is told of where ordinary
+_argenté_ hooks-and-eyes, which should pay nineteen cents a kilogram,
+were charged for as “plated silver,” which pays $1.15, and then a double
+duty imposed for “false declaration,” making the total $2.30 a kilogram.
+As a rule, a “venture” is not a success. The laws, framed with excessive
+severity against contrabandists, whom they often fail to reach, afflict
+well-meaning persons. They make the consignee of goods subject to all
+the penalties; and many of these latter are afraid to touch, without
+the most ample guarantees, consignments of goods which they have not
+specifically ordered. The Germans succeed best in this traffic, through
+their painstaking attention to the local requirements.
+
+“I will tell you a story,” said the consul, “of an unlucky fellow who
+came here from England with a small venture of fancy goods, part free
+of duty. The whole cost him originally $1200; and he had consulted the
+Mexican consul at Liverpool, and thought he knew what he was about. When
+he got through the Custom-house his total charges and fines had amounted
+to $2850. He sold his stock for $2000, and borrowed money to pay the
+difference and get out of the country.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+_UP THE LONG MOUNTAIN SLOPE._
+
+
+I.
+
+There is but one train a day, each way, on the English railway, and
+the journey occupies twenty hours. The road is a great piece of
+engineering, and has been described more than anything else in Mexico.
+Photographs—almost the only good ones to be had in the country—are
+plentiful, displaying its notable points. It climbs seven thousand six
+hundred feet to the table-land in a distance of about two hundred miles,
+the whole way to the capital being about two hundred and sixty. It has
+the transporting of the greater amount of construction material brought
+into the country for the new roads, and has lately been quite profitable.
+A first-class fare is $16; a second-class, $12.50; and baggage is charged
+for, as on the Continent of Europe.
+
+Behold us at last at the station, at eleven o’clock at night, ready to
+climb to the capital—but how unlike our great predecessor, Cortez—by
+railway. No, indeed; poor hero! he had to linger at the coast for months
+before beginning his long and painful march, with a battle at every step.
+Nor was it by the same route. He went in by Tlaxcala, Cholula, Puebla,
+and so over between the great snow-peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl
+(the White Woman), down to the gleaming lakes and palaces of ancient
+Tenochtitlan. In this course he was followed by General Scott in his
+turn. The old diligence road—of their adventures on which my predecessors
+have written so much—continued practically the same route, going first by
+National Bridge and beautiful Jalapa.
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF ENGLISH RAILROAD FROM VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO.]
+
+I say beautiful Jalapa—although I have not been there myself—because
+all testimonies point with such a unanimity to the charms of soil and
+climate, and the beauty of the feminine type, in what is considered a
+peculiarly favored spot, that I think there can be no doubt about it.
+
+There were no sleeping-cars; but the carriages, divided into compartments
+for eight, and comfortably padded (on the European plan), filled their
+place very well. The passengers in the third-class cars had already
+begun the night with a boisterous singing and playing of harmonicas.
+To-morrow was the _Sabado de Gloria_ (or Holy Saturday), an occasion of
+merry-making, and they were taking an earnest of it. A car containing
+half a company of dusky Indian soldiers, who act as an escort, was
+coupled on to the train.
+
+The associates in the compartment in which I established myself were the
+French engineer sent out to report for principals in Paris on Mexican
+mines, and the young Frenchman bringing back a bride from his own
+country. All at once there entered it so lawless and bizarre-looking
+a figure that the French engineer sent out to report on mines to his
+principals in Paris thought it prudent to descend hastily and seek
+quarters elsewhere. The rest of us, though remaining, were, perhaps,
+in no small trepidation. It was the first view at close quarters of a
+dashing type of Mexican costume and aspect which is peculiarly national.
+
+Our new friend was dressed in a short black jacket, under which showed
+a navy revolver, in a sash; tight pantaloons, adorned up and down with
+rows of silver coins; a great felt sombrero, bordered and encircled with
+silver braid; and a red handkerchief knotted around his neck. A person
+in such a hat seemed capable of anything. And I had forgotten to mention
+silver spurs, weighing a pound or two each, upon boots with exaggerated
+high and narrow heels. This last, by-the-way, is a peculiarity of all
+boots and shoes in the market, which aim thus, it would seem, to continue
+the old Castilian tradition of a high instep.
+
+Would it be his plan to overawe us with his huge revolver, alone?
+
+Or would he, at a preconcerted signal, be joined by confederates from the
+third-class car or a way-station, who would assist him to slaughter us?
+
+The traveller is rare who arrives in Mexico for the first time without a
+head full of stories of violence. The numerous revolutions, the confused
+intelligence which reaches us from the country, give a color to anything
+of the kind; and the stories retain their hold for a time even in the
+most frequented precincts.
+
+We got under way. The new arrival, instead of devouring us, proved the
+most amiable of persons, and we were soon upon excellent terms with him.
+He was a wealthy young hacendado, or planter, returning to estates of
+his, on which he said six hundred hands were employed. He offered cigars,
+gave us details in answer to our eager curiosity about his novel dress;
+and we had shortly even tried on—bride and all—the formidable sombrero,
+and learned that the price of such an one in the market is from $20 to
+$30. The silver-bound sombrero, and ornaments of coins, are a favorite
+kind of Mexican extravagance even among the lower classes, which is
+perhaps accounted for by the lack of proper places of deposit for savings
+in other forms.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was moonlight. Sleep on such a night was out of the question. Not
+a foot of the scenery ought to be lost. But the padded coach was
+comfortable; the fatigues of the day had been severe. The lively
+conversation became fitful, then lapsed into long silences. The events
+of that first night, half dozing, half waking, sometimes even alighting
+at the little stations, seem wholly like a dream—the waking part, if
+possible, stranger than the other.
+
+Palms and bananas and dense coffee shrubbery, with hamlets of thatched
+cottages sleeping peacefully among them; a glimpse of a cataract; an
+Indian mother singing to her baby; perfumes coming in at the window;
+statuesque, silent men in blankets, and Moorish-looking women, offering
+fruits; stations from the outer doors of which, when reached, no town was
+visible, but only an immense darkness; persons taking coffee in lighted
+interiors; the dusky soldiers laughing loud in their compartment; a few
+startling words of English, sometimes with a Southern or even Hibernian
+accent, spoken by imported employés of the line meeting to exchange
+a comment, generally unfavorable, on their situation—these are the
+impressions that stamp themselves upon the memory.
+
+As soon as the first gray of daylight appears it seems incumbent on us to
+begin to admire the country. We are not far past Cordoba, the centre of
+its most important coffee-growing interest.
+
+“_Pouf!_” says our friend, the hacendado, with an air of disdain.
+
+He will not take the trouble to look out of the window. He expects things
+very much better. We have, in fact, passed remarkable scenes in the
+night, but the best is still before us, and presently begins.
+
+At a little station called Fortin we commence to wind along the side of
+one of the vast sudden gorges which impede travel in the country, the
+_barranca_ of Metlac. There are horseshoe curves which almost permit the
+traditional feat in which the brakeman of the rear car is said to light
+his pipe at the locomotive. We pass tunnels and trestle bridges, see our
+route above and below us on the hills in such varied ways that it is
+hardly possible to understand that these are not so many different roads
+instead of the same. There is a point above Maltrata, distant but two and
+a half miles in a direct line, which must be reached by twenty miles of
+zigzag.
+
+The history of this road, from the political point of view, presents
+hardly fewer obstacles and vicissitudes than those opposed by nature
+to its engineers. It has passed, in its time, under the rule of forty
+different presidencies, and lost and recovered its charter in the
+revolutions. Though of so moderate length it required over thirty years
+and $30,000,000 to build it.
+
+The passengers ran out at the small stations for flowers, with which we
+adorned ourselves. So, too, wreaths were hung about the neck of Cortez’s
+horse in his progress, and a chaplet of roses upon his helmet. We gave
+the new bride heliotrope, roses, jasmine, and the splendid large scarlet
+flower—the tulipan—which may pass for the type of tropical beauty.
+
+The sun came up and lighted Orizaba, rising 17,375 feet beside us to
+the right, making it first rosy-red, then golden. The peak is a perfect
+sugar-loaf in form, with nothing splintered and savage about it, as in
+Switzerland. It seems almost too tame at first—a sort of drawing-master’s
+mountain—and, above the tropical landscape, is like snow in sherbet.
+The city of Orizaba is an important small place, the scene of a dashing
+surprise of the Mexicans by the French, at the hill of El Borrego. It
+has charming torrents, which furnish water-power for cotton and paper
+mills. One of these torrents, conveyed in an arched aqueduct, turns the
+machinery of the _ingenio_, or sugar plantation, of Jalapilla, once a
+country residence of Maximilian.
+
+A delegation of relatives had come down the night before to await our
+young couple here. What embracing and chattering! A Mexican embrace has
+a character of its own. The parties fall upon each other’s necks, as we
+are accustomed to see done on the stage. It is given, too, between mere
+acquaintances, almost as commonly as shaking hands.
+
+A vivacious sister-in-law aimed to give the new-comer an idea of what
+was before her in her future home. “Such flowers as I have in the
+court-yard!” she said, raising her eyes, with an expressive gesture;
+“such oranges, camellias, azaleas! Ah yes, indeed, I believe it well.”
+
+“And Jack?” inquired the husband, addressed as Prosper; “how always goes
+poor Jack?”
+
+“Ah! he is dead,” replied the vivacious sister-in-law. “I regret to tell
+you, but so it is.”
+
+It appeared that Jack was a favorite monkey, and for a moment his
+untimely fate cast a certain gloom over the company.
+
+
+III.
+
+From the heights where we were little villages, with squares of
+cultivated fields around them, were seen at vast distances below, with
+the effect of those miniature topographical preparations in relief
+displayed at international exhibitions.
+
+It greatly simplifies Mexico to remember that, in profile, it is a
+long, continuous mountain-slope, rising from the Atlantic to a central
+table-land, and falling, though more gradually, on the other side to the
+Pacific. Along the ascents, as well as at the top, are some benches,
+or level breathing-places. These table-lands are the chief seats of
+population, and they are utilized as much as possible for the lines of
+the north and south railways.
+
+[Illustration: TRANSCONTINENTAL PROFILE OF MEXICO.]
+
+This steep formation accounts for absence of navigable streams and for
+the existence of climates verging from tropical to temperate, nearly
+side by side. The sharpness of contrasts in climate is scarcely to be
+appreciated by the hasty voyager. The really tropical vegetation is
+succeeded by a kind which to the eye of the American of the North is
+quite as exotic. Banana and cocoa-nut are followed by a hardy kind of
+fan-palm; by nopal, or prickly-pear, as large as the apple-tree with us;
+by the tall, straight organ-cactus, in use for hedges; and the remarkable
+maguey, or century-plant.
+
+What would not some of our American conservatories or a certain
+well-known New York club give for some of these splendid specimens! The
+spiky maguey, like a sheaf of sword-blades, grows eight and ten feet
+high. It is the typical production of the central table-land. Its sap
+furnishes in extraordinary quantities the beverage called _pulque_—the
+wine of the country. From it, in addition, are made thatch, fuel, rope,
+paper, and even stuffs for wearing apparel.
+
+Our third-class passengers celebrated their _Sabado de Gloria_ with
+great spirit, by shouting, and firing pistols and Chinese crackers from
+the car windows. Teams of mules, with their load, whatever it might be,
+gayly adorned, showed that it was being equally observed in the country.
+It is a day devoted by custom to the particular abasement of Judas, who
+is treated as a kind of Guy Fawkes and dishonored in effigy. Venders
+parade the streets with grotesque images of him, and children at this
+time estimate their fortune in the number of Judases they possess, just
+as at the season of All-Souls it is in cakes, gingerbread, and even
+more substantial viands, fashioned into death’s-heads, cross-bones, and
+coffins.
+
+At Apizaco, the junction of a branch-road to Puebla, we met a merry
+excursion, decorated with rosettes and streamers. It had two mammoth
+Judases, stuffed with fire-works, one on the locomotive, the other on a
+baggage-car. The former was blown up, as a kind of compliment to us by
+way of exchange of ceremonies with our own train, amid hilarious uproar.
+
+We had now entered upon the central table-land of Mexico. Long,
+dotted, perspective lines of maize and maguey stretched to distant
+volcanic-looking hills. A few laborers in white cotton were ploughing
+with wooden ploughs, after the pattern of the ancient Egyptians. At the
+stations squads of a mounted rural police, in buff leather uniforms and
+crimson sashes, which give them a certain resemblance to Cromwell’s
+troopers, salute the train.
+
+The sparse towns consist of a nucleus of excellently built old churches
+amid an environment of mud-colored habitations. They are in crying need
+of whitewash. Will they ever get it?
+
+[Illustration: A RAILWAY JUDAS.]
+
+The face of the country was not the verdant paradise that may have
+been expected, but parched and brown. We had come at the end of the
+rainy season. Small columns of dust, whirling like water-spouts, were a
+constant feature of the landscape. A stage-coach going along a distant
+road was marked by its own dust, as a locomotive by its smoke.
+
+Isolated houses there were none, with the exception of (at long
+intervals) some gloomy, square, fort-like hacienda, with straw-stacks and
+flocks and herds near it. Indian peasants offered for sale, all along
+the way, cakes spiced with green and red peppers. The village of Apam is
+the centre of the Bordelais of the _pulque_ industry. The new-comer here
+usually makes his first trial of that beverage, milk-like in aspect, but
+somewhat viscid and sour to the taste, with heady properties. It does not
+commend itself to favor on a first acquaintance. Wry and contemptuous
+grimaces are made over it, but in time, as occurred in my own case, it
+may become very palatable, as it is said to be healthful. It is poured
+into little earthen pitchers from bags of whole sheep-skins, with
+the wool-side in, like the wine-skins of the East and “Don Quixote.”
+These bags, resembling dressed pigs, lie about on the ground or the
+freight-car, with their legs dumbly kicking up in the air, in many a
+grotesque attitude.
+
+But one glimpse of real Aztec antiquity along the way, and that at San
+Juan Teotihuacan, thirty miles from the capital. The deceptive shapes
+of the hills, which assume symmetrical forms, had frequently produced a
+throb of half self-delusion, but here are two genuine pagan teocallis,
+pyramids dedicated to the sun and moon, and a great area covered with
+broken fragments and vestiges of tombs. It is thought to have been old
+and ruined even in the time of the Aztecs. Children offer at the train
+_caritas_, as they call them (“little faces”), and other fragments of
+earthen-ware, together with occasional pots and idols of large size,
+which they represent as having been dug up out of the soil. They
+have certainly been buried in the soil; but later, finding that the
+manufacture of spurious antiquities is a thriving industry, one takes
+leave to question for what length of time.
+
+And yet, what can it matter? These ancient-seeming jars, with their
+symbols and images of the war-god and what not upon them, are at least
+unique and historically correct. One does well to bring home what he can
+get, for default of better, and not ask too many questions.
+
+San Juan is a place that one mentally makes a note of as to be returned
+to; and I spent some pleasant days there later, poking among the
+potsherds of the past, and picking up ordinary _caritas_ and bits of
+flint weapons, for myself.
+
+
+IV.
+
+But no dallying now. The shades of evening draw on. We are weary and
+travel-stained with the twenty hours’ journey and the many excitements
+of the day; but the great moment is at hand. Gleams of distant water,
+thickets of maguey and cacti, with a peasant stealing mysteriously among
+them, behind a troop of donkeys! The geography picture is realized to
+the life. The water comes nearer; we skirt its borders. Can it be that
+these lonesome, shallow expanses, without vestige of sail or even skiff,
+their muddy shores white with a deposit of salt and alkali—can it be
+that these are the great lakes of Tenochtitlan, on which Cortez launched
+his brigantines? And the famous floating gardens, where are they? All in
+good time! We shall see. The sacred hill of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with
+a cluster of interesting-looking churches upon it, is passed. Remains
+of ruined haciendas and fortifications, and dilapidated adobe hovels,
+appear. We run out upon a long, low causeway, skirted by the arches of
+an aqueduct, over marshes. Other similar causeways are seen converging
+from a distance. One had not expected to find everything so unrelievedly
+flat. It is like climbing the mountain to find the Louisiana lowlands. A
+chain of yet higher mountains surrounds it, it is true; the snowy summits
+of Popocatepetl and its mate, the White Woman, always shine upon it from
+a distance, but Mexico itself is a basin. It has been under water, and
+would be yet, but for artificial works by which the lakes have been made
+to recede and left behind them these alkali-whitened margins.
+
+It is a disillusionment very like that of approaching Venice at low tide.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+_THE CAPITAL._
+
+
+I.
+
+There was a custom-house at the Buena Vista station. Part of its profits
+are national, part municipal. The capital is in a Federal District, ruled
+by a governor, not unlike the District of Columbia. There is little
+inter-state comity as yet among the different parts of the republic. Each
+state still collects dues at its own frontiers, and the towns take tolls
+(the alcabalas) on merchandise and food entering their gates.
+
+Mexico is not a cheap city of abode. Its hackney-coaches, as in European
+countries as well, are an exception to the general rule; but even these,
+with the various commissionaires, who zealously aid you in putting your
+baggage upon them, after getting it through the custom-house, are dear
+for the first time. Travelling is like so many other things in the world:
+you pay a bonus, or initiation fee, in the beginning, after which the
+charges are in a declining series. The particular hackney-coach which
+conveyed us, a travelling companion and myself, may have been a trifle
+dearer on account of a driver who aspired to a few words of English. Not
+that we greatly wanted it. The injury to one’s feelings in these cases
+of the indifferent reception by the native of your first overtures in
+his own language (as if his own language were not good enough for him,
+forsooth), is sufficient, without a pecuniary burden added. But he
+charged for it, as I say.
+
+“Well, good-night,” he said, saluting us as patrons. “Wass you wants?”
+And, after having passed the long, shady strip of park called the
+Alameda, he even ventured upon a certain facetiousness, as, “Wills you to
+want a wiskey?”
+
+He had learned this proud acquirement in the military service on the
+frontiers of Texas.
+
+A long, dark ride conveyed us to the principal hotel. As it was once the
+palace of the Emperor Iturbide, after whom it is named, it should have
+something stately about it, and so it has. There is a high, sculptured
+door-way, of an Aztec touch in the design, though not in the details,
+and long, grotesque water-spouts project into the street. Within is a
+large, dark, arcaded court, from which open _café_ and billiard-room, the
+leading resort of the golden youth of the town.
+
+The office is a dark little box of a place, with two serious
+functionaries, who seem to receive the visitor only with suspicion. The
+gorgeous and affable hotel clerk of northern latitudes is unknown. In the
+rear are more courts, not arcaded; and around all of these the rooms are
+ranged in several stories.
+
+It is not so late on the evening of his arrival but that the traveller
+may, after dinner, still take a stroll. He will be apt to fancy at
+first, from the quietude, that his hotel is not on a principal street;
+but it is in the most central part of the city—on the street which, with
+three others running parallel for say half a mile, and the included
+cross-streets, contain the principal retail traffic.
+
+It is an early discovery that Mexico is a grave and not a gay city. There
+are no crowds on the sidewalks, no eating of ices in public, no _cafés
+chantants_, nothing Parisian. By nine or ten o’clock the people seem to
+have retired, perhaps to be up betimes in the morning for the work of the
+day. A military band plays three evenings in the week, but even these
+concerts, except on Sundays, are so sparsely attended that the men seem
+discoursing the music for their own amusement.
+
+Policemen are stationed at short intervals apart in the quiet streets,
+with their lanterns set in the middle of the roadway. They are obliged,
+by regulation, to signal their whereabouts every quarter of an hour. The
+sound of their whistles, which have a shrill, doleful note, like that
+of a November wind, is heard repeated from one to another all the night
+through.
+
+
+II.
+
+As Mexico has not, until lately, at any rate, expected tourists, there
+are almost none of the usual appurtenances for their pleasure and
+information to be met with. While this may have its annoyances, if an
+ardent curiosity be baffled too long, on the other hand freedom from the
+sense of responsibility to exacting Baedekers and Murrays has advantages
+of its own. The visitor with an eye for the picturesque dips into a
+delicious feast of novelties, makes discoveries on every hand, and has
+the pleasure of testing the value of his own unaided conclusions. By
+daylight, with all its bright colors upon it, and its normal stir of life
+going on, the famous capital is a very different place from what it was
+at night. By little and little misapprehensions are shaken off. After the
+first moments of disappointment we like it always more instead of less,
+and in the end it takes a powerful hold.
+
+Here at length is the great central plaza, in which events of such moment
+have been transacted. To actually sit down upon a bench in the midst of
+it, and gaze comfortably about—can it be possible?
+
+The imposing cathedral makes a new pyramid on the spot where once stood
+the pyramid of the Aztec war-god. These stones should be ankle-deep with
+all the blood of various sorts that has been spilled upon them. For a
+moment one renews the pagan superstition. I would gladly see set up
+again, for a brief instant, old Hutzilopotchli, the war-god, aloft on his
+ancient terrace, hear the beat of the lugubrious war-drum, and see the
+mournful procession of captives winding up to the sacrifice, in charge
+of the sinister priests with their black locks flowing down upon their
+shoulders.
+
+But not one instant too long. What! hideous priests, you will indeed lay
+them down on the sacrificial stone, and raise the knives of flint above
+their bared breasts for the monstrous slaughter? Not one hair of their
+heads shall be harmed. San Jago and Spain! When was Castilian ever known
+to turn his back upon a foe? Up the pyramid we go, leaping from step to
+step, though with no better weapon than a sun-umbrella in hand, to their
+deliverance. Ay, howl if you will, baffled miscreants, and rattle your
+spears and arrows like hail upon us! Down with your old Hutzilopotchli
+till he crashes in fragments below there. Your carven sacrificial stone
+shall be set up in the court-yard of the Academy of Fine Arts of San
+Carlos for this, and your great calendar-stone, a show-piece, against the
+side of the cathedral.
+
+It is a good day’s work. I estimate that there were in that train of
+captives not less than a hundred souls!
+
+But it is hard to conjure up images of desperate conflicts, though
+there have been so many, in this bright sunshine, with the multitude of
+pretty, novel sights. On one side of the square a beneficent institution,
+the National Loan Establishment, occupies what was once the site of
+the palace of Cortez; on another, the long, white, monotonous National
+Palace, the site of that of Montezuma. In the centre is a charming little
+garden, with benches, the Zocalo.
+
+The cathedral, like most of the earlier architecture, is in the
+Renaissance style, far gone to the vagaries of rococo. It is saved from
+finicality, however, by its great size and massiveness, except in respect
+to the terminations of its towers, which are in the shape of immense
+bells. Adjoining, and forming a part of it, is a parish church, in a
+rich, dark-red volcanic stone, with carving that recalls the fantastic
+façades of Portuguese Belem. What a painting it would make, on one of the
+perfect moonlight nights, which bring out every line of the sculpture
+softly, and show the whole like a lovely vision!
+
+There are little book-stalls in front, and gay booths devoted to the sale
+of refreshing drinks—_aguas nevadas_—from large, simple jars and pitchers
+of most noble and pleasing shapes. The drinks are dispensed by dusky
+Juanas and Josefas of Indian blood, with straight black braids of hair
+down their backs. With a characteristic taste the fronts of their booths
+are often wholly studded and banked up with flowers, and furnished with
+inscriptions formed in letters of carnation pinks and blue cornflowers.
+
+Figures go by in blankets which one hankers to take from them for
+_portières_ or rugs. The men of the poorer sort wear or carry,
+universally, the _serape_—a blanket with a slit in the centre for the
+insertion of the head. Apart from its artistic patterns, it is a useful
+garment in many emergencies. It is not the most improbable thing in
+the world that, in the course of the Mexican revival, we may yet see
+it introduced in the States, and running a course of popularity like
+the ulster. The corresponding garment of the women is the _rebozo_, a
+shawl or scarf, generally of blue cotton, which, crossed over the head
+and lower part of the face, gives a Moorish appearance. The background
+of life here seems more like opera than sober existence. Two other
+sides of the square are occupied by long arcades, among the merchants
+of which, protected from the sun and rain, one may wander by the hour,
+watching the shrewd devices of trade, and picking up those knick-knacks,
+trifling in the country of their origin, which are certain to be
+curiosities elsewhere. From time to time pass across the view, dark and
+Egyptian-like, in a peculiar dress of bluish woollen, trudging under
+heavy burdens, Indians who have yet preserved the tradition of their
+race. Followed to their homes, they are found to dwell, among the ruined
+walls of the outskirts, in adobe huts which can have changed little since
+the time of the Conquest.
+
+These genuine Aztecs have peculiarly soft, pleasant voices, in contrast
+with the Spanish voice, which is apt to be harsh. They are shiftless and
+squalid, but their manners are above their surroundings. It is a favorite
+way with the Mexican to say, “This is your house;” and I have had said to
+me on being introduced, “Well, now, remember! number so-and-so, such a
+street, is your house.”
+
+Having looked into one of these Indian abodes, and asked an elderly
+woman, by way of making talk, if it were hers, she replied, “Yes, Señor,
+and yours also.”
+
+Neither in the Zocalo nor the Alameda (a park, which holds somewhat
+the position of the Common, in Boston), are there trees with the hoary
+antiquity one might expect in such time-honored places. But it appears
+that the setting out of the trees, and the formation of the Zocalo
+entirely, is of modern date, the work of Maximilian, a monarch who, in
+his short, ill-fated reign, had many excellent projects.
+
+[Illustration: A FLOWER-SHOW IN THE ZOCALO.]
+
+The Zocalo is occasionally allowed to be enclosed, and an admission-fee
+charged, for select festivities. The orations were delivered there,
+for instance, on the national festival of the 5th of May. When I first
+arrived a flower-show was in progress. I have never seen anything more
+charming of the sort. Our florists might get a score of new ideas for
+the arrangement of bouquets. Strawberries were introduced into some for
+effects of color. Little streamers with gallant mottoes floated from
+others. There were lanterns, and birds in cages. A military band played,
+and people promenaded—dandies with silver-braided hats, stout duennas,
+and fathers of families, and slender, lithe señoritas, wearing the
+graceful mantilla instead of the Paris bonnet.
+
+In front of the Zocalo a permanent flower market is held every morning,
+which is almost as pleasing.
+
+Tramway cars run out of the plaza in numerous directions. The city early
+utilized this invention, and boasts of having one of the most complete
+systems existing. The inscriptions on them have an attractive look. One
+would like to take all the different routes at once. Patience! it is
+all accomplished in time. Shall we go to Guadalupe Hidalgo, with its
+treasures and its miraculous Virgin; to Tacubaya and San Angel, with
+their villas; Dolores, with its pensive cemetery, full of sculptures; La
+Viga, with its picturesque canal, giving access to the _chinampas_ of
+flowers and vegetables; the gates of Belem and Niño Perdido, familiar
+in the story of the American conquest; Chapultepec? Yes, that shall be
+the very first—Chapultepec, theatre of exploits of American valor and of
+moving events in every historic epoch.
+
+Mexico is extraordinarily flat, and laid out as regularly at right angles
+as our own symmetrical towns. At the ends of all the streets the view
+is closed by mountains. Its flatness, together with its position in
+reference to the adjoining lakes, are circumstances which have occasioned
+great solicitude in the past, and still call for almost as much, on
+a different ground. Formerly it was danger of inundation; now it is
+defective drainage. Bad odors offend the nostrils, and stagnant gutters
+and heaps of garbage the sight, of the wayfarer about the interesting
+streets.
+
+[Illustration: COMPARATIVE LEVELS OF LAKES.]
+
+The drainage problem, divested of the mystery with which it has been
+surrounded in learned treatises, is simply this. When the vast slope
+from the sea has been surmounted, and the Valley of Mexico—as high
+as the Swiss pass of St. Gothard—is reached, it is found to be a
+shallow depression, containing six lakes. These are of many different
+levels—Texcoco the largest and lowest. On the edge of Texcoco, or in the
+midst of it, like another Venice, with canals for streets, was built
+ancient Mexico. This principal lake received the overflow of the others,
+and the city was subject to frequent inundations. It is even now, after
+a large shrinkage in the lakes, but a little more than six feet, at its
+central portion, above Texcoco. The waters of the three upper lakes—San
+Cristoval, Xaltocan, and Zumpango—were turned back as has been done with
+the Chicago River of late. A great Spanish drain in the early seventeenth
+century, the Tajo of Nochistongo, was cut through the mountains, and got
+rid of it in the direction of the Atlantic.
+
+But Texcoco itself has no outlet, and, as experience has proved, even
+with only Chalco and Xochimilco to be taken care of, is still liable
+to overflow. With relief from this peril is inseparably bound up the
+drainage problem. The fall is so slight at best, that though Lake Texcoco
+be preserved at a normal level, and kept from backing up into the sewers,
+there is no destination for the sewage received by it, which lies
+festering in the stagnant water. With the rest is complicated also the
+irrigation of the valley. No end of plans have been offered to resolve
+these difficulties. Their history would make an interesting chapter by
+itself. Some have proposed to pump out the lake by steam; others, to
+intercept the waters running into it, and allow it to dry up naturally;
+another, to exhaust it by means of a great siphon of stone and cement.
+But the judgment of most is in favor of establishing a current, through
+a canal, to some point lower than the lake; and the mountains in the
+neighborhood have been searched for the most favorable point of exit for
+such a canal.
+
+The plan was officially adopted, in fact, and a considerable beginning
+made, under the direction of an able engineer of foreign education,
+Don Francisco Garay. But the works were allowed to languish. Neither
+government nor community seemed more than half-hearted in the effort to
+get rid of evils to which they had so long been used. The problem still
+remains one of the most pressing of those to be resolved, and one of the
+most interesting to foreigners intending to make Mexico their home.
+
+
+III.
+
+Choosing any street at random where all are so attractive, and
+proceeding to its termination, in this direction or that, you arrive
+now at a mere _cul-de-sac_, now at a city gate, now at vestiges of
+adobe fortifications, with a moat. Few vehicles, apart from the
+hackney-coaches, are to be seen, but plenty of troops of laden donkeys,
+and everywhere the cotton-clad natives themselves bearing loads under
+which the regular beasts of burden might stagger. There is a story that
+when wheelbarrows were first introduced to their notice on the railroad
+works, the natives filled them in the usual way, and then carried them on
+their backs.
+
+Each separate kind of business has its distinctive emblem. The
+butcher—elsewhere not a person noted for great taste in ornament—displays
+a crimson banner, and has his brass scales decked with rosettes. His
+supplies are brought him by a mule, trotting along with quarters of beef
+or carcasses of mutton on each side hung from hooks. But it is especially
+the _pulque_ shops (corresponding to our corner liquor stores) which
+devote themselves to decoration in its most florid form. Not one so poor
+as to be without its great colored tumblers, and ambitious fresco of a
+battle scene, or subject from mythology or romance. They delight in such
+titles as “The Ancient Glories of Mexico,” “The Famous St. Lorenzo,” “The
+Sun For All,” “The Terrestrial Paradise,” and even “The Delirium,” which
+often enough expresses the condition of customers who imbibe too freely.
+
+[Illustration: THE HOMES OF THE POOR.]
+
+On the tramways pass not only passenger-cars, but others for freight.
+They move the household goods of a family, for instance. There are also
+impressive catafalques and mourning-cars, running smoothly along, with
+funeral processions. You may graduate from a hearse with six horses,
+driver, lackey, and four pall-bearers, all in livery, for $120, to one
+drawn by a single mule for $3; and there are cars for the mourners in the
+grand style at $12 and plain for $4.
+
+Both these ideas, it would seem, might be advantageously adopted by
+suburban lines of our own.
+
+Presently comes by a more economical funeral—a couple of _peons_ (as the
+Indian laborers are called), at a jog-trot, bearing a pine coffin on
+their shoulders.
+
+Battered old churches and convents on a great scale, and of a grand
+architecture, now for the most part devoted to other purposes, are
+extraordinarily frequent. Before the sequestration of Church property—in
+the war called of the Reform, under Juarez, in 1859—Mexico was well-nigh
+one great ecclesiastical estate. Without going into the religious
+question, and supposing only the operation of ordinary causes, it is
+easy to see how the Church corporations—repositories of the gifts of the
+faithful, moved by no feverish haste in speculation, and with no reckless
+heirs to spend their gains—must in course of time have become possessed
+of an enormous share of worldly goods.
+
+There is no lack of sculptured old rococo palaces, of the conquerors
+and their successors, either. Many of these are of a peculiar, rich red
+stone, with carved escutcheons above their door-ways. There is one of
+which I was fond, in the Calle de Jesus, with immense water-spouts to its
+cornice, in the shape of field-pieces. Wheels and all project in high
+relief.
+
+Only infinitesimal quantities of vacant land exist within the compass
+of the city. All is compactly built. The Continental system of _portes
+cochères_ and interior court-yards prevails. How many glimpses, both
+pleasing and curious, into these interiors! What a pity that the severity
+of our winters prevents building in a style which would be so admirably
+adapted to our summers! Over the entrances of some tenement-houses are
+placed pious dedicatory signs, as “Casa de la Santisima,” “Casa de la
+Divina Providencia.”
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO A TENEMENT-HOUSE.]
+
+One day, as I made a hasty sketch of one of these, with a water-carrier
+lying asleep in the archway, the custodian came out and offered strenuous
+objections. “You are mapping the house” (_mappando la casa_), he said,
+“and I do not see how it can be for other than evil purposes.”
+
+One of the most charming of all the mansions I saw stood nearly opposite
+our hotel, and was faced up entirely with china tiles, chiefly blue and
+white, and set with old bronze balconies, as dainty and quaint as a
+dwelling in fairy-land. I examined the interior of this house also, and
+found it faced within as well with the same simple, Moorish-looking,
+tiles, in staircase walls, ceilings, and even the high, banked-up
+furnace, or range, in the kitchen. An affable major-domo occupied his
+leisure with painting, in a large library on the ground-floor. He was
+just now engaged in copying and enlarging, very poorly, the photograph of
+a lady, over which he held up his brush for criticism. A maroon carpet
+was laid up the centre of a grand staircase, and the same uniform color
+prevailed in the carpets throughout. The rooms were large and high, the
+principal ones opening both on the street, and, by means of light glass
+doors draped with lace, on the balconies running around the courts. These
+balconies are edged in the general practice with climbing vines and rows
+of handsome plants. In one of the rear courts could be heard and seen
+the family carriage-horses, together with others for the saddle, stabled
+according to custom under the common roof.
+
+There was a large saloon, with divans, and old-fashioned mirrors, sloped
+forward from the walls, instead of pier-glasses; and a little boudoir,
+with furniture entirely in gilded wood and cane. There was a pretty
+family chapel, with two _prie-dieux_ for the master and mistress, and
+a couple of benches for the use of the servants. In the bedrooms of
+such houses are usually religious pictures, copies of Murillo and the
+like; and there are also found quaint effigies of sacred things, as a
+representation of the Nativity; a Christ, with purple mantle and crown
+of thorns; a life-size Virgin, in raiment of tissue of silver, standing
+upon the globe and a serpent’s head. The men of the country are very
+widely imbued with the sceptical spirit of the age, but the women, whose
+property these objects are, are still devoutly Catholic.
+
+These rooms, in such interiors, though less lofty and impressively
+finished perhaps than those at Havana, have not the complexity of objects
+with which we, in an ill-understood passion for decoration, overload
+our own in the United States. They are large, and contain a few simple
+articles, with plenty of space around, and have an unmistakable dignity
+of effect. When we can make up our minds to do that, instead of depending
+upon a complication of costly rarities in little space, we shall begin to
+be palatial, and not merely _bon bourgeois_.
+
+We do not know how republican we are, after all our travelling abroad
+and reverence for things European, till we come to where the stately old
+Continental traditions are actually in force.
+
+One of the enthusiasts of the new progressive movement, writing of late
+of Monterey, a city of 40,000 people, in the north, already connected
+with us by the Mexican Central Railway, and coming into notice as a
+winter resort, notes, as one of the signs of improvement, that “the old
+Latin style of building, the square, flat-roofed house, with interior
+court, is giving place, in the new quarters, to American architecture.”
+To which I reply, Heaven forbid! Let us never “improve” away with
+“American architecture” the Moorish-looking dwellings which, to lovers of
+the picturesque, should be one of the principal inducements for visiting
+the country.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+_THE PROJECTORS._
+
+
+I.
+
+Meanwhile the court-yard of our hotel, the palace of the ancient Emperor
+Iturbide, is full of a curious group of English-speaking foreigners,
+discussing a multitude of projects. They sit usually in chairs on a
+little terrace at the left of the court, behind which is a modest
+little parlor, with a piano. As a general rule, the Mexican hotel is
+without parlor, reading-room, or any other of those appurtenances we are
+accustomed to look upon as an essential part of the composition of a
+hotel.
+
+The guests take their meals at a restaurant, entered from the second
+court, or at other restaurants in the town where they please, there being
+no provision by the hotel itself. They look up wearily at their rooms
+around the circumscribing galleries, push their hats on the back of their
+heads, and pass their hands across their brows. The atmosphere, at this
+elevation of 7600 feet, is very rare, it will be remembered, and most are
+affected at first by a feeling of dizziness and loss of appetite. They
+do not find themselves quite right in health; and even the most athletic
+pause once or twice, and hold by the balusters, on their way up-stairs.
+The same amount of exercise cannot be taken, in fact, by either men
+or animals, as in a more dense atmosphere. The horses, for instance,
+though good and speedy, can only be run short distances, and then, as
+evaporation is rapid and draughts particularly dangerous, must not be
+let stand, but must be walked up and down till gradually cooled.
+
+I recollect my first glimpse of my room, to which, after an interview
+with the sepulchral clerks below, I was shown by the barefooted boy,
+“Pancho,” carrying a tallow dip. It was without windows or other
+opening except through a large transom above the door, and seemed hot
+and suffocating. This may have been the influence of imagination,
+however, for the climate is rarely either hot or cold, but noted for its
+remarkable evenness. There is no provision for heating during the winter.
+It is said that even after a very few minutes of fire, in stove or grate,
+the already thin air becomes so much farther expanded as to produce
+discomfort. Later, in my long stay at this hotel, I had a room higher up,
+on the sculptured front, looking down upon the life in the thoroughfare,
+which, taking a separate name at every block, is here the Calle de
+San Francisco. Again, I had one with a window commanding the shining,
+tile-covered dome and part of a garden approach to the lovely old convent
+of San Francisco, now devoted to the uses of an Episcopal mission, and
+beyond that the mountains, with the fair blue sky above them. Rising to
+begin the day, the mornings were found peaceful and lovely, the genial
+sunshine bathing the prospect, the blue sky but varied with the piled-up
+clouds out of which castles in the air are constructed. The visitor,
+having got over his temporary oppression, remarks upon this almost
+unbroken series with increasing wonder and admiration. It is hardly the
+custom to comment on the weather in Mexico, at least in the agreeable
+season, though the rainy season is a different matter.
+
+“A pleasant day?” says the listener, with lifted eyebrows, should you do
+so. “Well, why not?”
+
+[Illustration: OLD SPANISH PALACE IN THE CALLE DE JESUS.]
+
+Most familiar among the group of English-speaking foreigners in the
+court-yard during my stay was General Grant, who has lent a part of
+his great fame to the development of the resources of a much-suffering
+people. Did he ever reflect in these historic halls, one wondered, on
+the career of the Emperor Iturbide? Had all the talk on Cæsarism in the
+Press ever put the idea the least bit in his head? Rumors, mischievous to
+the cause of amity, ran at the very time that it was in Mexico, not the
+United States, that he proposed to found his empire. Certainly it would
+be difficult to imagine so unmelodramatic a figure in the robes and stars
+and crosses in which Iturbide has arrayed himself, after the pattern of
+Napoleon the Great, in his portrait at the National Palace.
+
+Iturbide wrote in his memoirs—which, as a display of egotism, are highly
+interesting reading—one sagacious sentence. “Devotees of theories,” he
+says, “are apt to forget that in the moral as in the physical order only
+a gradual progress can be expected.”
+
+This is very true; but the short-lived Emperor forgot, as have many of
+his republican successors, that despotism can never educate the citizen
+for the duties of freedom.
+
+Only once before—namely, on the coming of Maximilian—has there been
+a stir that might be compared to the present in a country which the
+progress of the century has heretofore seemed to ignore. Could a secure
+government then have been established, much would have been done. But the
+new-comers arrived as masters, not as friends; and the conditions were
+wholly unfavorable. The real improvements, too, apart from those intended
+for the glitter and the comfort of the throne, were but the shadow of
+those proposed to-day.
+
+[Illustration: SEMI-VILLA ON THE PASEO OF BUCARELLI.]
+
+Here the more efficient lighting of the city by electric light was heard
+discussed; there the opening of coal mines; here the establishment of
+sugar refineries, shoe factories, cotton mills. There were archæologists,
+constructors of telegraph lines, and engineers starting out or
+returning from reconnoissances. This person had come down to look into
+coffee-plantations; that, to establish a new line of steamers. This
+discourses of the improving tranquillity of the country, and asserts
+that three ploughs are now sold to one revolver. He names over prominent
+bandits who have become peaceable contractors and farmers.
+
+Some will organize banks of issue, and rid us of the cumbrous silver
+dollar. Another is up from the interior with a scheme for a colony and
+mines—much too rose-colored, one would say—with which he will start back
+to New York to organize a syndicate. Mines of gold and silver are one
+of the specialties of the country; but they seem to present fully the
+uncertainties of mines elsewhere.
+
+[Illustration: THE MODERN STYLE.]
+
+Some organized dinners, at which Mexican senators and deputies were
+enlisted for the cultivation of more friendly relations. These were held
+at the Concordia restaurant, or the Tivoli of Bucarelli, or of the Eliseo
+(summer gardens), with spacious banqueting halls. Much international
+good-feeling was manifested, and the Mexican national anthem and the
+“Star Spangled Banner” were played alternately after the speeches.
+Everything was to be made over anew. A few of the younger men were
+going and returning from expeditions of pleasure. They came back from a
+bull-fight; from the baths of Alberca Pane, where there is a fine tank
+for swimming, covered with an awning; or the theatre. They had many an
+amusing gibe, after our American way, on the backwardness of things, and
+the difference of manners and customs in the country.
+
+[Illustration: PORCELAIN HOUSE IN SAN FRANCISCO STREET.]
+
+But pleasure had as yet few votaries; the object of most was serious
+work. The business of railroad-building, and procuring of charters and
+subventions from government, threw all else into the shade. Five great
+lines, two of which had already made long strides, were to traverse the
+country from north to south, and more than twice as many from east to
+west, connecting the oceans. There were said to be six hundred American
+engineers in Mexico. They are often young graduates of Cornell and
+other polytechnic schools. In the capital the engineers and employés
+form settlements in boarding-houses of their own; make resorts of
+certain economical restaurants where little but English is spoken. They
+associate but little with the natives, but go about their work rather
+rough-and-ready in appearance, and seem to postpone adornment till the
+heat and burden of the campaign are over. There was a noticeable Southern
+element among them; and it will be found, generally, that the enterprises
+in Mexico have attracted a large representation from the Southern States.
+There is still, among the rest, a remnant of the ex-Confederate officers
+who came hither after the war, to engage—without great success, as it
+happened—in coffee-planting and the like.
+
+Not a few of the young engineers, however, particularly those who have
+their field of operations in the provinces, have already found wives
+among the slender señoritas of the country. It seems another case of
+going after the women of Moab, as it were, for the rumor comes back that
+these exacting helpmeets have often made them change their religion, as a
+preliminary to naming the happy day.
+
+
+II.
+
+A leading point with the projectors, is whether or not Mexico is likely
+to become a large or metropolitan city. It seems difficult, when on the
+ground, to doubt it. Great cities have sprung up at a mere intersection
+of railroads. But here is one with a population of 250,000 people
+already, a seat of government and of schools, colleges, museums, and
+galleries of fine arts, with an admirable climate and extraordinary
+scenery, and three hundred and sixty years and traditions of great
+fascination behind it. There are to come into or connect with it, when
+all is complete, the Mexican Central, National, and International
+roads, from the north; the Mexican Oriental, on the eastern sea-board,
+and Occidental, on the western; and General Grant’s road, the Mexican
+Southern, from the south—all to have interoceanic branches and feeders;
+the Morelos road, the Acapulco road, the English road to Vera Cruz;
+another, now constructing, to the same point by Puebla and Jalapa; and a
+number of short lines of less importance.
+
+A small portion only of this would be sufficient to create a metropolis
+outright, while Mexico has grown to a certain greatness with no
+advantages at all—not even wagon-roads. It seems its manifest destiny,
+with its central position on transcontinental lines, and its established
+prestige, to become the chief depository and place of exchange for the
+whole country. It ought to be a favorable point, too, for manufactures,
+and to become the metropolitan residence of the wealthy from the
+interior. These have rarely come to the capital heretofore. Not even the
+senators and deputies bring their families, owing to the barbarous state
+of the roads. The existing difficulties of communication can hardly be
+conceived. There are perfectly authentic accounts of persons who have
+gone from Mexico to Vera Cruz, thence to New York, thence across to San
+Francisco, and thence by Pacific mail-steamer to Acapulco, rather than
+make the direct journey of three hundred miles on muleback over the
+sierra.
+
+It is fair to say, however, that there are those who think the future
+metropolis may be farther to the north, as at San Luis Potosi.
+
+If Mexico, then, is to be a great city, whither is it to spread? It is
+compactly built within, and much of the land about it is low, traversed
+by causeways. There is no better place to think about it, nor to look
+down upon the capital as a whole, than Chapultepec.
+
+My first visit there was made on the tramway, where I fell in with a
+Mexican colonel, who told me that he liked the Americans very well. He
+had spent some time in captivity among them, having been taken prisoner
+at San Jacinto, and had learned to know them as they are. They mean
+well, he said, and are enterprising and appreciative of the arts of
+life; and you can depend upon what they say. Most of his countrymen, he
+said, very sensibly, did not understand this, but were distrustful and
+jealous. Their idea of American character, in fact, is largely derived
+from foreign books in which it is conventionalized and caricatured in an
+unfriendly way. There is evidence of it on every hand. The American, as
+touched upon in the newspapers and current literature, is the “Yankee”
+of Dickens and followers of less intelligence on the Continent. He is
+a sordid person, exclusively wrapped up in “dollars,” and can know
+but little of the chivalrous nature of those who thus superciliously
+disapprove of him.
+
+There is nothing very warlike about Chapultepec at present. A glimpse
+is got, as you approach, of a light, oblong, colonnaded edifice, with a
+lookout on the top, which is now a part of the government observatory.
+The hill is not precipitously high, though of a good elevation. There is
+a monument at its foot to the memory of the pupils of the military school
+who fell in its defence in 1847, and in the grounds moss-grown cypresses
+and a tank of clear water. I found the main part of the building, when
+an upper terrace was reached, in a state of ruin. The light iron columns
+of an arcade had been coquettishly painted and gilded, and its walls
+decorated in the Pompeian style, under Maximilian, but all had been
+wrecked in the revolutions. There was a little garden, in which a small
+guide picked me some flowers. He answered, “_Quien sabe?_” in a childish
+lisp, to most inquiries, just as his father, the custodian, if he had
+been there, would have answered in his deeper base. “_Quien sabe?_” (Who
+knows?) is a more dreamy and speculative rendering of our own “Give it
+up,” or perhaps “Dunno!”
+
+[Illustration: THE DRIVE TO CHAPULTEPEC.]
+
+The most prominent object, in the long line of the distant city against
+the bright gleam of Lake Texcoco behind it, is a sudden little volcanic
+hill—El Peñon—which rises out of it like a teocalli; and next to this the
+cathedral.
+
+As the lay of the land is studied from here it seems rather natural that
+the city of the future, on grounds of good drainage, ease of access,
+and scenery, should advance in this direction to Chapultepec, ex-palace
+of the Montezumas and of viceroys, military school, fortress, and
+observatory, on the foremost spur of the foot-hills.
+
+This was the intelligent forecast of Maximilian—a ruler, it must be
+admitted, much better fitted to cope with such pleasant matters than the
+ferocity of Mexican war and diplomacy. And such was the view of a rather
+wild-cat American Improvement Company, found among the projectors in
+the court-yard, which professed to intend a large purchase of land for
+building upon, to sell part of it, with houses, on the instalment plan,
+and to put up a mammoth hotel.
+
+It seemed a little incongruous, this selling of the heritage of Montezuma
+on the instalment plan; but we are a people who do not stop even at the
+most venerable of traditions; and the scheme might not be a bad one in
+responsible hands.
+
+Maximilian also made Chapultepec his summer palace, and laid out to it
+the handsome Paseo de la Reforma, the afternoon drive and promenade—the
+Bois and Central Park of fashionable Mexico. During Lent, however,
+fashion takes the caprice of changing to the Paseo de la Viga, along
+the canal by which vegetables and flowers are brought to the capital
+from the floating gardens. The Paseo de la Reforma is a wide, straight
+boulevard, nearly two miles long, starting from a certain equestrian
+statue of Charles IV. of Spain—the first bronze cast in this hemisphere,
+and fine and excellent work. It is two hundred feet wide, and has a
+double row of trees—eucalyptus and ash—shading its sidewalks. The Mexican
+equestrian dandy should be observed as he curvets his horse along it
+among the fine carriages. He wears now not only his weighty spurs and
+silver-braided sombrero, but a cutlass at his saddle-bow, and larger
+revolvers than ever. Not that there is need of them, since a couple of
+mounted carbineers—of whom there seems no great need either—are stationed
+at nearly every hundred yards; but they are a part of his peculiar
+display. Some of our young Americans, too, in the country, it must be
+said, almost out-Mexican the Mexicans themselves, carrying all their
+customs to an exaggerated extreme.
+
+There are to be six circles, with statues, spaced at proper intervals
+along the way. The first, containing a fine Columbus, is finished; a
+Guatemozin, for the second, is in progress. The next, it is said, will
+contain Cortez. There at last will stand, face to face—their countrymen
+now one people—the heroic defender and the heroic conqueror, the two
+characters of such contradictory traits within themselves, who both acted
+according to their lights in their day and generation, and but followed
+the path of inevitable destiny.
+
+The causeways of La Veronica and La Romita—containing ancient
+small-arched aqueducts, which bring water to the city—branch off from
+Chapultepec, and form two sides of an obtuse triangle, which the Paseo
+(or Calzada) de la Reforma bisects. It was along these causeways that
+the Americans ran, in that invasion of a very different character, in
+1847. It is said that as Shields was charging on that to the right,
+after the fall of the castle, Scott, fearing his imprudent haste, sent
+to detain him. The aide had got as far as the preliminary “General Scott
+presents his compliments, and begs to say—” when Shields, apprehending
+the message, cut him short with, “I have no time for compliments now,”
+and hurried on, and got into the city before he could be overtaken.
+
+Do the Mexicans bear us a grudge for all that? They seem just now to
+have amiably forgotten it, and far be it from me to revive such memories
+in a boasting spirit. There is a behind-the-scenes to it, here, upon
+the ground. It is pathetic, and by no means calculated to produce
+complacency, to read in the small history studied in the schools the
+Mexican account of what took place. The almost unbroken series of defeats
+from which they went up, without hope of success, to the slaughter are
+frankly admitted. The country was torn by internal dissensions. The
+generals went back from the field to put down or sustain governments,
+refused to aid one another in their operations, and availed themselves
+of the troops given them to seize upon power, instead of fighting the
+Americans. There were not less than eleven changes of government, chiefly
+violent, during the short course of the war. In February and March of the
+year in which, in September, the invaders made their entry there had been
+fighting in the streets of the capital for well-nigh a month between two
+presidents, neither strong enough to put the other down. Want of courage
+is not a Mexican failing. It was want of leaders, unity, everything that
+gives steadiness in a great crisis.
+
+The land ostensibly aimed at by the so-called Improvement Company follows
+the Calzada of the Reform for a considerable part of its length. It lies
+vacant, except for use as pasture. It has not been safe to live too far
+from the thickly-settled district till the establishment of law and order
+by the present administration, and the city itself has furnished room
+enough. But what new accommodations are to be needed in the great future,
+with the vision of which imaginations are regaling themselves, it is not
+an easy matter to determine.
+
+Villas were spoken of, to be built with restricted rights, so as to
+preserve a select and park-like aspect. There were to be front lots
+enough on the Calzada alone to pay the cost. The grand hotel talked of
+was to surpass anything on the continent.
+
+If somebody would but put up a hotel equal to our own of the second grade
+it would be a boon to American travellers. It might expect to draw, too,
+not a few of the Mexicans themselves, who are hardly slower than the rest
+of the world in recognizing a good thing when they see it. The magnates
+who shall have made fortunes in the new enterprises, and others who have
+them already, could, no doubt, be relied on for a liberal patronage.
+
+
+III.
+
+This project is of no farther importance than as a text for a mention
+of the Mexican tax and real estate laws, which have their features of
+decided interest. “In the moral as in the physical order,” as our friend
+Iturbide tells us, “only a gradual progress can be expected.” A nation
+of nine or ten millions, two-thirds of whom are of pure Indian blood,
+used only to the most primitive and poverty-stricken ways of life, cannot
+be too suddenly pushed forward. They must be allowed to go at a certain
+pace, even with the best of intentions, and slowly adapt themselves to
+the improvements designed for their good; for it is by them, the rank
+and file, after all, that these must be supported.
+
+The country might seem, at first sight, the most glorious place for real
+estate speculation in the world. Real property is not taxed except upon
+such income as it produces. When not actually producing income, it may be
+idle indefinitely, and escape scot-free, however much it may enhance in
+value meanwhile. But there are embarrassing restrictions, devised through
+fear and jealousy of the foreigner, which make the prospect much less
+attractive. The traveller of means cannot follow his whim, as he might
+almost anywhere else in the world, of buying a pretty bit of land or
+house that attracts him and leaving it, to return to when he will, or do
+what he please with it.
+
+By the Mexican Civil Code “no foreigner may, without previous permission
+of the President of the Republic, acquire real estate in the frontier
+states or territory within twenty leagues of the frontier.” And “it is
+absolutely prohibited to foreigners to acquire rustic or urban property
+within five leagues of the coast.”
+
+This may be well enough, and is aimed principally at the United States,
+as a way of preventing any gradual encroachments from the borders; but
+farther, and more important: no foreigner may own real property at all,
+except on condition of remaining permanently and looking after it. If he
+be absent from the country for two years, his property may be denounced
+and entered by the first comer, the same as if it were a mine. He cannot
+even have an agent in the country to hold it for him. Nor, even should he
+comply with the rigid condition named, could he then sell it to another
+foreigner.
+
+The transient foreigner, so far as he is concerned, cannot acquire real
+estate on any condition.
+
+All this is set down in the Code in the most explicit terms. The most
+driving improvement company, therefore, could sell lots only to Mexicans.
+The class of wealthy Americans expected as winter residents would be
+ruled out of the calculation, though, of course, they may stop at the
+hotel.
+
+There is also some ambiguity as to what commercial corporations, with
+one-third of their directors resident in the country, may or may not do,
+since the construction of the term “corporation” is not the same as with
+us. Some construing or explanatory enactments are needed to remedy the
+ambiguity last mentioned, and an entire sweeping away is needed of all
+the rest.
+
+If there be sincerity in the manifestations of desire for progress,
+and aid from without, Mexico must sweep away narrow and benighted
+restrictions. If outside capital be demanded for works of amelioration
+and embellishment, how can it be expected at such a price?
+
+And why, in the name of goodness, in this enlightened day, should not the
+foreigner be put upon the same footing as the native in these matters,
+and allowed to hold property wherever he will throughout the civilized
+world?
+
+Let the foreigner bear in mind, too, that he must be matriculated at
+the Department of Foreign Affairs, through the Consul-general, in
+order to have any recognized standing in a court of justice, in cases
+of difficulty. Without this formality even his foreignness is not
+necessarily conceded to him as a protection.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+_THE FERRO-CARRILES._
+
+
+I.
+
+The _ferro-carriles_, the _caminos de fierro_, or railways, were the
+business of the hour. In speaking of the coming greatness of the capital
+I mentioned glibly the principal ones which are supposed to have a part
+in it. They are by no means all built. Far from it! It is not even
+certain that some of the most promising of them, on paper, ever will be
+built.
+
+The matter of granting railroad charters in Mexico is by no means new.
+They have been granted for thirty years or so, to Europeans and natives,
+who did little or nothing with them. It was only when, under the adoption
+of a more enlightened policy, they came to be granted to Americans that
+the roads were built and the charters had a value. At once everybody who
+prided himself upon the necessary influence began to desire a charter
+also. He might not want to use it at once, but could keep it and see what
+turn things were to take. Or he might transfer it to some more powerful
+ownership to which it would be worth a consideration. This new ownership,
+too, might wait to see what was likely to happen. If railways promised to
+be profitable in the country, it was well for certain great corporations
+in the United States to have their feeders or extensions there; at any
+rate, they could keep others from the field till they should be satisfied
+of its character.
+
+It is in this way, I surmise, that some of the present franchises have
+been got, and are reflectively held. There have been henchmen to procure
+them and turn them over to patrons, who wait a while before going to
+work, trusting to influence to procure the proper extensions and renewals
+of time, if needed.
+
+Stories were afloat of practices employed in the obtaining of concessions
+and subsidies, which I should prefer to believe falsifications. I heard
+one or two of them, it is true, from somewhat inside sources, and such
+practices are not unknown elsewhere; yet I like much better to think
+that there are no persons of standing and influence in Mexico who could
+prostitute their high position, and put a shameless greed for gain before
+the public interest in a crisis like the present, as these stories seem
+to indicate.
+
+“Why, in our great West,” said an American visitor, settling himself back
+in his chair to complain vigorously of certain treatment he had received,
+“if an immigrant comes among us, we give him a lift. We help him build
+his house, or perhaps put him up a barn; and are glad to do it. If he has
+capital to start some kind of factory, we give him a piece of land free
+of charge. That is the American style. We put our hands in our pockets
+and pay out a little, knowing full well that we shall get it back in time
+in the greater prosperity of the town.”
+
+“Yes,” I said, by way of sympathy with his aggrieved situation, and a
+proper pride in the American style of doing things, “and I am told that,
+in Chicago and St. Louis, they pay his hotel bills a while, and try to
+keep him, if not as a permanent resident, at least long enough to get out
+a new census, in which he may be included.”
+
+“But here,” my interlocutor continued, “there is nothing of the kind. The
+first thing they ask about a new-comer is, ‘How much can we make out of
+him?’ They want pay for permitting him to do something for them. There is
+no public spirit, no local pride. What they want is exorbitant gains.”
+
+He went on to tell of an application for a charter by an American
+company, which was absolutely refused. They were afterward approached
+and told that the privilege would be granted to a committee of Mexican
+senators, who would in their turn transfer it to the company for a
+handsome consideration. The go-betweens in this negotiation declared that
+the personages who were to have the final voice in the granting of the
+charter, as well as themselves, would require to be paid, which might
+have been true, and might not. A liberal share of the subsidy to be voted
+for the railway was to be exhausted in this way.
+
+I do not know whether this be anything more than political “striking,”
+or black-mailing, with which we are familiar at Albany and elsewhere,
+and whether the corruption ever really reaches to head-quarters. At any
+rate, it was said that some part of the aid devoted to each several
+enterprise was diverted in this way to private benefit. The drainage
+of the valley had been offered in the United States at a reduction of
+forty per cent. from the amount voted by the appropriation bill, the
+difference to be retained by the purveyors of the opportunity. One
+hundred thousand dollars in cash was demanded, again, as a preliminary,
+for the opportunity to fill in the works of a certain harbor with
+stone at a reasonable rate. Such accounts may be worth looking into by
+Mexican authority, with the interest of good and economical work and
+the abatement of scandal at heart. There is probably no better form of
+patriotism for Mexico just now than a strict and uncompromising honesty
+of administration.
+
+
+II.
+
+There were entered in the convenient statistical hand-book known as the
+“Annuario Universal,” for the year, a list of forty-one railways as
+in _explotacion_ (running), or under construction. But after many of
+those enumerated was inserted a note, to the effect that, owing to some
+unforeseen delay, the works were not yet begun. Taking out these, and
+a larger number on which, though technically begun, little or no labor
+had been expended, there was still an unlooked for array of constructed
+roads. Taking out the English road from Vera Cruz, and what had been
+done by the American companies, almost at the moment, these were
+found to consist of short bits of local line scattered throughout the
+country. There was not a through line among them; many were operated by
+animal traction only; they had been built by natives, been afflicted by
+bankruptcies and other troubles; and represented the railway situation
+of the country apart from outside assistance. You were even drawn a
+good part of the way by animals on the English branch from Vera Cruz to
+Jalapa; and in going from Mexico to the mines at Pachuca, after leaving
+the main line at Ometusco, we took first a diligence, and were then
+pulled by mules in a Philadelphia-built horse-car. The number of these
+isolated bits has not increased in the mean time, several of them having
+been bought up and incorporated in the larger enterprises.
+
+In the mean time, however, the list of projected roads at least has
+been liberally increased. The Congressional session of 1881 was the
+most active ever known in the authorization of new enterprises on a
+great scale. The great Mexican Central, trunk line, had, however, been
+chartered in 1878, and the Mexican National in 1880. The first charter
+under the modern movement dates from October, 1867; and since then the
+Mexican Government has issued charters for over 20,000 miles of road,
+with subsidies probably to the amount of $200,000,000. Many of these,
+with their subsidies, have lapsed, of course. The Government is now held
+for about 15,000 miles of road, and subsidies of $90,000,000.
+
+The enterprises on a great scale are all American, and the chief ones
+among them may be estimated roughly as follows:
+
+                                                       Miles.
+    Mexican Central (Boston Company)                   2,000
+    Mexican National (Palmer-Sullivan)                 2,000
+    Sonora (Boston Company)                              500
+    Mexican Southern (General Grant, President)        1,000
+    Oriental (De Gress and Jay Gould)                  1,200
+    Topolobambo (Senator Windom, President)            1,200
+    International (Frisbie and Huntington)             1,400
+    Pacific Coast (Frisbie)                            3,000
+                                                      ------
+                  Total                               12,300
+
+To these may be added the Sinaloa and Durango, from the city of
+Culiacan to the port of Altata, in Sinaloa; the Tehuantepec railway,
+and Captain Eads’s ship railway across the same isthmus, to take the
+place of a ship canal. The privilege to build an American railway across
+Tehuantepec, it may be remembered, was secured (at the same time with
+the lower belt of Arizona) by the Gadsden treaty of 1853, supplementary
+to that of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The road was supposed to be needed for
+the consolidation of relations with our then newly acquired territory
+of California. The Pacific railroad filled its place, however, and the
+project, taken up and dropped from time to time, has since had but a
+lingering existence.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL RAILWAY SYSTEM OF MEXICO.]
+
+Captain Eads proposes to transport bodily ships of 4000 tons, 190 miles,
+by land. He will have twelve lines of rails, and four locomotives at
+once; and, to avoid jarring in transit, changes of direction will be made
+by a series of turn-tables instead of curves. The scheme is a startling
+one, and meets with no little opposition. It is still only on paper; but
+its proposer, who has abundantly vindicated his sagacity in constructing
+the jetties of the Mississippi and the great St. Louis bridge, remains
+firm in his conviction that he will be able to sail ships across the
+isthmus on dry land.
+
+
+III.
+
+The several enterprises are succinctly divided into two classes—those on
+the ground, and those on paper. It is not necessarily a disparagement to
+the last that they are still in such a condition, for many of them are of
+very recent origin.
+
+The original Mexican Southern road is to run south from Mexico, by Puebla
+and Oaxaca (capital of the populous state of the same name) and the
+frontier of Guatemala, with branches to the ports of Anton Lizardo, on
+the Gulf of Mexico, and Tehuantepec, on the Pacific. It is to connect
+also with the Tehuantepec railway. It relies, as a principal resource,
+upon the transport of the valuable productions of a rich tropical
+country, as cotton, sugar, coffee, rice, and the like. Oaxaca is an
+important small city of 28,000 people, birth-place of General Porfirio
+Diaz, the Mexican power behind the throne, and undoubtedly the weightiest
+person in the country. The route will be a rugged one to build. Much of
+the area is high and salubrious. The Oaxacan Indians are a sturdy race,
+who have followed their leader, Diaz, and others in many a hard-fought
+campaign.
+
+This company, however, has lately effected a consolidation with the
+Mexican Oriental, and both will henceforth be known under the name of the
+Mexican Southern.
+
+The Mexican Oriental sets out from Laredo, on the Texas frontier, and
+proceeds to the capital by way of Victoria, the capital of the state of
+Tamaulipas. It claims to have a bee-line, and to be 200 miles shorter
+than any other. Its mission is to occupy the district between the coast
+and the Mexican National. It throws out a branch from Victoria to San
+Luis Potosi; and has a coast-line connecting Tuxpan, Nautla, and Vera
+Cruz. It is fed by some 12,000 miles of road under control of Jay Gould
+in the United States.
+
+The International is chartered to run from Eagle Pass, in Texas, to the
+city of Mexico, occupying a field left vacant between the Mexican Central
+and National; and is allowed to have also a cross-line to a point between
+Matamoras and Tampico, east, and between Mazatlan and Zihuataneso, west.
+The theory of each, it will be seen, is to have an interoceanic line as
+well as a main line north and south.
+
+The Pacific Coast road covers the right to a vast stretch, beginning
+at a point below Fort Yuma, Arizona, and connecting the whole series
+of Pacific ports down to Guatemala. The Topolobampo has also a long
+extension southward, to touch at some of the same points.
+
+The Topolobampo route (Texas, Topolobampo, and Pacific) crosses the
+northern border states. It professes to be a shorter transcontinental
+route to Australia and Asia than any other that can be laid down on
+the map. It claims to have at Topolobampo, just within the Gulf of
+California, the ancient Sea of Cortez, one of the few fine harbors of the
+Pacific coast.
+
+These harbors are spaced at wide intervals apart. That of the Columbia
+River of Oregon is the highest up. Then, 600 miles south, comes San
+Francisco; 441 miles below this is San Diego; 650 miles farther on, in
+a direct line, or 936, doubling Cape St. Lucas, is Topolobampo; and 740
+miles south of this again is Acapulco. Between them all there is nothing
+worthy the name of harbor.
+
+Topolobampo city, within the confines of the state of Sinaloa, exists
+only on paper as yet, but nothing is more impressive in its elegant
+regularity and finish than a paper city. It claims to be 800 miles nearer
+New York than San Francisco by railroad travel, and that a person coming
+from Liverpool to Sydney, Australia, would save 600 miles in laying out a
+course from Fernandina, Florida, by New Orleans and Topolobampo, which is
+indicated as a route of the future. If some of these representations be
+correct, no doubt it will be. We live in times of a ruthless commercial
+greed which is stopped by no sentimental considerations of vested rights
+and convenience. We have but to see a short, through line, with possible
+economies, to build it with all possible despatch.
+
+The road in question is to start from Piedras Negras, on the frontier
+of Texas, and make for Topolobampo, across the states of Coahuila,
+Chihuahua, and Sonora, with branches to Presidio del Norte, also on the
+Texas frontier, and to Alamos, in Sonora, and the port of Mazatlan,
+down the coast. These routes pass near, and would greatly facilitate
+operations in some of the large silver-mining districts, of late entered
+with success by American capital and immigration. The reports of its
+surveys chronicle an engaging prospect in various other ways. It passes
+from belts of tropical products to those of white pine, oak, and cedar,
+and others fitted for cereals, grass, and cotton, with a rich iron
+mountain, and deposits of copper as well as silver.
+
+The maxim is laid down that a railroad pays, in local traffic, in
+proportion as one section of its line supplies what another lacks. If the
+situation be as represented, Topolobampo seems provided with most of the
+essential conditions of success.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+_THE RAILWAYS AT WORK._
+
+
+I.
+
+The Sonora road is already built, and in operation as I write. It is a
+stretch of three hundred miles, from the Arizona frontier, to the port
+of Guaymas, near the centre of the shore line of the Gulf of California.
+Its United States connection is by a branch of the Atchison, Topeka,
+and Santa Fé, from Benson, through Calabasas, to the border at Nogales;
+and another is proposed, from the Southern Pacific at Tucson. The
+management of this enterprise, as well as of the Great Mexican Central,
+is practically that of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé.
+
+Its course is across the state of Sonora. It abolishes the old system
+of ox-train transportation and the dusty stage-line from Tucson. It
+will be found fault with, among others, by the savage Apaches, whose
+refuge Northern Mexico has so long been. Their depredations, with their
+territory penetrated by railroads, must soon come to an end once for all.
+The other Indians of the state—Yaquis, Mayos, and Opatas—are docile,
+and a principal reliance for cheap labor. The road taps mines, and, by
+means of a branch, what is even more important for Mexico, the valuable
+Santa Clara coal-fields. It has the little city of Hermosillo, with its
+plantations, irrigated by aqueducts, in its course; and its port of
+Guaymas is commodious and sheltered.
+
+
+II.
+
+I have purposely reserved to the last—the better, perhaps, to present
+them to view—the two great trunk lines of principal importance, the
+Mexican Central and the Mexican National. These two represent the bulk of
+the entire movement as it is at present. Neither had many miles in actual
+operation during my stay; but the works, railway stations, city offices,
+and army of employés of both, were constantly in sight at the capital,
+and were the principal evidences by which the manner of the railway
+invasion of Mexico could be judged.
+
+Energy of movement, ingenuity in planning, and an almost limitless
+expenditure, all indicated here conscientious work, and not simply
+railroad building on paper.
+
+The Central begins at El Paso, the terminus of the Atchison, Topeka, and
+Santa Fé, as well as a station on the Southern Pacific, at the frontier
+of New Mexico. It extends to the capital, a distance of thirteen hundred
+miles, tapping on the way a long series of the leading cities of the
+republic, most of these as well capitals of states. It has also a great
+interoceanic cross-line, which is to pass from the port of Tampico, on
+the Gulf of Mexico, through the cities of San Luis Potosi, Lagos (the
+junction with the main line), and Guadalajara, to San Blas, on the
+Pacific. It is expected that the main line will be completed about July,
+1884.
+
+The first reached in the chain of leading cities is Chihuahua, with
+about eighteen thousand inhabitants. The line is already running to
+this point, and is completed in all three hundred and thirty-one miles
+southward from Paso del Norte. The visitor by rail may already have in
+Chihuahua a glimpse of a place presenting most of the typical Mexican
+features. It has Aztec remains, and a large cathedral, built out of a
+percentage of the proceeds of a silver-mine in bonanza. It is the scene
+where the patriot Hidalgo, who first raised the standard of insurrection
+against Spanish rule, was shot, having been treacherously betrayed by
+his friends. This story is, unhappily, of but too frequent repetition in
+Mexican annals.
+
+Durango, three hundred miles farther, has twenty-eight thousand people.
+It has been spoken of as the _Ultima Thule_ of civilized Mexico, the
+barren plains to the north—which are, indeed, very common in all these
+uppermost states—not having been considered worthy to be included with
+the country below. There are places where water is not to be had for
+two and three days at a time, but must be carried by the traveller. The
+inhabitants have had to depend considerably upon themselves for defence,
+as is seen in the occasional fort-like haciendas, with walls turreted and
+pierced for musketry.
+
+Zacatecas, moving onward now into a country of recognized civilization,
+has 62,000 people; San Luis Potosi, 45,000; Aguas Calientes, 35,000;
+Lagos, 25,000; Leon, 100,000; handsome Guanajuato, capital of the state
+which is the richest of the whole interior, 63,000; Celaya, 30,000;
+Silao, 38,000; Irapuato, 21,000; Salamanca, 20,000; and luxurious
+Guadalajara, 94,000.
+
+The mining of the precious metals is a leading industry over all the
+area thus described, which abounds also in the agricultural products of
+a gentle and temperate climate. The railroad is now running northward
+from the city of Mexico to Lagos, and is completed for three hundred and
+thirty-four miles from this lower end.
+
+Lastly in the chain of cities may be mentioned Queretaro, which has a
+population of 48,000. It is the site of flourishing cotton-mills, an
+aqueduct which is compared with the works of the Romans, and it saw the
+final resistance and execution of Maximilian. Mexico itself has 200,000
+inhabitants. I have summed up here nearly a million of people; and it
+would seem that a railroad along the line of which are scattered such
+communities as these, grown to their present dimensions without even
+tolerable means of approach, need not lack for support.
+
+True, large numbers of the people are Indians and very poor; but I
+point to the example of Don Benito Juarez, the liberator of his country
+from the French, an Indian of the purest blood, and to numerous others
+accessible on every hand, to show that there is nothing inherent in
+the race itself to debar it from the highest development with increase
+of opportunities. And if any suppose that they do not like to travel,
+let him simply inspect the excursion trains where third-class cars are
+supplied to them in sufficient numbers.
+
+
+III.
+
+I made the trip over the section of the Central to the small city of
+Tula. Its principal feature is the passage through the great Spanish
+drainage cut, along one side of which it has been allowed to terrace its
+track. This cut—the Tajo of Nochistongo, before mentioned, designed for
+keeping the lakes from inundating the valley—was begun under the viceroys
+as far back as 1607, and continued for a couple of hundred years. Such
+mammoth earth-cutting—a ditch twelve miles long, a couple of hundred feet
+deep, and three hundred and sixty wide—was never seen elsewhere in the
+world; and it is said to have cost the lives of seventy thousand _peons_,
+or Indian laborers, in the course of construction. Why this should have
+been, and how they died—whether by slipping in and being buried, or
+under the exactions of cruel task-masters, and whether those who passed
+away simply of old age (for which it will be seen there was ample time)
+are included—does not appear.
+
+I went partly by construction train, dining in their car with a group of
+jolly young engineers, and partly on horseback over the _terre-plaine_
+(the graded road-bed), which makes an excellent surface for riding.
+The peons, swarming on the work, in white cotton shirts and drawers,
+have reddish skins, bristly black hair, and a sudden, wild-eyed way of
+addressing you. They have an analogy to the Chinese type. They got at
+this time two and a half reals (thirty-one cents) a day. They are very
+suspicious, and have absolutely no idea of trust, or waiting over the
+appointed time. Dangerous strikes have resulted from some slight putting
+off of the pay-day, which usually takes place once a week. In other
+respects they are very tractable.
+
+There were said to be thirty thousand of them at work on railroads at
+this date. The rate of wages, so favorable to the contractors at first,
+has been gradually rising under the active demand in the mean time, and
+I have heard, since my return, of a strike on one of the northern roads
+for as high as $1 a day. They buy gay clothes for Sunday, and _pulque_,
+and save nothing. Many will not even work steadily. Two such form a
+partnership to take a single place, and one works half the week and the
+other the rest. There were some who walked all Saturday night to spend
+Sunday at Queretaro, and returned Monday morning. On the haciendas they
+are generally in debt, and as they cannot leave when in debt, they are so
+far attached to the land, like serfs. Each gang has a _Cabo_ (or head),
+who is simply an enterprising one of themselves, and gets an allowance of
+two cents extra for each man he controls. The Cabo is a great man among
+the railway laborers, and out of cabos arise the Benito Juarezes, and
+hopes indefinite for the evolution of the race.
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT SPANISH DRAINAGE CUT.]
+
+I spent the night at Tula. It was the capital of the Toltecs before the
+day of the Aztecs. I climbed the Hill of the Treasure, to inspect some
+ruins over which archæologists have made a stir. There are no sculptures
+nor carved stones, nothing but some opened cellars and heavy walls, with
+patches of a red plaster, as at Pompeii, adhering to them. But we stayed
+our horses, and looked down, from a thicket of organ-cactus and nopal,
+upon a lovely sunset over the valley of Tula. It is a little pocket of
+fertility in the hills, and it does not seem at all wonderful that the
+Toltecs stopped there in their migrations southward.
+
+My _mozo_ pointed out a ruin in the thick woods, which he declared was
+Toltec, knowing that to be what I was in search of. It was picturesque
+enough, its walls having been split by an irrepressible vegetable growth;
+but it had the same style of battlements (a kind of Spanish horn of
+dominion) as the fortress-like church in the town, dating from 1553, and
+was much more modern.
+
+I went into this cool old church—vast enough for a cathedral—next day,
+when the temperature was warm without. It was entirely vacant. Fatigued
+with my journeying, I sat on a comfortable old wooden bench, and dozed
+till awakened sharply by the striking of a little cuckoo-clock. I seem
+to have dreamed that the numerous quaint figures of saints, in dresses
+made of actual stuffs, had somehow an every-day existence there, in
+addition to their sacred character, and that they were taking notice of
+the intruder, and offering audible comments. This is one of the ways, I
+suppose, in which very good miracles have been wrought before now.
+
+For the rest, the place consisted of a plaza, with two or three
+_pulque_-shops; a shop of general traps, with the ambitious title of “Los
+Leones;” a _botica_ (or drug-shop), kept by one Perfecto Espinoza; a
+Hotel de las Diligencias; and a little jail, at one corner of the plaza,
+where a couple of soldiers walked up and down, and the prisoners peeped
+out through a large wooden, grated door.
+
+And there was a good restaurant, kept by a little Frenchman, who moved on
+with it from time to time to the head of the line.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The Mexican National, or “Palmer-Sullivan,” road is due to the same
+enterprise which established the successful Denver and Rio Grande system
+in Colorado and New Mexico. It is, like that, a narrow gauge, instead of
+a standard gauge, line, and a connection is to be ultimately established
+between the two. In some respects it may claim to be the pioneer in the
+modern movement, since its agent in Mexico, James Sullivan, had obtained
+a charter and begun to raise money in 1872, but was stopped in his
+project by the panic of the following year.
+
+The National takes a much shorter line to the capital than the Central,
+say eight hundred miles, as against thirteen hundred. Its initial point
+is Laredo, on the Texas frontier. It is running already into Monterey,
+the capital of Nuevo Leon, and built below Saltillo. Of the charms
+of the little city of Monterey, which has medicinal springs beside
+it, travellers begin to speak in the warmest terms. It touches San
+Luis Potosi and Celaya as well as the Central, and has along or near
+its course other cities, well peopled, though less known to fame, as
+Matchuala, the population of which is 25,000. Its eastern port is Corpus
+Christi, Texas, though it will have a branch also to Matamoras. Its
+westward extension (only less important than the main line) winds round
+about, through the cities of Toluca, Maravatio, Morelia, Guadalajara, and
+Colima, down to the port of Manzanillo.
+
+Four of these are capitals, and all are populous, and have wide,
+well-paved streets and handsome buildings, public and private. Toluca, at
+a great height, 8825 feet, above the sea, is often afflicted by a rather
+frigid temperature; Colima is distinctly in the tropics; but Morelia
+affords the happy medium, and its whole state of Michoacan has charms
+upon which the appreciative never have done expatiating. Humboldt speaks
+of the lake found at Patzcuaro as one of the loveliest on the globe.
+Madame Calderon de la Barca, in her journey here, could hardly refrain
+from regretting the lavishing by Nature of what seemed (so few were there
+then to enjoy it) almost a wasted beauty. “We are startled,” she says,
+“by the conviction that this enchanting variety of hill and plain, wood
+and water, is for the most part unseen by human eye and untrod by human
+footstep.”
+
+The route winds, too, on its way to Guadalajara, around the great lake
+of Chapala. Truly, it seems they are to be happy travellers, those of
+the immediate future, to whom the simple device of the railway is to
+open up so much of the wildness and loveliness of nature, combined with
+the quaintness of an old Spanish civilization. We are apt to forget, in
+our preconceived impressions, what an important part Old Spain played in
+the country during three hundred years, what treasures she spent there.
+She had made a beginning of some of these solid, regular cities, which
+surprise one like enchantment on emerging upon them from forests and
+wastes, a hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Very
+little, in fact, has been added to what the Spanish domination left.
+The modern movement, since 1821, is to be credited with very little in
+the way of new buildings. Such compliments as are paid in the course of
+these descriptions to the architecture belong chiefly to that remaining
+from a much earlier date. The reputation of the republic is still to be
+made in all such matters when it shall have outgrown the ample legacies
+bequeathed it, and have need of farther accommodations peculiarly its own.
+
+
+V.
+
+In all, the National has completed four hundred and sixty miles. It
+is said of late to have been sold to an English company. We need not
+forego our American pride in its early achievements, even if this be so.
+Perhaps such a transfer might be of benefit, in allaying the dread of an
+overweening American influence.
+
+It was not done even to Toluca in my time. It has to face its most
+arduous engineering difficulties at the very beginning, and fortunately
+goes far more smoothly afterward. No less than seventeen bridges, of
+solid construction, had to be thrown across the little stream of the Rio
+Hondo in two or three miles of its course.
+
+A pay-train on horseback started out from the central office every
+Saturday, to convoy the silver coin for the wages of the army of hands
+employed on the first section of twenty miles.
+
+“Ride with us!” its members often hospitably urged, and I more than once
+accepted the invitation.
+
+It is an all-day adventure, and a fatiguing one. Behold us at early
+morning clattering out of the court-yard to ride up into the fastnesses
+of the mountains, a curious cavalcade. The treasure is packed upon the
+backs of a dozen mules, which are placed in the centre. A troop of
+_Rurales_ (the efficient force organized by Porfirio Diaz for the better
+protection of the rural districts) takes the van. A numerous retinue of
+armed _mozos_ of the company, with ourselves, bring up the rear. The
+young engineers, paymasters, and contractors, well mounted, with long
+boots and revolvers, present a handsome, half-military aspect.
+
+We have presently lost sight of the city, and are upon high rolling
+barrens, where the surface is volcanic and rent into an infinity of
+seams, and the only vegetation is that of nopal, or prickly-pear, as
+large as apple-trees with us. Here and there a cluster of white tents
+is seen at a distance, and cotton-clad peons delving in gulch or on
+mountain-side are like some strange species of white insects.
+
+The whole expedition wears a most un-nineteenth-century air. We might
+be some band of marauders returned from an ancient foray. The Rurales
+have something in their cut—the buff leather jackets, crossed by ample
+sword-belts, and wide, gray felt hats—of the troopers of Cromwell. Each
+has a rifle in his holster at the saddle-bow, and a gray-and-scarlet
+blanket strapped behind him. Nothing could be more spirited, in color,
+than these costumes, dismounted beside a cactus-tree, or thrown out
+against the blue of distant mountains. On the harness of some of the
+mules are embroidered in red and blue their names, or that of some
+hacienda, as “Santa Lucia,” to which they have belonged.
+
+It is understood that an individual with a crimson handkerchief around
+the back of his head, under his silver-bordered sombrero, is the titular
+_cacique_ of San Bartolito by descent from ancient chiefs. He precedes
+us, being employed by the company to look out for plots and ambuscades.
+When we have passed what he considers the dangerous points—these are
+generally in the neighborhood of elevations, whence an intending bandit
+could spy the road for a distance in both directions, and where are
+ravines on either side for concealment and escape—he rejoins the troop,
+and converses upon the propriety of his receiving more salary for his
+arduous duties. No molestation has ever yet been offered these caravans,
+and there is hardly likely to be. From a considerable experience in
+remote parts of Mexico I am satisfied that, however prudent ample
+precautions may be in exceptional cases like this, the ordinary traveller
+runs little if any more danger of robbery than at home.
+
+[Illustration: PAY CARAVAN ON THE MEXICAN NATIONAL ROAD.]
+
+At the pay-stations we breast our way through crowds of the peons so
+thick that the horses can hardly be prevented from trampling upon them,
+always with their narrow foreheads, bristling hair, staring, wild eyes,
+and large, undecided mouths. Their money is jingled out to them through a
+pay-window into their shabby sombreros. Venders of small commodities and
+_pulque_ wait for them, and profit by the new supply of funds.
+
+At these stations the engineers lead a kind of barrack life. The interior
+contains some beds, a dining-table, and a safe; outside is a storehouse
+of picks, shovels, and barrows. Whether here, in their construction-car,
+or tents, they extend the stranger a cheery hospitality. They are hearty,
+robust fellows—“not here for their health,” as their saying is. Many of
+them have seen service in war and in other climes, and their company is
+both amusing and instructive.
+
+
+VI.
+
+The right of way usually given in all the concessions is for a width
+of two hundred and thirty feet. Material and supplies for the road,
+and connected telegraph line, are exempted from duty generally for the
+period of twenty years. Neither the concession, property, nor shares can
+be alienated to any foreign government, nor can a foreign government
+be admitted as a shareholder. The fear of foreign domination crops out
+everywhere in Mexican legislation; and perhaps the weakness of the
+nation, and the sad experience of its seizure by Napoleon on the pretext
+of debt, are sufficient excuse for such nervousness. At any rate, all
+companies organized under its charters agree to be strictly Mexican, and
+to renounce all rights and exemptions as foreigners.
+
+[Illustration: “NOT HERE FOR THEIR HEALTH.”]
+
+There is no great vacant public domain, as with us, and the Government
+has not aided the new enterprises with land grants. Up to a recent
+period, however, it has attached to each concession a cash subsidy
+of $10,000 to $15,000 a mile. Both the Central and National are thus
+subsidized. In order that the burden may not fall too heavily upon an
+exchequer always weak, the payments are made to depend upon the pledge of
+six per cent. in the one case, and four in the other, of receipts at the
+custom-houses. Certificates for the several amounts as they become due
+are issued to the companies, which must wait for collection till there
+are funds to meet them.
+
+The latest plan, affecting most of the great schemes still chiefly on
+paper, gives no subsidy with the charter, but gives, instead, certain
+privileges to atone for its absence. A less strict accountability to
+Government, with a much higher tariff of charges, is permitted. It
+has been questioned by some whether under these conditions a charter
+without the subsidy is not better than with it. It is to be borne in
+mind, however, so far as the matter of the higher rates is concerned,
+that between competing points the company which can afford to run at the
+cheapest rates gets the business. If but a tithe of the railroads now
+covering the map like a net-work be built, there need be no fear of the
+lack of a lively competition.
+
+The stocks and bonds of railroads are not bought on the word of a
+desultory traveller mainly in search of the picturesque—though I will
+admit, too, that they are often bought upon less. I am not afraid,
+therefore, to express a certain enthusiasm about the _ferro-carriles_ of
+Mexico, which are in everybody’s mouth. It is the railways which have
+made the modern world elsewhere what it is, and why should they fail of
+the usual effect here?
+
+They may be overdone, and there may be panics and shrinkages, such as
+have occurred elsewhere, though this is not extremely probable, owing
+to the reasons for wariness which lie very much on the surface. The
+conditions to be conformed to must not be sought in a parallel situation
+of things in the United States, but rather in such countries, perhaps,
+as Russia and India, with a large peasant population to be developed,
+instead of a new population to be created. We have built railroads in
+advance of settlement, and depended upon immigration to fill up in their
+wake. Mexico has but an infinitesimal immigration, and presents no great
+inducements to it at present. It must depend upon the local carrying
+trade and natural development of the industries and commerce of the
+country. It has a population per square mile but little less than that
+of the United States. These are of a natural intelligence, and capable
+of the stimulus of ambition when opportunities are opened. They are to
+be encouraged to be no longer satisfied with a bare subsistence for
+themselves, but to produce from their fertile lands a surplus, for which
+a market is now opened. They are to trade upon it and become amassers of
+wealth.
+
+No less than 10,000 miles of railways are spread over what were once
+the old Mexican provinces of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado,
+Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Railways have brought these out of the
+nothingness in which they recently lay so vast and desolate. What must
+they not inevitably do at last for Old Mexico itself, so fully peopled,
+and scattered with centres of trade and of the arts of civilized life?
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+_THE QUESTION OF MONEY, AND SHOPPING._
+
+
+I.
+
+It is perhaps thought that the work of improvement is to be effected
+entirely from without, the Mexican himself remaining passive, and
+allowing everything to be done for him. The view is supported by the
+extent to which the business of the country is already in the hands
+of foreigners. The bankers and manufacturers are English. The Germans
+control hardware and “fancy goods.” French and Italians keep the hotels
+and restaurants; Spaniards the small groceries and pawn-shops, and
+deal in the products of the country. These latter have a repute for
+somewhat Jewish style of thrift. They are enterprising as administrators
+of haciendas, and often marry the proprietors’ daughters, and possess
+themselves on their own account of the properties to which they were
+sent as agents. Whether it be due to such rivalry or not, it is to be
+noted that there are few Jews in Mexico. Finally, the Americans build the
+railroads.
+
+The Mexican proper is a retail trader, an employé, or, if rich, draws his
+revenues from haciendas, which in many cases he never sees, and where his
+money is made for him. These are on an enormous scale. The chief part of
+the land is comprised in great estates, on which the peasants live in
+a semi-serfdom. Small farms are scarcely known. For his fine hacienda
+in the state of Oaxaca ex-President Diaz is said to have paid over a
+million of dollars; on another the appliances alone cost a million. The
+revenues of Mexican proprietors have been heretofore devoted to the
+purchase of more real estate, or loaned out at interest; at any rate,
+“salted down” in some such way as to be of little avail in setting the
+wheels of industry in motion.
+
+Before adopting, however, the conventional view that this state of things
+is due to inferiority of race or enervating climate, considerations
+on the other side are to be looked at. In the first place is the
+revolutionary condition of the country, which until a recent date
+subjected the citizen who ventured to place his property beyond his
+immediate recall to a thousand embarrassments from one or another of the
+contending parties. Such immunities and advantages as there were, were
+enjoyed by foreigners alone, under the protection of their diplomatic
+representatives.
+
+Again, there have been peculiar inequalities of fortune, coming down
+from the old Spanish monarchical times. There has been at one extreme
+of society a class too abject, and at the other, one in too leisurely
+circumstances, to greatly aspire to farther improvement, and the middle
+class has been of slow formation. The difficulties in the way of travel
+and communication with foreign parts for the middle class, from the bosom
+of which financial success chiefly springs, have been of a repressive
+sort.
+
+The climate, of the central table-land at least, must not be considered
+enervating. One must lay his ideas of climate, as depending upon
+latitude, aside, and comprehend that here it is a matter of elevation
+above the sea. Individual Mexicans are to be met with who, under the
+stimulus of the new feeling of security, have embarked their capital,
+put plenty of irons in the fire, and appear to handle them with skill.
+The street railways of the capital, an extensive and excellent system,
+are under native management exclusively. It is as successful in mining.
+It was only when the great Real del Monte Company at Pachuca, formerly
+English, passed into Mexican hands that its mines became profitable.
+
+I should be strongly of the opinion that the backwardness of the Mexican
+is not the result of a native incapacity or lack of appetite for gain,
+but chiefly of the physical conformation of the country. The mule-path is
+traced like a vast hieroglyphic over the face of it, and in this is read
+the secret—lack of transportation.
+
+But the zealous advocate of race and “Northern energy” objects: “How long
+is it since we had no railroads ourselves? And yet did we not reach a
+very pretty degree of civilization without them?”
+
+But Mexico not only had no railways, but not even rivers nor ports. It
+was waterways which made the prosperity of nations before the day of
+steam. It is hardly credible, the completeness of the deprivations to
+which this interesting country has been so long subjected. The wonder is,
+to any experienced in the diligence travel, and the dreary slowness of
+the journeys, at a foot-pace, by beasts of burden, not that so little,
+but so very much, has been done. On the trail to the coast at Acapulco,
+for instance—in popular phrase a mere _camino de pajaros_ (road for
+birds)—have grown up some charming towns, like Iguala, the scene of the
+Emperor Iturbide’s famous Plan, which, it seems to me, the Anglo-Saxon
+race would hardly ever have originated under such circumstances.
+
+Commerce and trade in such a land naturally have their peculiar aspects.
+There is, in the first place, the complicated tariff, already referred
+to. Americans should not let a new-born enthusiasm for a promising market
+hurry them into consignments without a thorough understanding of the
+premises. As to engaging in undertakings in the country itself, one who
+had done so held that the new-comer should make his residence there for
+six months or a year, and first acquaint himself with the people, their
+customs, and language.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN SHOP-FRONTS AT MEXICO.]
+
+“Better make it two years, on the whole,” he said, reflectively, “and
+then he will go home again and let it alone altogether.”
+
+Without sharing this saturnine view, the importance of some preliminary
+acquaintance cannot be too strongly insisted upon. The great inertia
+of customs and ways of looking at things so different from our own is
+appreciated more and more as time goes on.
+
+The most promising openings at present would seem to be, for capital,
+to work up into manufactures the raw material with which the country
+abounds. These opportunities will increase with the growth of
+transportation. Labor is cheap. The peons have little inventive but
+sufficient imitative talent, and make excellent mill-hands. They work
+for twenty-five and thirty-seven cents a day, and have no trades-unions
+nor strikes. There is little opening as yet for persons of small means.
+The government has taken but its first rudimentary steps toward the
+encouragement of immigration, and the path is beset with difficulties.
+
+A commercial treaty is now in the hands of the Senate of the United
+States. It will be adopted in some form before long, and may result in
+the improvement of local business opportunities, as it must in the volume
+of trade, between the two countries. What we want is such a reduction of
+duties as to put us on the same footing at least as England (in favor of
+which there is a certain discrimination), so that our goods and machinery
+can be sold in the country on reasonable terms. It is predicted that a
+trade which is now about $30,000,000 per annum (including both exports
+and imports) can be made $100,000,000. The Mexicans, on their side,
+desire admission for their sugar and hemp. The treaty has met with its
+chief opposition thus far from our Southern sugar-planters. Their fear of
+competition is hardly reasonable at present. Our own product seems more
+likely to go to Mexico at first. It is a matter of note that sugar has
+been selling at eighteen cents a pound of late at old Monterey, in the
+country which professes to raise it.[1] The total value of the exports
+from Mexico for the past fiscal year has been $29,000,000. Of these
+$14,000,000 came to us, and $10,000,000 went to England. Our own exports
+to Mexico for 1881 were somewhat over $11,000,000.
+
+
+II.
+
+At present Mexico is perhaps the most difficult country in which to do
+business in the civilized world. A customer four or five hundred miles
+off, even on the best roads, is five or six days’ journey distant. In
+preparing for it it is not long since he was accustomed to first make his
+will. The merchant has friendly as well as commercial relations with his
+customer. He is more or less his banker at the same time, not for the
+resulting profit, but because it is expected of him. If he does not offer
+such, accommodation some other house will. Credits are long, and it is
+not expected that interest will be charged even on quite liberal overlaps
+of time.
+
+Payment is made in the bulky silver currency of the country; and this is
+sent in large sums by guarded convoys, the _conductas_, which converge
+upon the capital four times a year—in January, April, August, and
+November. There were but two banks issuing bills at this time, and these
+to but a small amount, and receivable only at short distances from the
+capital. One of these was a private corporation, the other the National
+Monte de Piedad, or pawn-shop.
+
+The visitor becomes early acquainted with the Mexican “dollar of the
+fathers,” to his sorrow. Sixteen of them weigh a solid pound. It is
+obviously impossible to carry even a moderate quantity of this money
+concealed, or to carry it at all with comfort. The unavoidable exhibition
+of it, held in laps, chinking in valises, standing in bags, and poured
+out in prodigious streams at the banks and commercial houses, is one of
+the features of life.
+
+Guadalajara, the supply from which unites with that from Zacatecas at
+Queretaro, is the northernmost point from which money is despatched by
+_conducta_ to Mexico. A portion of that even from here is despatched
+to San Francisco, by the port of San Blas, just as a part of that from
+Zacatecas goes to Tampico through San Luis Potosi. The country north of
+San Luis to the east ships its funds to Matamoras; those of Durango are
+divided between Matamoras and Mazatlan; while Puebla, Oaxaca, and the
+rest of the south find their natural outlet at Vera Cruz.
+
+[Illustration: THE “PORTALES” AT MEXICO.]
+
+The importance of the great _conducta_ in these times is diminished
+by the growing safety of the transport of money by private hands. Its
+days are numbered with the progress of the railways, nearing so rapidly
+the central cluster of cities in which it has its origin. Even now it
+no longer came wholly to town, but took the Central train at the first
+feasible point, at Huehuetoca, the Spanish cut for the drainage of the
+valley. Its place as a spectacle is filled by the pay _conductas_ of the
+railroads.
+
+A revision of these accounts is needed almost from moment to moment as
+I write, to keep pace with the rapid changes in affairs. A National
+Bank and banks of foreign incorporators have been established in the
+mean time, with authority to issue large amounts of but inefficiently
+secured paper. The Mexican National Bank may now issue bills to the
+amount of $60,000,000, upon a capital of $20,000,000. They are legal
+tender from individuals to the government, but not from the government
+to individuals, nor between individuals. One of the arguments in favor
+of this bank, our minister was assured, was that it would counteract in
+some sort the influence of the United States: the usual patriotic leaven
+cropping up, it will be seen; though how it should accomplish the purpose
+in view it is by no means easy to understand. A flood of depreciated
+paper is driving the solid coin out of circulation; so that, while the
+traveller may be now able to carry his money comfortably about him, there
+may be much worse in store for the Mexicans themselves than the handling
+of bags of unwieldy dollars. It is not pleasant to see also that the
+government shows some unusual pecuniary embarrassment. Its expenditures
+for the last fiscal year exceeded its revenues by ten per cent., and
+a loan is talked of. Should a spirit of recklessness enter into the
+management of the finances, in all this whirl of novelties, complicated
+by the issues of paper, a crisis might be precipitated, which would, of
+course, have to be counted among the retarding influences on the railways.
+
+
+III.
+
+Shops and shopping in Mexico follow much more European than American
+traditions. A fanciful title over the door of the shop takes the place of
+the name of a firm or single proprietor. You have no Smith & Brown, but,
+instead—on the sign of a dry-goods store, for instance—“The Surprise,” or
+“The Spring-time,” or “The Explosion.” A jeweller’s is apt to be called
+“The Pearl,” or “The Emerald;” a shoe-store, “The Foot of Venus,” or “The
+Azure Boot.”
+
+The windows are tastefully draped, after the way of shop-windows. Within
+stand a large force of clerks, touching shoulder to shoulder. They seem
+democratic in their manners, even by an American standard. They shake
+hands over the counter with a patron with whom they have enjoyed a slight
+previous acquaintance; ask a mother of a family, perhaps, after the
+health of “Miss Lolita” and “Miss Soledad,” her daughters, who may have
+accompanied her thither. One of them, they hear, is going to be married.
+Perhaps this is accounted for by the presence among the minor clerks of
+some of considerable social position—some of the class you meet with
+afterward at the select entertainments of the Minister of Guatemala, for
+instance. But a limited choice of occupations has been open to the youth
+of Mexico, and those who cared to work have had to take such places as
+they could. They apply now with great eagerness for the positions of
+every sort offering under the new enterprises.
+
+It was not etiquette of late for ladies of the upper class to do shopping
+in public, except from their carriages, the goods being brought out to
+them at the curb-stone. Now they may enter shops. A considerable part of
+the buying, as of furniture and other household goods, is still done by
+the men of the family. Nor was it etiquette for ladies to be seen walking
+in the streets, even with a maid, except to and from mass in the morning.
+
+The change in both respects is ascribed to the horse-cars. The point of
+ceremony, it appears, was founded somewhat upon the difficulty of getting
+about.
+
+Americanism now appears in the streets with increasing frequency, in
+the signs of dealers in arms, sewing-machines, and other of our useful
+inventions. Our insurance companies, too, are a novel idea, to which the
+Mexicans seem to take with much readiness. The principal shopping hours
+are from four to six o’clock of the afternoon. From one till three, or
+even four, little is done. Even the horse-cars do not run in the middle
+of the day. There is a general stoppage of affairs for dinner. It is but
+a short time since that enterprising person, the commercial traveller,
+was unknown in the country, but now he begins to flourish here as
+elsewhere.
+
+The profits of favorably situated houses, in the absence of keen
+competition, have been very large, and methods of doing business
+correspondingly loose. The Mexican merchant does not go into a fine
+calculation of the proportionate value of each item of a foreign invoice,
+but “lumps” the profit he thinks he ought to receive on the whole. Some
+articles, in consequence, can be bought at less than their real value,
+while others, in compensation, are exorbitantly advanced.
+
+It is the smaller trade, and that most removed from metropolitan
+influences, which is the gayest and most entertaining as a spectacle. How
+many picturesque market scenes does not one linger in! Each community has
+its own market-day, not to interfere with others. The flags of the plaza
+and market-houses, which are commodious and well built, are hidden under
+fruits, grains, cocoa sacks and mats, striped blankets and _rebosos_,
+sprawling brown limbs, embroidered bodices and kirtles, as if spread
+with a thick, richly colored rug. A grade above the open market is the
+_Parian_, a bazaar of small shops, in which goods, sales-people, and
+customers alike might all be put upon canvas only with the most vivid of
+hues.
+
+[Illustration: A “MERCERIA” AT PUEBLA.]
+
+I give some examples of the street architecture of the more important
+shops. The approach to many is under the welcome _portales_, shady in
+sunshine and dry in the wet. Not a few of the shops have been old Spanish
+palaces before being adapted to their present use. I transferred to my
+sketch-book a bit from the leading _merceria_ (dry-goods store) of the
+important minor city of Puebla which I thought particularly interesting.
+It was called, after the prevailing fashion, “The City of Mexico.” The
+entire front—upon which still remained the carved escutcheon, showing
+that it had been the residence of a family of rank—was faced up between
+carvings, in a gay pattern in tiles, the figures glazed, the rest an
+unglazed ground of red.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+_SOCIAL LIFE, AND SOME NOTABLE INSTITUTIONS._
+
+
+I.
+
+The persons who once lived in these old Spanish palaces, and descendants
+of the titles of nobility existing before the Independence, are still
+much esteemed in a certain small circle in the country. There are pointed
+out to you those who should by right be marquises and counts, and the
+titles are occasionally given them. The Mexican nobles, from the time of
+Cortes down, lived in magnificent style in their day. The Count of Regla,
+who has left his trace after him in many directions, must have enjoyed
+almost the state of royalty. A single hacienda of his in Michoacan was
+thirty leagues in length by seventeen in breadth, and, sloping down from
+the temperate plateau to the tropic, comprised in its extent the products
+of almost every clime. He fitted out two ships of the largest size,
+building them of mahogany and cedar, and presented them to the King of
+Spain. Inviting his majesty to visit the country, he assured him that his
+horse should tread on nothing but ingots of silver from the coast to the
+capital.
+
+A remnant of the old _noblesse_ rallied around Maximilian when he came to
+assume the Emperor’s crown. With this, and what remains of Maximilian’s
+court, and some few other families of a peculiarly exclusive turn, a
+circle is constituted somewhat corresponding to the Parisian Faubourg
+St. Germain. They are sometimes stigmatized as “Mochos,” literally
+hypocrites. They are rich, pass much of their time abroad, protest
+against the sequestration of the Church property, and exhibit a refined
+horror at the vandalism of these later times.
+
+“The government,” they tell you, “is in the hands of the _populacho_, the
+rabble; the _gente honrada_, respectable society, has nothing to do with
+it.”
+
+In a novel which I have by a Mexican writer, Cuellar, a secretary of
+legation at Washington, the scene is laid in this faction or clique.
+“Chona,” or Incarnacion, the heroine, or leading feminine character,
+“had been brought up from childhood more to abhor than admire. The
+conversations in the family continually turned upon the utter antipathy
+which the men and things of Mexico inspired.”
+
+“They had for visitors Church notables and those of the wealthy who
+still retained the parchments of their ancestry. If they made any new
+acquaintance it was some Spaniard lately come into relations with them
+through the business of their estates.”
+
+The fashionable men in the story have been educated at Paris, and
+become elegantly _blasé_ there as well. In contrast to these is shown
+one Sanchez, a vulgar, pushing fellow, upheaved from the depths by the
+revolutions. He has the “gift of gab,” which he has utilized to make
+himself a figure in politics; has enriched himself with the spoils of the
+Church establishment, and secured a good place under government. He more
+than hints, however, when he is found to have finally lost it, that he is
+ready to engage in upsetting “Don Benito”—it is now under the _régime_ of
+President Juarez that the scene is laid—or in any other convulsion that
+may promise to again mend his fortunes.
+
+
+II.
+
+I do not quite know which side the writer himself is on, in this
+satirical work; it is so bitter all around. It is certainly interesting
+as showing two such boldly distinct types, one of them at least
+picturesque, evolved out of the peculiar conflicts of the country. Let us
+hope that there are few of the dangerous Sanchez pattern in the present
+juncture of affairs. The Mochos cannot now be numerous nor dangerous,
+with the wholesale victory of middle or lower class republicanism around
+them. They have taken little part, voluntarily, in the successive
+revolutions since their own overthrow, leaving them rather to be fought
+out by professional soldiers of fortune. They temporize a little; attend,
+perhaps, the wedding of some rich railway contractor’s daughter, in
+order, as they say, not to draw upon themselves a direct enmity; but they
+do not open their own houses in return; they do not “entertain.”
+
+Don Sebastian Lerdo, spoken of as the most scholarly President the
+country ever had, is conceded to have been to a considerable extent “in
+society.” He was expelled by Porfirio Diaz, and is now in retirement
+at New York. The political class since that time has either not been
+well received in the circle spoken of, or, perhaps too busy with other
+affairs, has not greatly cared for it.
+
+Such being the case, there are few reunions, and these of an informal
+character. Nor do the officials give entertainments themselves. Social
+gayeties, as we understand them, can hardly be said to exist in Mexico.
+It is only under the neutral roofs of the foreign ministers that they
+take place with some satisfaction. I had the good fortune to be at
+the capital during the visit of General Grant, and to see a social
+movement which, by the general testimony, was quite phenomenal. There
+was, among the rest, a fashionable wedding, attended by the President
+and his cabinet. A “reception” and banquet were given in the evening on
+the occasion of the signing of a civil contract between the parties. The
+religious ceremony took place at church next day. The interior courts of
+the house were wreathed with flowers, and lent themselves palatially to
+the festivity, as they always do. The banquet was spread along the bases
+of the columns of the arcade.
+
+The young Mexican women are still kept apart from the other sex, and made
+love to chiefly on their balconies in the good old-fashioned, romantic
+style. Their manners when met with in public, however, are not so unusual
+as might be expected. They seem neither more nor less diffident than
+elsewhere. They are allowed to take part at balls in a slow waltz called
+the _danza_—so slow as hardly to be a dance at all—which is chiefly an
+opportunity for conversation.
+
+The high-contracting parties to the marriage above-mentioned were by
+no means young, and in general the exceeding precocity of development
+and early age of entering into the marriage relation supposed to be
+characteristic of the tropics were not apparent. It was said that
+mercenary considerations were not frequent, and claim was laid to a
+good deal of simplicity and honest affection in the settlement of these
+matters; though how the parties get at each other, under the restrictive
+system, sufficiently to enter upon a simple and honest affection, is one
+of those things that remain a mystery. It is said that the young woman
+who remains single is not stigmatized for it in the common way as “old
+maid.” They say very charmingly instead: “She is difficult. She is hard
+to suit.”
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR COURT-YARD OF MEXICAN RESIDENCE.]
+
+In the country the match-making is often taken charge of by the village
+priest, who brings the parties together finally at dinner.
+
+As a general remark, the manners of the lower class of the country
+are much better than ours, and those of the upper are not as good—not
+as often based upon real kindliness of heart and genuine desire to
+be of service. The Mexican promises a hundred things which he has no
+intention, often no ability, of performing. The American is not without
+his faults—the more’s the pity—but in a general way he aims to do as he
+agrees. He will often make against the Mexican the reproach of a certain
+slipperiness—a lack of appreciation of the importance of adhering to his
+word.
+
+
+III.
+
+Each considerable group of foreign residents, as the French, Germans, and
+Spaniards, has its handsome casino, or club-house, which is a standing
+resource for the diversion of members.
+
+A French traveller as far back as 1838 complains of the unsociable
+conduct of the Mexicans. If something of the kind be still observed,
+therefore, it is not new. “They abound,” he says, “in a superfluity of
+fine phrases, and it is in this easy way that they discharge themselves
+of their obligations.”
+
+All who know European life, however, are aware that the theatre and the
+café, with people of the Latin race, largely take the place of the social
+visiting and entertaining at home prevailing among Anglo-Saxons. Our
+next-door neighbors, after all, may only have followed, making a little
+more severe, the traditions of Old Spain. Ladies do not often appear at
+the cafés, but they are often at their boxes at the theatres, to which
+they subscribe by the season; and they would go more frequently yet, no
+doubt, were the pieces as a rule better worth their consideration. There
+are three large, well-built theatres, the Nacional, Principal, and Arbeu,
+and minor ones for the working-class.
+
+[Illustration: MEXICAN COURTSHIP.]
+
+The entertainments esteemed of chief importance are those of the French
+opera companies which come over from Havana, on their rounds. A native
+Spanish opera-bouffe and ballet, called _zarzuela_, is much given at
+other times. For the rest, the theatrical pieces presented are the
+works, in prose and verse, of the Spanish dramatists current at home, or
+occasionally of some native dramatist, announced with an extra flourish
+which his production does not usually justify. They are all announced
+with a sufficient flourish, so far as that is concerned. There is always
+going on some especially _Gran Funcion_, as, for example:
+
+“The grand Drama of Customs, Entirely New, in three acts and verse, by
+the distinguished poet, D. Leopoldo Cano, author of the precious comedy,
+‘La Mariposa,’ entitled ‘LA OPINION PUBLICA.’
+
+“This sublime work of the distinguished poet, D. Leopoldo Cano,” the bill
+goes on to say, “was received at Madrid with an astounding acclaim. The
+Spanish Press has lavished upon it a thousand eulogies.... In choosing it
+for the second subscription night, we feel that the public will know how
+to value it as it truly merits, and to value at the same time the skill
+of the Company in their most finished studies and essays.”
+
+I do not recollect any of this as very novel, or likely to be of interest
+if translated, apart from some portions depending upon such a difference
+of manners and customs as to be hardly intelligible to an American
+audience. My acquaintance with the theatre began with a piece at the
+Nacional, called “The First Patient.” There was a young doctor on the
+stage, and an acquaintance of his had fallen in love with his wife, and
+put a note in her work-basket by way of telling her so. The note was
+conveyed to the husband, who, instead of shooting the imprudent writer,
+took occasion presently to assume a look of horror, and pretend that the
+latter had gone blind. Before the Lothario could protest, a bandage was
+clapped over his eyes, medicaments given to make him believe in his own
+misfortune, and he was put under a course of onerous treatment.
+
+After a series of absurd situations he was finally released, persuaded
+by degrees that he was cured. The patient raised the bandage. “_Veo!
+veo!_”—“I see!”—he exclaimed, in wild delight.
+
+“Very well, then—see that!” said the husband, thrusting the offending
+letter under his nose.
+
+This was amusing enough, but I was quite as much amused all the time
+with the studious efforts of a companion who had come with me—the French
+engineer sent out to examine mines, before mentioned—who proposed to
+turn the theatre into a school of languages. He grasped at every word
+a semblance of which he seemed to catch, and dived for verifications
+of it into his grammar and dictionary. He resented in his ambition any
+interpretation of passages which he did not himself originate, and
+constructed such a theory of the play as its author would by no means
+have recognized. When the _dénouement_ came, in the bold “_Veo!_” he
+seized upon it with avidity.
+
+“_‘Veo,’ c’est bien trouvé ça—‘veo,’_” he said, reflectively, digesting
+it at his leisure. “_Je vais le retenir ce ‘veo;’ vous-allez voir._”
+
+And so he did, and proceeded to use it vigorously in the restaurants and
+the like on the following day.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Though so much more be still proposed, there are certainly some reasons
+for self-complacency in the country even from the American point of view.
+Education is found to be provided for in a manner that awakens admiration
+and surprise. The primary schools are least looked after, but the pupils
+who pass through these with a disposition to go farther have an array of
+advantages open to them at the capital superior to anything of a parallel
+sort in the United States. The Government maintains national schools
+respectively of engineering, law, medicine, agriculture, mechanic arts,
+and trades (for both sexes), a conservatory of music, an academy of fine
+arts, and a library, provided with an edifice that New York well might
+envy. It maintains a museum, institutions for blind, deaf and dumb, and
+insane, for orphans, and young criminals, and a long list besides of the
+usual charities of enlightened communities. The schools are open without
+money and without price to all, and there are even funds to provide
+board, lodging, and pocket-money for students from a distance, who are
+selected on certain easy conditions.
+
+The students in agriculture pass some months of the year at the haciendas
+to observe different crops and climates. The graduates of the School of
+Arts and Measures go out into the world prepared to make their living
+as carpenters, masons, photographers, electro-platers, and at numerous
+other trades. Before an opinion is passed upon Mexican civilization the
+accommodations and neat uniforms of the pupils of the blind institute
+should be seen; the noble building erected in the last century for
+the School of Mines; the beautifully clean, wide corridors, sunny
+class-rooms, embroidery-rooms, dormitories, and drawing-rooms of the
+_Viscaynas_, the national college for girls; and the arcades and charming
+central garden of the National Preparatory School (in the professions)
+for young men.
+
+There was a fountain spouting among tropical plants in the garden of the
+Preparatory School the day I went there, and by the fountain was a young
+panther, or lion, of the country, as they call it, confined in a cage.
+The students, young fellows, who did not differ so greatly from Yale and
+Harvard undergraduates in aspect, except for the dusky Indian complexions
+among them, came now and then and stirred up the lion a little,
+making him play with a ball in his cage. They seemed to prepare their
+recitations walking around the garden or sitting in the ample corridors.
+
+The principal text-books are studied in French or English, in which
+languages they are apt to be written, and the recitations are conducted
+in the same languages; so that, what is so rare with us, graduates emerge
+from these schools very tolerable linguists without ever having been out
+of their own country.
+
+All these institutions are housed for the most part in the vast ancient
+convent edifices, which furnish ample quarters to whatever is in need of
+them—to barracks, hospitals, post-offices, prisons, railway stations,
+iron founderies, and cotton-mills.
+
+Each state of the republic, again, has its free college. Judging from
+that of the state of Hidalgo, however, which I saw at Pachuca—its
+internal arrangements in a very filthy condition—all do not follow very
+closely the example of the capital.
+
+In the department of jails, unhappily, there is a deficiency. As at
+present arranged, they can present but moderate terrors to evil-doers.
+The really fine penitentiary at Guadalaxara is the only one in which
+modern ideas of penal discipline are followed. There is by law no death
+penalty at present. The number of nefarious criminals is kept down by
+semi-official lynchings, shooting on capture, into which nobody ever
+inquires. Others are transported to Yucatan. There still remain enough,
+however, to make one look with uneasiness on the slightness of the means
+of restraint employed. The bolts and bars are often only lattices of
+wood instead of iron. At the city prison of Belen some two thousand
+persons are confined. It seemed to me that a large part of them must
+be much more comfortable than at their own squalid homes. They made a
+strange spectacle indeed, looked down upon in their large courts. Of all
+ages, and for sentences of all durations, they eat, sleep, and work at
+various light occupations together. No attempt is made to prevent their
+communicating or staring about. They have good air, light, and food, and
+are allowed a part of their own earnings. They take a siesta at noon,
+play checkers, gossip, and even bathe luxuriously in a central tank.
+
+The liberality toward education spoken of is the more creditable since
+the Mexican treasury is not flourishing, and a yearly deficit is more
+common than a surplus. These expenses appear to be regarded as essential,
+whatever else may suffer. It is the more creditable, too, since the heads
+of the government do not indulge themselves in expensive surroundings.
+The American legislator is not himself without his marble colonnades
+and his furniture of black walnut upholstered in Russia leather; but
+President and Cabinet ministers here walk upon threadbare carpets in the
+National Palace. The chamber of the Senate is a modest little hall; and
+the Deputies sit in shabby quarters in another part of town, which were
+once simply a place of amusement, the Theatre Iturbide.
+
+The museum, chiefly of Aztec antiquities, to which one turns with
+interest, is not of the extent or informing character that may have
+been expected, and is under by no means brilliant management. Its
+greatest attraction is the arrangement of some of the larger fragments,
+particularly the great sacrificial stone from the ancient temple of the
+war-god, in the court-yard. There is a setting of shrubbery and vines
+about them, and the sunlight striking in among these upon the gray old
+remains, produces some charming effects.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+_THE FINE ARTS AND LITERATURE._
+
+
+I.
+
+The school of fine arts, on the other hand, the Academy of San
+Carlos—which was to celebrate with a special exhibition the one hundredth
+anniversary of its foundation—produces, both in its collections and the
+ability of its directing professors, a most satisfactory and agreeable
+impression. You enter galleries which carry you back again to the Louvre
+and Uffizi. They used a great deal of bitumen, the old painters here.
+In its darkening it has left now and then only isolated lights upon a
+face or bits of drapery to glimmer out of a midnight gloom. It is an
+artificial taste, no doubt, to like it, and “caviare to the general;”
+but like it one does, at its most artificial, after a long absence from
+anything of the kind.
+
+The walls recall such galleries as that of Bologna in the liberal scale
+of the works displayed. With such models before them, there is no reason
+why students should fall into a niggling and petty style. As a matter
+of fact, they do not. They seem to excel in a bold, large composition
+and the rendering of grandiose ideas. This, rather than color, is their
+strong point. If our New York schools of art are able to equal the
+portfolio of drawings I saw as the result of a fortnightly exercise,
+they are certainly not in the habit of doing so. Nor were they at all
+equalled by those of the prize competition of the students of the
+British Royal Academy which I saw in the first year of the presidency
+of Sir Frederick Leighton. This devotion to large academical ideas—the
+fortunes of Orestes, Regulus, and Belisarius—it is true, is a source of
+weakness rather than strength from the money point of view. The market of
+the time demands a domestic, _genre_, realistic, and not a grandiose art.
+The market for art of any kind in Mexico is extremely small. There are no
+government commissions farther than an occasional portrait or two, and
+enlightened patrons hardly exist. There are no pictures of consequence in
+the best Mexican houses. The predictions at Havana were not verified. The
+abundance of native talent receives little encouragement. Many a bright
+genius is forced to paint his inventions on the walls of _pulque_ shops,
+and finally to quit the profession for lack of support.
+
+The subjects are, for the most part, severely religious, in consonance
+with the taste of the wealthy convents, the patrons of art for whom they
+were originally painted. The series is in a declining order of merit
+chronologically. The earliest Mexican masters are the best. They came
+from Europe, contemporaries of Murillo, Ribera, the Caracci, trained in
+the splendid Renaissance period at its acme, and they left here works
+which do it no discredit. Mexico was a hundred years old already, and it
+was high time that art should arise when Baltazar Echave began, somewhat
+after the year 1600. There is a romantic tradition that it was his wife
+who first taught him to paint.
+
+The genius of this early school is very decorative, and marked at once
+by refinement of sentiment, breadth, and vigor. It delights in rich
+stuffs and patterns, in the glitter of plate and weapons. It fills up all
+portions of the canvas symmetrically, and colors with a subdued richness.
+I recall a St. Ildefonso, by Luis Juarez, as an exquisite work. The
+saint, in a rich red mantle, by a praying-desk and chair, both draped in
+the same color, is receiving from angels the paraphernalia of a bishop.
+The mantle of the nearest angel is in burnt sienna, and these warm red
+hues, relieved by cool whites, are repeated throughout. There is a group
+of six angel heads composed in an ellipse, and, in the air, a Virgin,
+with that bevy of fluttering angels about that take the place of clouds
+in landscape. The minor heads, painted chiefly from the same model, are
+full of sweetness and intelligence.
+
+Arteaga has a noble St. Thomas; José Juarez, a quaint couple of child
+martyrs, Saints Justo and Pastor, who trudge along hand-in-hand like a
+pair of burgomaster’s children (the scenes of their martyrdom shown in
+the background), while angels rain down upon them single pinks, roses,
+and forget-me-nots, carefully painted. A younger Baltazar Echave, and
+Juan and Nicolas Rodriguez, are of almost equal force.
+
+A second period begins with Ibarra and Cabrera—the latter very much
+the better—at the end of the same century. They are without the same
+distinction. Their figures have a bourgeois air. They aim to be pictorial
+instead of decorative. The crude red and blue garments with which we
+are monotonously familiar in religious art come in with them; and the
+draperies, in smooth, large folds, are apparently made up out of their
+heads.
+
+The foreign gallery boasts many excellent works of the school of Murillo,
+and an original each of Murillo, Ribera, Carreño, Leonardo da Vinci,
+Teniers the elder, and Ingres, with also probable Vandycks and Rembrandts.
+
+A collection has also been formed of works of merit, contributed to the
+regular biennial exhibitions, and purchased by the Academy to illustrate
+modern Mexican art. The religious tradition still prevails to a large
+extent, though the subjects are now taken from the Scriptures instead
+of the Bollandists. They are Hagar and Ishmael, the good Samaritan, the
+Hebrews by the waters of Babylon, and Noah receiving the olive-branch,
+and the like.
+
+[Illustration: THE DEATH OF ATALA. [By Luis Monroy.]]
+
+There is in this contemporary work the general fault of an over-delicacy
+and smoothness of painting, and a lack of realism, while the design is
+excellent. These voyagers in the ark have not experienced the woes of
+a deluge, and the shepherds have the complexion of Lady Vere de Vere.
+Rebull, who studied at Rome under Overbeck, repeats here the dove-colors,
+violets, and lemon-yellows of the modern decorations of the Vatican done
+under that school.
+
+The works of the latest period, under the able direction of Señor Salome
+Pina, a pupil of Gleyre, are much more virile, and the subjects more
+secular. We have now Bacchus and Ariadne; the death of Atala; the slaying
+of the sons of Niobe; an arch and dainty Cupid poisoning a flower, by
+Ocaranza; a charming fisher-boy, by Gutierrez. Some of the artists have
+had the advantage of study also abroad. The strongest of them all, Felix
+Parra, now enjoying a grand prize of Rome, produced the masterpiece,
+a great canvas representing the friar Las Casas protecting the Aztecs
+(from slaughter by the Spaniards)—a work in sentiment, drawing, and color
+worthy to hang in any exhibition in the world—before he had seen any
+other country than his own.
+
+Velasco has set a powerful lead in landscape. He is especially a master
+of great distance. His favorite theme is the curious, sienna-colored
+Valley of Mexico, which he paints to the life.
+
+There are some scattered works of the early school, besides, in the
+houses of a few _dilettanti_ at the capital and Puebla; and some few in
+the cathedrals of the same places, though scarcely to be seen, from their
+disadvantageous positions. Good pictures need not be looked for in the
+churches. No doubt they were once numerous, but they have been sacked
+from the country by invaders and others, and found a profitable market
+abroad.
+
+
+II.
+
+In sculpture there is talent corresponding to that in painting. The
+stately system of burial, in the _panteons_, lends itself to sculpture
+and furnishes opportunities which with us are relegated to the
+commonplace tombstone-makers. The _panteon_ is a solid city of the dead,
+walled in, paved, and with courts and arcades like a city of the living.
+The monument of greatest note is that, by Manuel Islas, at the Pantheon
+of San Fernando, to Benito Juarez, “the second Washington” of his
+country, old Padre Hidalgo having been the first. His effigy in marble,
+so realistic and corpse-like that it seems to have been modelled from
+an actual cast in plaster, lies upon a mausoleum, with a figure of Fame
+bending over it. The realism of the principal figure is almost repulsive,
+but it is redeemed by the grace of the angel, and nobody can deny to this
+large work great vigor and dignity.
+
+The bodies are not buried, but sealed up in mausolea, or in niches
+in a wall, which present somewhat the aspect of a Roman columbarium.
+Some of the monuments are of the lovely Mexican onyx, with letters in
+gilt. I noted one bearing only the initials M. M. They were alluring to
+the curiosity, and on inquiring I found that it was that of Miramon,
+general-in-chief of Maximilian, who fell by the executioners’ bullets,
+with his master, and General Mejia, at Queretero.
+
+There were no flowers on this one to-day, but the tombs of the patriots
+were elaborately decked, for it was the great festival of the Cinco de
+Mayo.
+
+I walked out and stood in the round-point by the colossal bronze statue
+of Charles IV. The Paseo de la Reforma and the causeways glittered
+with bayonets; the cadets were coming down from the Military School
+back of Chapultepec, and the garrison from the Citadel, to join in the
+procession. The troops were reviewed in front of the National Palace—as
+troops in smaller numbers seem always being reviewed there. They are
+mainly of Indian blood, and small in stature. The cavalry especially
+had a rusty look in their outfit, and did not compare with the dashing
+_Rurales_. The officers, on the other hand, are trimly uniformed and
+quite French in aspect. There were patriotic speeches in the Zocalo;
+the main thoroughfare was strung with lanterns; and our Iturbide hotel
+was very picturesque, with its three tiers of balconies draped in the
+national colors—green, white, and red.
+
+From time to time, as the procession moved, cannon were fired in the
+Plaza, and the bells of the cathedral turned over and over, like the
+wheels of machinery. I never saw a better-conducted crowd. There was no
+fighting, no inconvenient elbowing, no drunkenness. In the evening the
+lanterns were lighted, and the great square was filled with venders of
+fruits and knick-knacks, around little bonfires of sticks, where they
+would bivouac for the night. Later, red lights were kindled in the towers
+of the cathedral, and every detail within stood out upon a lurid ground
+as if they were burning. One could imagine the camped venders in the
+square to be the ancient Aztecs resting upon their arms, in order to
+attack Cortez in his quarters on the morrow.
+
+
+III.
+
+Scarcely the same improvement is to be got from Mexican literature as
+from Mexican art, but it is not without its interest, both in itself and
+as an aid to knowledge of the people.
+
+Journals are very numerous. They are started upon slight provocation, and
+as easily disappear. They attain, as a rule, but a circulation of a few
+hundred copies. It is thought that the _Monitor Republicano_, by far the
+most important, may circulate from six to eight thousand. The problem
+of existence for many of them would be difficult without government
+aid. Subventions are given, without public objection, so far as I have
+observed, to the greater part of those managed with ability. The system
+of subventions to the press was begun by our old friend of school
+history, Santa Anna, and has been continued ever since by governments
+which could not afford to have anything more than the truth told about
+them, at any rate. It is an encouraging sign, however, that the _Monitor_
+is not a subventioned organ, yet speaks its mind temperately and without
+apparent malice.
+
+There is no efficacious law of libel, since extreme violence of language
+is often indulged in by the periodicals in their controversies with each
+other and outsiders. The duel, which still survives, is somewhat of a
+corrective upon this. The newspaper is about such a one in appearance
+as at Paris, and includes a daily section of a serial story. A Sunday
+edition is published, with literary selections, and particularly poems,
+in large supply.
+
+Actual literature as such is poorly paid. The reading public is small.
+A thousand copies is a good edition even for a popular book. The chief
+literary lights are found, as a rule, not of the shy, scholastic order,
+but possessed of talent for oratory and bustling affairs. They take
+posts in Congress, and are appointed as cabinet ministers. General Riva
+Palacio, Juan Mateos, Prieto, Paz, Altimirano, Justo Sierra, Peza, are
+deputies; Payno, a senator; Cuellar, who wrote under the pseudonym of
+“Facundo,” a secretary of legation. These are the native writers whose
+works are more frequently in the hands of the public than any others.
+
+Prieto, who is chiefly a poet, however, has written a book of his travels
+in the United States, in which some amusing things will be discovered. He
+finds that with us “the totality [_lo colectivo_] is grand and admirable,
+but the individual egoistic and vulgar.” He saw Booth’s Theatre, which is
+all of white marble (_el Teatro de Both, todo de marmol blanco_); and,
+besides our hotels, the establishment which we call a “Boarding” (_el
+Boarding_). The Hudson and East rivers, he says, are two arms of the sea,
+which freeze in winter, and even the immense quantity of ice collected
+from these does not suffice for the demands of the summer.
+
+The poetical talent, of which we had a premonition in Cuba, is that
+which principally abounds. There is plentiful skill in versifying, with
+here and there a strain of something very much higher, in the volumes of
+the numerous authors. Prieto, above-mentioned, is found principally a
+poet of “occasions.” He writes for the unveiling of statues, to steam,
+electricity, and the like. Juan Mateos strikes a fierce patriotic note.
+Altimirano, a fiery Indian orator, who models himself in Congress
+rather after Mirabeau, chooses as his themes for poetry bees, oranges,
+poppies, morn, the pleasures of rural life. They are excellent subjects
+in themselves, but it is an artificial, and not a real, existence he
+describes. He would like to be Horatian, summons nymphs to disport with
+him in the shade, and abounds in florid terms, without thought.
+
+Carpio is inspired more or less by Biblical subjects, as Pharaoh and
+Belshazzar. In De Castro, Zaragoza, Gustave Baz, and Cuenca are found
+charming conceits, of pensive cast, and bits of description of a limpid
+purity. Jewellers in words they may be called at their best, affiliated
+to the Venetian school.
+
+The argument of Zaragoza’s “Armonias” (Harmonies) is briefly as follows:
+“When the flowers are dead, and spring is over, the swallows take their
+flight; and when again the flowers of spring adorn the mead, they, too,
+return, bringing blessings on their wings.
+
+“But when the illusions depart and leave behind them only the thorns
+of the passions, in vain we invoke and wait for them to return. The
+illusions, the swallows of the heart, return, alas! never.”
+
+So Gustave Baz, brooding in the sere winter over some heavy sorrow,
+reflects upon the return of spring. But the very contrast of its
+joyousness, the fresh rippling of the brooks and melody of the birds,
+will but render his sadness the heavier. “Then most keenly,” he laments,
+“will break forth my grief. Then weightiest will the air be laden with my
+sighs.”
+
+The gem of the Lyra Mexicana is undoubtedly a certain fugitive sonnet,
+“A Rosario,” by an unfortunate young man, Acuña, who ended by taking
+his own life. The poem expresses the charming ideals in love and the
+bitterness of its disappointment, in a youth of fine and sensitive
+nature. It has a poignancy and realism which have, perhaps, never been
+surpassed. He returned from a long journey, as the story is told, and
+found his betrothed the wife of another. The shock proving unendurable,
+he committed suicide, leaving to the faithless one the poem, a part of
+which may be thus rendered:
+
+“Well, then, I have to say that I love you still, that I worship you
+with all my being. I comprehend that your kisses are never to be mine,
+that into your dear eyes I am never to look.... Sometimes I try to sink
+you into oblivion, to execrate you.... But alas, how vain it is! my soul
+will not forget you. What will you, then, that I should do, oh, part of
+my life? What will you that I should do with such a heart?... Oh, figure
+to yourself how beautiful might have been our existence together!... But
+now that to the entrancing dream succeeds the black gulf that has opened
+between us—farewell! love of my loves, light of my darkness, perfume of
+all flowers that bloomed for me! my poet’s lyre, my youth, farewell!”
+
+
+IV.
+
+If one try to select the most obvious trait in the native fiction it is
+undoubtedly patriotism. This patriotism is rampant in the press, and
+in the forms of official life. The authorities are Citizen President,
+Citizen General, and the like, as in the first French Republic, and they
+conclude their official documents with the formula: “Liberty In The
+Constitution.” The usurpation of Maximilian served to bind the country
+into a certain unity and awake this feeling to its utmost.
+
+Two romancers, General Riva Palacio, and Juan Mateos, have made use of
+the events of the French invasion in a curious class of bulky novels,
+to call them so, which have scored a popular success. “The Hill of Las
+Campañas,” and “The Sun of May,” of Mateos, are respectively more or less
+authentic accounts of the final defeat and execution of Maximilian, and
+the defence of Puebla, slightly disguised. The “Calvary and Tabor,” Riva
+Palacio, treats of the career of the Army of the Centre in the same wars.
+Numbers of the characters therefore are persons actually living, to be
+met with every day, which gives to this fiction a singular effect.
+
+Thus, in “El Sol de Mayo,” Manuel Payno, Altimirano, and Riva Palacio
+himself are mentioned and their manners described in the debate on the
+financial measure which brought on the Intervention. Lerdo, long since an
+exile, resident in New York, was at that time “_el profeta inspirada de
+nuestra nacionalidad_” (the inspired prophet of our nationality).
+
+I pick out from the same book this paragraphic mention of our own civil
+war: “And Edmundo Lee shone like a star in the victories of Springfield
+and Bull Run.” Perhaps the friends of General Robert E. Lee would have
+some difficulty in recognizing him under such a description.
+
+These novels are printed with each sentence as a separate paragraph, for
+easier reading. They first began to rival somewhat the popular Fernandez
+y Gonzalez, by some called “the Spanish Dumas,” whose works are printed
+in the journals, together with translations of those of Gaboriau and
+Dickens. Another flimsy series, in covers of green, white, and red,
+called “_Episodios Nacionales_,” aim to sugar-coat a didactic exhibition
+of the events of the War of Independence. One individual after another
+tells a long, dreary narrative about what happened; these fall in with
+somebody else who tells more, and so it goes.
+
+These stories are read chiefly by the middle and lower classes, the upper
+class, as in most provincial states of society, preferring books from
+abroad. Their favorable reception may be accounted for in part by the
+lack of regular histories and of newspaper intelligence, so that the
+populace may to some extent be getting their information for the first
+time.
+
+Riva Palacio has written also, with Manuel Payno, a large work
+appropriately called _El Libro Rojo_ (The Red Book). It gives an account
+(and graphic illustrations) of the heroes and other notables in Mexican
+history who have come to violent ends. This is a fate that has overtaken
+aspirants to distinction quite regularly, and the plates from the book,
+hung up at the book-stalls in the Portales, are a ghastly chamber of
+horrors. The three fighting curates of the early insurrection, Hidalgo,
+Morelos, and Matamoras begin the series; and Maximilian, Mejia, and
+Miramon, standing with bandaged eyes at the Hill of las Campañas, for the
+present conclude it.
+
+Several minor writers have feebly essayed the Aztec material for fiction.
+Riva Palacio has availed himself also of the picturesque life under the
+Spanish viceroys. Of him it is to be said that, though of the sensational
+school, and careless in plan, he has, not unfrequently, passages of
+genuine force, and unhackneyed incidents that enchain the attention.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+_SOME TRAITS OF PECULIAR HISTORY, AND THE MEXICAN “WARWICK.”_
+
+
+I.
+
+It would seem that history in Mexico might be a somewhat confusing study;
+and so, in fact, it is. There have been fifty-four Presidents, one
+regency, and one Emperor, in fifty-six years, and a violent change of
+government with nearly every one.
+
+Picking up the little volume by Manuel Payno, used in the schools, and
+opening it at random, I find—
+
+“_Question._—What events followed?
+
+“_Answer._—Truly imagination is lost, and memory confounds itself, among
+so many plans and _pronunciamentos_; but we will follow the thread as
+best we can.”
+
+The period referred to is that of the revolt of Texas, which proceeded to
+constitute itself “The Lone Star Republic.” Looking a little farther with
+interest to see how this is accounted for, we find:
+
+“The settlers were North Americans, a portion, as we have said, colonized
+by Stephen Austin. They set up the pretext that they were not permitted
+to sell their lands, and, later, that the Federal Constitution had been
+violated; and they rose against the Government. The latter felt it
+necessary to put down the rebellion, and took measures to assail that
+remote and sterile State.”
+
+These dispositions, as we know, ended in the defeat and capture of Santa
+Anna at San Jacinto. There is always a fascination in being behind
+the scenes, and I confess that this little opportunity of finding out
+what was thought of itself by a country which has jarred so much with
+our own was one of the attractions of being in Mexico. The American war
+is accounted for as a wicked attempt to sustain and annex the revolted
+province of Texas; and equally good solutions are found for the various
+other invasions by foreign powers.
+
+What! is there no absolute right? Are all combatants alike striking for
+their altars and their fires, and resisting wanton aggression? Will
+not these Mexicans even yet admit, though beaten, and though it has
+passed into history, that they terrorized our frontier, and oppressed
+an industrious and enterprising province? Why, then, perhaps both sides
+were wrong; and let us aspire for the day when all such quarrels may be
+settled by an international arbitration.
+
+
+II.
+
+The young Mexican learns first about his Aztec ancestry, the mild
+semi-civilized aborigines, who built cities and temples, and were ruled
+by luxurious Montezuma and scholarly Nezhualcoyotl. The latter, at
+Texcoco, was a maker of verses and stoical maxims like another Marcus
+Aurelius.
+
+Cortez conquered the Aztecs in 1519. Then followed a government of
+nearly three hundred years by sixty-four Spanish viceroys. A rebellion,
+of eleven years’ duration, marked by many of the features of a servile
+uprising, drove out the Spaniards in 1821. Grasping and inconsiderate in
+their colonial management as their way has always been, the Spaniards had
+probably only themselves to thank for it.
+
+Iturbide, who commanded the revolt at the end, made himself briefly
+Emperor. His generals, notably the irrepressible Santa Anna, who first
+here comes into view, rose against him, and proclaimed a Federal
+Republic. Santa Anna, when the opportunity offered, made himself
+Dictator, and changed the Federal Republic to a centralized republic,
+and the states to departments. Santa Anna had numberless ups and downs,
+having obtained possession of the supreme power no less than six times,
+with intervals of overthrow and banishment.
+
+The Federal Republic was reconstituted in time, with twenty-seven states,
+one territory and a federal district, pretty much on the model of our
+own, and it still retains this form, as it is likely to. There is no
+doubt about the democratic tendency of the people, but perhaps it is
+something in the impulsive blood of the Latin race which has prevented
+the leaders from conceiving a republic on the Anglo-Saxon plan. They
+have been inspired almost without exception by a craving for the sweets
+of power. Their rampant patriotism has been like the religion of those
+persons who would die for a cause, but will not live in accordance with
+the least of its dictates. There seems to have been no conception until
+lately of that larger patriotism which educates the people in their
+duties, and constitutes a state of society where the rights of all are
+guaranteed and people go about their avocations without interference.
+
+
+III.
+
+Would you recall, by-the-way, what became of Santa Anna? He, who had
+so indignantly shaken off the yoke of Iturbide, wrote a missive of
+congratulation, while living in banishment in the West Indies, to
+Maximilian, and endeavored to take service under him. His aid was
+rejected, whereupon he turned to Juarez, only to be repulsed again. In
+a rage at both sides, he fitted out an expedition on his own account,
+landed in the country, and was well-nigh being shot, after the model,
+and almost on the same ground, as that Iturbide whom he had pronounced
+against forty-two years before. The court-martial, however, spared his
+life, “in consideration of the ancient services done to his country in
+Texas, at Tampico, and Vera Cruz,” and sent him again, superannuated and
+poor (for he had squandered an ample fortune in this attempt), to finish
+his days in banishment.
+
+I cannot forbear going a little farther into the questions and answers of
+the little history. Of the gallant generals who fought so well for the
+Independence, Victoria was the first President. Bravo pronounced against
+him, and was exiled to South America. Guerrero, defeated as a candidate
+for the succession by Pedraza, took up arms and seized it by force. He
+repelled, while in office, a new attempt by the Spaniards to recover the
+country.
+
+“_Question._—I suppose that with this triumph the government of Guerrero
+was firmly established?
+
+“_Answer._—This was to have been hoped, but that happened which always
+happens in Mexico—just the contrary.”
+
+Bustamente, in fact, pronounced against Guerrero; and when the latter
+would have returned to the capital from an expedition designed to
+put down the revolt, he found it closed against him, and in favor of
+Bustamente also.
+
+“_Q._—What end had this revolution?
+
+“_A._—The most terrible that can be imagined. The Government at Mexico,
+feeling that it could not overcome Guerrero ... bought over, for $70,000,
+a Genoese named Picaluga, who commanded a vessel anchored in the harbor
+of Acapulco. Picaluga invited Guerrero to dine on board, and this
+manifestation of hospitality was accepted in good faith. When they had
+dined the Genoese signified to Guerrero that he was a prisoner, and set
+sail with him to the port of Huatulco and delivered him into the hands of
+his enemies. This great and good man, valiant and worthy of the respect
+and gratitude of the nation ... was shot in the puebla of Cuilapa, on the
+15th of February, 1831.”
+
+It was not till 1848, for the first time, that the Presidency was
+transferred without violence, and under the law. The incumbent was
+General Herrera, and he was succeeded peaceably by General Arista. These
+two administrations “will forever place themselves before historians,
+both Mexican and foreign,” says the history, “as models of honor,
+economy, and order.” But Arista was deposed in two years, and in the next
+three months there were four Presidents, the last of them Santa Anna, on
+one of his periodic returns.
+
+Thus the turmoil of revolutions has continued down to recent times.
+A certain Don José Maria Gutierrez Estrada directed a letter to
+the authorities in 1840, proposing, as a measure of relief, that a
+monarchical government should be established in Mexico; and the idea, in
+the distracting state of things we have seen, cannot be considered wholly
+without reason. It caused great scandal nevertheless, but Gutierrez
+Estrada stuck to it tenaciously, and, by a very singular coincidence, he
+was one of those who, twenty-four years after, went to Miramar to present
+the imperial crown to the Archduke Maximilian.
+
+If I cite a number of such events from the past it is not for the purpose
+of being disagreeable or arguing that the same state of things is to
+last. It is partly because they are amusing, and partly to obtain a
+more encouraging point of view for the present. It will be seen that
+the later administrations, though not without their faults, are a vast
+improvement upon their predecessors, and do not constitute a declining
+ratio.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ, EX-PRESIDENT OF MEXICO.]
+
+General Porfirio Diaz occupied unmolested a full term, from 1876 to
+1880, and handed over the place to General Manuel Gonzales, who holds
+it at present in the same security. Diaz began the current career of
+improvement by his liberal chartering of railroads, and Gonzales follows
+in his track. Both must be considered to have made a most exemplary
+and promising use of their powers. But, since we have arrived at “Don
+Porfirio,” let us see how he entered upon office in the beginning.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Since he is, by general admission, the power behind the throne, the
+Mexican “Warwick,” the President who has been, is, and is to be, let us
+inquire a little also who he was. “His influence in the country,” says
+the _Monitor_, “is decisive, incontestable. Something more than Benitez
+in the past, he is not only the great commoner, but the one man of the
+present.”
+
+Porfirio Diaz was born in Oaxaca, in 1830. His family destined him for
+the law, but he took to soldiering instead. Beginning as a private,
+he entered the city of Mexico as general-in-chief of the forces which
+wrested it from the French. Once in these wars, when a prisoner at
+Puebla, he let himself down by a rope from a tower and made his escape.
+His career is studded with romantic incidents, but the career of what
+Mexican leader is not?
+
+The Latin race admires the military type, and “Don Porfirio,” or more
+familiarly “Porfirio,” as the people delight to call him, bethought him
+to turn his prestige in the field to account. He offered himself for the
+Presidency against Juarez, on the platform of no re-election, in 1871.
+Lerdo de Tejada, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was also in the
+field as a third candidate. Let the figures in this remarkable election
+be noted, as an indication of the acute interest the Mexican voters take
+in their own balloting. In a population of 8,836,411 a total of only
+12,361 votes were cast. Juarez received 5837, Diaz 3555, Lerdo 2874, and
+95 are recorded as “scattering.”
+
+“_Q._—Relate to me what happened thereafter.
+
+“_A._—General Porfirio Diaz issued, from his hacienda of La Noria, a
+manifesto, hence called the _Plan of La Noria_, repudiating the existing
+powers, and proposing to retain military command until the establishment
+of a new order of things.”
+
+A bloody war of more than a year followed, in which the Porfiristas
+were utterly routed. Diaz, amnestied, presented himself at the capital,
+and was affably received by Lerdo, who assured him, on the part of the
+Government, that he might live tranquil without fear of persecution or
+harm. “Nothing,” breaks forth our historian, in enthusiasm about these
+times, “gives a better idea of the constancy and elevation of the Mexican
+character, a heritage from its Spanish ancestry, than what passes in
+our wars, both civil and foreign. It appears that defeats but serve as
+stimulus and fresh aliment to the fray.”
+
+Upon what possible theory these ambitious chiefs have always made their
+partisans so ready to be slaughtered for them, is a speculation which I
+shall not go into. Porfirio now remained quiet till 1876, when he issued
+the _Plan of Palo Blanco_, and rose against Lerdo, who had succeeded
+Juarez. He captured Matamoras by a bold stroke of strategy; was himself
+captured on shipboard; and escaped from the Lerdists by leaping into the
+sea, through the connivance of the French captain, whom he afterward
+made consul to St. Nazaire. After a series of such-like adventures his
+persistence won the day, and Lerdo took to flight. “Don Sebastian” Lerdo
+is spoken of as probably the most scholarly and accomplished President
+the republic ever had. He had been a school-master, however, and tried
+to govern the country in the pedagogue spirit to which he had been used.
+He lost favor, too, by his lack of military talent, and fled when his
+fortunes were by no means desperate. The country people were strongly
+on his side at first, but this singular thing happened—that, finding
+him unable to protect them against the roving bands of revolutionists
+favoring Diaz, they joined them in disgust, and went on with them to the
+capital.
+
+It is upon such original guarantees that the authority which Porfirio
+has devoted to the extension of law and order and the benefits of
+civilization reposes.
+
+
+V.
+
+The subject of these remarks is a person neither talkative nor taciturn.
+He is of commanding height, a swarthy, half-Indian complexion, a figure
+stalwart but not heavy, and of a military yet somewhat nonchalant
+bearing, all of which may form a part of his attraction. He knows how to
+utilize the arts of peace as well as war. Perhaps he believes a little in
+the motto, “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes
+its laws;” for the ballad-singers at Santa Anita, on the Viga Canal,
+whither the populace swarm on Sundays to indulge in dancing, _pulque_,
+_tamales_, and flowers from the floating gardens, have many a long-drawn
+refrain to the praises of Don Porfirio Di-i-i-az. It is hardly fair,
+perhaps, to suggest that these are subsidized, since they may rest upon
+pure admiration of his merits, after all.
+
+The Mexican law prohibits re-election, except after an interval of four
+years, and Porfirio Diaz was too ardent a one-termer to be able to
+overstep this prohibition with any consistency. He has placed his friend
+and fellow-soldier Gonzales in office as his _locum tenens_. He will
+assume it himself for the next term, dating from 1884. After that—so the
+plan is supposed to be arranged—he will give it to General Treviño, his
+companion in arms and strong auxiliary in his pronunciamentos. Treviño
+has married the daughter of an American general, Ord, and it may be
+supposed that American interests will not suffer in his hands.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL MANUEL GONZALES, PRESIDENT OF MEXICO.]
+
+Porfirio is romantic even in his Machiavellianism. The only source from
+which he might have had anything to fear was perhaps a lingering Lerdist
+sentiment. It represents, or represented, a conservative element, of
+better social position than the rude democratic force in power. He set to
+work to conciliate this Lerdist sentiment. He has been able to take of
+late the effectual means of marrying into the very midst of it, having
+chosen for his third wife the daughter of Senator Romero Rubio. Romero
+Rubio was the right-hand man of Lerdo, and his companion in exile. He is
+now president of the Senate, and the official who is empowered by law to
+call and control a new election, in case of a vacancy in the Presidency
+of the nation. Gonzales suffers from an old wound, received at Puebla,
+and it has been thought by some that Diaz might need to be called to the
+chair even before the appointed limit of time.
+
+Nor could he have had any personal repugnance to overcome in this
+match. His usual good-fortune attends him. The young lady is under
+twenty, accomplished, and of a high-bred air. She will be recollected by
+Americans as among the prettiest of the belles who took part in the round
+of festivities given in honor of General Grant at his last visit. This,
+too, will be pleasing to the people. Don Porfirio means that the people
+shall be pleased. When General Grant, on his first visit to the country
+in his tour around the world, was the curiosity and hero of the hour,
+Porfirio was his inseparable attendant and courteous host. A certain
+resemblance was traced between them. Both had been illustrious generals,
+both presidents. When Grant returned a second time, and was now less
+popular, on account of his interest in the railway concessions, and a
+jealousy which had meantime arisen of American aggression, Don Porfirio
+was unfortunately obliged to be far distant, distributing charity to
+sufferers on the northern confines of the republic.
+
+The work of conciliation has long been going on. Old functionaries have
+been reinstated in place; veteran army officers have been approached and
+offered new commands. One of these latter told me that President Gonzales
+had sent for him, after having kept an espionage on his conduct for some
+time, and asked him, in a bluff way,
+
+“Why do you continue to talk against the Government, and pass your time
+in idleness—you who were once so good a soldier?”
+
+“Sir,” he replied, “you know my sentiments, and the cause for which I
+fought. I cannot deny that I hold them still. I take the consequences. I
+have pawned my valuables and clothing for food. If I rust in idleness it
+is because I have no occupation to turn to.”
+
+“I admire your manliness,” the President replied. “Here is your
+appointment to the command of a regiment. Your cause is dead, as you
+know, and cannot be revived. I ask of you no political services. I ask of
+you only to be as before—a soldier.”
+
+It is needless to say that after this there was at least one Lerdist the
+less.
+
+I do not wish to be understood as finding fault with this policy of
+astute conciliation; far from it. The hammer-and-tongs method has been
+so long in vogue that it is a delightful relief. The chicanery of
+matrimonial alliances, and assumption of frank and soldierly manners,
+will be welcomed by all the foreign capital in the country as a great
+improvement upon throat-cutting.
+
+From vast estates in Oaxaca, which with a commendable economy he has
+amassed meantime, the Mexican Warwick, controls the destinies of his
+country with an ease like moving one’s little finger. He pleases himself
+in the interim to be governor, and commander of the forces, of this
+fighting state. In the absence of any efficient electoral system the
+country is under his absolute dictatorship; while, with the ostensible
+division of powers, there is no way of tracing the responsibility to its
+source.
+
+Not that there is the least danger of anybody’s trying to do so. There
+are apparent Brutuses in both Houses of Congress, orators and poets
+who have turned off many a diatribe and many an ode to freedom on the
+best classic and French republican models, but they have nothing to say
+against this Cæsar. They are not very free agents, to tell the truth.
+They are really sent by the governors of the respective states, and these
+governors have been manipulated in advance. Porfirio can undoubtedly make
+threats as well as promises; and an unlucky representative, if content
+to forego a better place, may even lose the one he has. He cannot depend
+upon adequate support, either, should he have a notion to resist. The
+“boys” are much given to “going back” on one another in Mexican history.
+
+I shall be found fault with by some persons, as likely as not, for undue
+severity. He is a beneficent Cæsar, after all, compared with former
+times; he has brought back something like a Golden Age; he oppresses
+nobody, at least, not the foreigners, and gives a stimulus to every
+worthy enterprise.
+
+So be it; and probably there is no more genial government than a Cæsarism
+of the beneficent sort, fairly established. But it is too full of
+dangers. Porfirio is doing nothing to educate the nation. “In effect,”
+one of his own papers says to him, “it is not alone with railways that
+a nation so disorganized as ours can reconstitute itself; not alone
+the locomotive and the telegraph that can make us happy. There should
+emanate from the regions of power something like an impulse of obedience
+to the law and observance of the institutions upon which the social and
+political well-being of the country rests.”
+
+It is not probable that there will soon again be serious disturbances.
+“All the grabbers have got places,” say some critics of a cynical turn,
+“and there will be no more revolutions.” A better saying, however, is
+current: “A bad government is preferable to a good revolution.” There
+is a weariness of fighting. The country seems to savor the little-known
+luxury of peace with a positive gusto. The railways diminish the chance
+of trouble by for the first time furnishing ample employment to the idle,
+who formerly occupied themselves in plunder and were ready to follow the
+banners of insurgent chiefs. They will be a potent military engine in
+enabling the Government to mass its forces at points of danger. The fear,
+too, may be present of interference by foreign governments, should the
+enterprises of their citizens be threatened with serious damage by new
+upheavals.
+
+Still, there are great administrative abuses. The civil service is
+notoriously corrupt. Opportunities for galling oppression are open to
+the governments, both federal and state, and, most ominous of trouble,
+redress by the ballot is not possible. The anomaly is presented of a
+republic in which there is no census nor registration of voters, no
+scrutiny of the ballot-box except by the party in power. There is hardly
+a ray of interest in the political machine by the people themselves.
+The number of votes cast at elections is pitifully small, as we have
+seen. It is not considered worth while to vote. The lower classes
+read no informing journals, have no public speakers. No organized
+opposition exists. Such opposition as there is is purely personal. All
+contests for office are personal, and not a matter of principles. The
+Government—that of the centre influencing the states, and these in turn
+the communities—sustains and counts in what candidates it pleases. There
+are no data for objection, since nobody can point to the real number of
+voters in a given place, nor their names.
+
+When this is understood it seems to account for almost all that has
+happened. There is absolutely no remedy for oppressive domination but in
+rebellion. With the best of dispositions, the most entire patience, what
+has happened in the past may happen again.
+
+If there be any statesmanship in Mexico, may we not hope to see some
+champion arise to remedy this, instruct the masses in their rights,
+enumerate and register them, and insure them the first essential of a
+free government—an accurate and unfettered suffrage?
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+_CUATITLAN, AND AROUND LAKES XOCHIMILCO AND CHALCO._
+
+
+I.
+
+The saying is current that “Outside of Mexico all is Cuatitlan.”
+
+It shows that the capital entertains a true Parisian esteem for itself,
+and a corresponding contempt for the rest of the country. Cuatitlan
+is a little village twenty-five miles to the northward, reached by a
+narrow-gauge railroad, built by Mexicans, but purchased by the Mexican
+Central. It was at Cuatitlan that I saw my first bull-fight. It is one
+of the two places in the vicinity where the capital thus amuses itself,
+the sport being prohibited in town. In some states, as Zacatecas, it is
+abolished entirely.
+
+There were five bulls killed that day, and three horses, but no
+men—unfortunately, the novice in these cowardly and disagreeable
+representations is inclined to think. Each bull came in ignorant of the
+fate of his predecessor, and ran at the streamers with a playful air.
+You felt like scratching his back and calling him “good old fellow,”
+instead of waiting to see presently his pained astonishment and torture,
+his glazing eye and staggering step, and death like that of an actor in
+melodrama. The horses were wretched hacks, allowed to be gored purposely
+as a part of the spectacle. They were driven around the ring afterward
+till they dropped, and their life-blood poured with an audible noise,
+like the spatter of a rivulet. Upon which the boisterous youth of Mexico,
+of the lower class, cried “_Bello!_” “_Bellissimo!_” in frenzied delight.
+
+[Illustration: ENVIRONS OF MEXICO.]
+
+The gray old walls of the parish church, immense, and of excellent design
+(as they all are), rise above the amphitheatre. Within are figures of
+saints grotesquely adorned, or realistically horrible, in the usual
+style. The devout Indians are not archæologists, and have no idea of
+paying honor other than as they understand it. I have it on authority
+that when left to themselves they have been known to equip the Saviour
+of the World in a twenty-dollar hat, _chaparreras_ (a kind of riding
+breeches), spurs, sabre, and revolver, sparing no expense to make him a
+cavalier of the first fashion.
+
+The houses of the town, built of concrete or adobe, sometimes plastered
+and tinted, are of one story. There are some small portals for the use
+of out-of-door merchants, a few _pulquerias_, and thread-needle shops,
+and a _meson_, or inn, “of the Divine Providence,” where enormous-wheeled
+wagons are corralled in line, and muleteers sleep upon their packs, as in
+the times of _Don Quixote_.
+
+This is Cuatitlan, this the Mexican village, which can be dreary enough
+to one who does not look at it with the fresh interest of a new-comer.
+You cannot take as much comfort in the lower class of people as you
+would like, on account of their habits. There is no denying that in the
+neighborhood of Mexico at least they are very dirty. They do not clean
+up even for their festivals. I saw them dancing at a public ball at the
+Theatre Hidalgo, which, among other amusements, the municipality provided
+for them free, on the national festival of the 5th of May. There were
+charcoal dealers and such persons, with their women, and they had not
+taken the pains to remove a single smudge of their working-day condition.
+
+Cuatitlan was the birth-place of the simple peon Juan Diego, who in 1531
+saw the miraculous apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was passing
+the barren hill where her elaborate pilgrimage church now stands, and
+she gave him roses which had flowered where no flower had ever been seen
+before. A banner with the image of this miraculous Virgin was carried all
+through the wars of the Independence. Guadalupe is still one of the spots
+to be visited, and you buy such sacred knick-knacks there as at Lourdes
+or Einsiedlen, but the church is stripped of its treasures now, and the
+surroundings have a shabby aspect.
+
+
+II.
+
+At San Angel, Tlalpam, and other similar points in the vicinity of the
+capital, there was formerly an extensive villa life. It has curiously
+decayed, even while the security of living in such a way has increased.
+There are no fierce heats, however, to drive people to the country. It is
+always comfortable in town. No watering-places nor summer resorts in our
+sense of the word exist. People who go to their haciendas visit them more
+to look after their business interests than in need or love of country
+life. Bills are up in the grated windows of the long, low, one-storied
+villas at San Angel, and the fruits fall untasted in the orange and
+myrtle gardens. The villagers endeavor to atone for this neglect of them
+by feasts of flowers, and little fairs, which last a week at a time. On
+these occasions, among other attractions, existing ordinances against
+gambling are set aside, and their small plazas are filled with games of
+hazard.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY DIVERSIONS AT SANTA ANITA.]
+
+The Viga Canal, as far as Santa Anita, is a livelier and more unique
+resort. Santa Anita is the St. Cloud or Bougival of Mexico. Thither go,
+especially on Sundays, lively persons to disport themselves on the water
+and pass a day of the picnic order, taking lunch with them, or depending
+on such cheap viands as the place offers. The wide yellow canal is more
+Venetian than French at first. A mouldering red villa or two on its
+banks, with private water-gates, might belong to the Brenta. Afterward
+lines of willows and poplars are reflected in the water, and then it is
+French again.
+
+Flat-boats coming on, piled up with bales of hay and wood, echo each
+other peacefully from distance to distance. Swift, small _chalupas_
+(dug-outs) follow, managed by the Indian master in poses for a sculptor,
+while his wife—or it is as often an Indian woman alone—is ensconced among
+flowers and vegetables, with which it overflows. This is the region of
+the _chinampas_, the gardens from which the markets of Mexico are most
+liberally supplied. They are formed by the division of what was once a
+marsh, by narrow branch canals, into small oblong patches. The patches
+are so small that the owner passes around the borders in his canoe, and
+keeps all portions moist with water, which he throws out upon them with
+a calabash. By this care, and the rich character of the redeemed soil,
+luxuriant crops are produced.
+
+The houses of the village are generally of bamboo, and without windows,
+sufficient light penetrating through the interstices. The first business
+of the participants in the Sunday festivities here is to provide
+themselves with large, thick wreaths of lovely poppies and blue and
+white cornflowers, which are sold for the merest trifle. They wear these
+upon their heads, in their caperings, with a highly classic effect. A
+general frizzling sound is heard, where eatables, of which peppers form a
+large ingredient, are prepared on little charcoal furnaces without and
+primitive fire-places within. “Come in!” the busy venders cry; “come in,
+señors, señoras, and señoritas, and be seated! _Aqui los niños!_ Here is
+the place for the children! Here is the place where they are appreciated,
+and by no means considered a nuisance!”
+
+“_Tamales calientitos!_ dear little _tamales_, very nice and hot!” they
+cry. In the same caressing way a cabman in want of a job will call you
+_patroncito_, “dear little patron,” though you may be as large as a
+grenadier.
+
+They decorate their little stands with turnips and radishes cut into
+ingenious shapes of flowers, and with a profusion of little birds
+in wax, and the Mexican Goddess of Liberty astride of an eagle. A
+swarm of flat-boat men cluster at the edge of the canal, bidding for
+your patronage. Dancing is going on in almost every court-yard; the
+ballad-singers strike up lazy refrains; and in the Carcel, in a dirty
+little plaza, by a fountain, a single prisoner monotonously rattles
+his wooden grating, and glares out at the gayety like a madman. No
+self-respecting American prisoner could be induced to stay in a place so
+easy to escape from. But there is no accounting for tastes.
+
+
+III.
+
+But are there no real _chinampas_, no gardens that actually float,
+according to the tradition? Was all that, then, a myth?
+
+Not at all. The soil hereabouts is solidified now, anchored down, as it
+were; but it has in its time floated, and in that condition borne crops.
+Farther on whole expanses are found only kept in position by stakes,
+with four feet of water below, and yet strong enough to sustain grazing
+cattle. An expedition was organized, in which I was privileged to set
+off, under the hospitable guidance of the Director of the Drainage of
+the Valley, to witness these marvels in person. We had a large row-boat,
+rowed by five oarsmen; and in our party was an amiable English traveller,
+who has written a book about Mexico,[2] and described, among others, this
+very expedition.
+
+We started about seven o’clock in the morning from the garita of La Viga,
+an old Spanish water-gate, at which toll is taken from the market boats.
+The current was against us. The canal of La Viga, a stretch of about
+sixteen miles, is the outlet of Lake Xochimilco into Texcoco. Chalco
+and Xochimilco are practically the same lake, being separated only by a
+narrow causeway of ancient date, which is open at the centre and spanned
+by a little bridge.
+
+There are numerous hamlets along the way, built like Santa Anita, and
+each with a few venerable palm-trees in its plaza. The Jefe Politico of
+one embraced our Director of the Desagüe and kissed his hand. At another
+a solid little bridge had lately been thrown across the canal, and we
+heard of a banquet that had been given on the occasion. The orator of the
+day had delivered a resounding address on human progress, and declared
+that he was proud to be a resident of a village which could accomplish
+such a feat. We lunched at a fort-like hacienda at Ixtapalapa, the point
+where the canal issues from the lake, and there found horses awaiting to
+take us to the top of the Hill of the Star. Upon this eminence, according
+to Prescott, were rekindled the extinguished fires and the beautiful
+captive sacrificed at the end of each of the cycles of fifty years, when
+the Aztecs thought the existence of the world was to be terminated.
+
+We found nothing on the summit but a few heavy foundation stones,
+possibly remains of a sacrificial altar. Our horses had to be walked
+actively about, to prevent their taking serious cold from the rapid
+evaporation. It is chiefly memories that are found on such places. I
+plucked there, however, to send in a letter, a dark-red common flower,
+and pleased myself with the fancy that it might have drawn its sanguinary
+hue from the ground so steeped in slaughter.
+
+Though at the entrance of the lake, no shining expanse of water was
+visible. The greater part of the surface, in fact, is covered with a
+singular growth of entwined roots and _débris_, supporting a verdant
+meadow. Passage through it is effected by canals and shifting natural
+channels, which change with the wind.
+
+Two of our men after a time got out and towed the boat. The ostensible
+_terra firma_ sank under their weight like the undulations of “benders”
+in thin ice. Now and then one floundered and went in waist-deep, whereat
+the others laughed. The margins are kept in place along the permanent
+channels by pinning them down with long stakes.
+
+We fell in with wandering strips of growing verdure, called _cintas_
+(ribbons), and larger ones, _bandoleros_ (bandits), drifting about
+at their own sweet will. Our host told us, though this he would not
+guarantee as of his own experience, that in the earlier times a garden
+of flowers and vegetables was now and then wrecked along-shore after
+a gale of wind, as if it had been a bark. Contrabandists, robbers
+who occasionally beset the market-boats, and political refugees have
+sometimes found this a favorable place of refuge, and escaped pursuit by
+diving under the illusive area and coming up elsewhere.
+
+We dined _al fresco_ at Mas Arriba, a place named quite in the
+American style, literally Farther On. The margins were full of yellow
+water-lilies, and the clear spaces reflected distant mountains. Evening
+drew on, and then night. The frogs and crickets waked up their lonesome
+refrain, and fire-flies twinkled brightly in the morass. A few drops of
+rain fell, which increased in time to a shower.
+
+
+IV.
+
+We reached the long causeway between the two lakes late at night, in
+pitch darkness and torrents of rain, and screened ourselves a while under
+the little bridge, which barely accommodated the boat. Here was Tlahuac,
+an ancient island town or village, at the centre of the causeway. Waiting
+was useless. We landed in the rain, bought candles at a wretched _tienda_
+kept by Indians as solemn as statues, and set out in search of a lodging.
+A mozo preceded us, like a great fire-bug, sheltering a burning candle
+under a straw mat as best he could, to aid us in keeping out of the
+deeper puddles.
+
+We were recommended to the Padre, as the only person capable of
+entertaining visitors of our distinction, and found him in an ancient
+Dominican convent looming up in the darkness. He received us with many
+apologies, gave us a good supper, manifested an interest in the late
+gossip of Mexico, and put us to sleep on the church carpets on the floor
+of a vast, bare room, provided with a few old religious pictures and bits
+of furniture.
+
+Any temporary discomforts of this night of adventure were amply atoned
+for by the beautiful bright morning of the next day. We found Tlahuac
+a kind of Venetian island, a Torcello, as it were, on which some
+population of New Zealanders might have put up their thatched huts. The
+church rising in the centre had one of the usual shining tiled domes,
+and was preceded by a court and arched gate-way. Its outer walls were
+covered with a large pattern of quatre-foils in red and yellow. I do not
+recollect just such a design again till I came later to the old Spanish
+mission of San Juan Capistrano, in Southern California. The island has
+sunk, or rather the lake has risen, in course of time, and the bases
+of the columns in the church are some four feet below the level of the
+ground.
+
+Near by was the village school, and, as we got under way, we heard the
+shrill little voices of the children reciting their spelling in concert.
+All the shock-headed adult residents, in their garments of white cotton,
+looked as stupid as possible; but it is not always safe to judge by
+appearances.
+
+From here the view of the two great snow-clad volcanoes is uninterrupted
+and glorious. We were told to feel with the oars at one place in the
+canal the pavements of a submerged Aztec city. Cortez mentions such a one
+in his letters. In 1855 the rumor of a new Pompeii spread abroad, based
+upon the finding of a few submerged Aztec huts in Lake Chalco, but no
+remains of any real importance have ever come to light.
+
+
+V.
+
+On this day, in Lake Chalco, we took our mid-day meal at the base of
+Xico, a little island volcano now extinct. It is of solid granite,
+without so much as a blade of grass externally, and the ascent is
+smooth and difficult. The boatmen sometimes see “Will-o’-the-wisps” on
+its summit, which, they say, are kindled by the witches. We climbed
+it, notwithstanding, and found a gently sloping crater, filled with
+maize-fields, which could easily have been approached from the other side.
+
+The water began to be charmingly clear, and the bottom was full of a red
+weed like coral. We gathered ferns, lilies, the fragrant little white
+flower of St. John—_flor de San Juan_, sold in large bunches in the
+market—and other flowers, yellow, purple, and vivid scarlet, of unknown
+names.
+
+The clouds still hung threateningly about, and gave us now and then a
+slight sprinkle of rain. But as we drew near to Chalco and the end of our
+two days’ voyage they cleared away.
+
+The prospect from this point is the subject for a landscape painting of
+the grand order. The town of Chalco, with an ancient and noble church
+edifice, supplies the element of human interest. In front is the blue
+water in spaces, with their reflection, and a wealth of marsh plants,
+arrow and lance heads, ferns, and flowers. In the distance is the great
+snow-clad mountains, upon which wreathing mists throw changing lights and
+shadows. Ixtacihuatl, the White Woman, though the lesser, I continually
+find the more picturesque of the two, in its sharp and rugged outline.
+Popocatepetl, in the more perfect symmetry of its cone, is a little
+monotonous, like Orizaba.
+
+We came, by a short branch canal, to the station of La Compañia, on the
+Morelos railway, and took the train back to town. We were just in time to
+hear of a disturbance near by by General Tiburcio Montiel, and his arrest
+by the Government forces. It was said that he had headed a communistic
+uprising of Indians for the recovery of their lands. He declared through
+the press afterward that he had but gathered a posse to aid him in the
+execution of some legal process. Quaint risings of a communistic sort,
+however, have not been uncommon. Demagogues have more than once told the
+simple-minded peons that the lands of the country were theirs—had been
+wrested from their ancestors by the Spanish conquerors—and it was high
+time to get them back. An ingenious hacendado, waited upon by such a
+delegation, admitted their view, but met it with another.
+
+“Yes,” said he, “the Spaniards took your lands, it is true; but before
+that you Aztecs took them from the Toltecs. Find me first, therefore,
+some Toltecs; I will yield my title only to them.”
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+_TO OLD TEXCOCO._
+
+
+I.
+
+My next journey was by lake across Texcoco to the old capital of that
+name. I had hoped to take _El Nezhualcoyotl_, which lay in the mud by the
+Garita of San Lazaro, when I went to make preliminary inquiries. There
+would have been a certain fitness in approaching the ancient capital in
+a boat named after the sovereign who made it illustrious; but it was not
+its day for sailing.
+
+The _Nezhualcoyotl_ was clipper-built, as it were, a long, rusty,
+gondola-like scow, devoted exclusively to passenger traffic. We took
+instead a freight-boat of much larger and heavier build, _La Ninfa
+Encantadora_, or “the Enchanting Nymph.” She would have been called the
+_Mary Ann_ or _Betsy Jane_ elsewhere, but such is the difference in the
+tropical imagination.
+
+A cabin sheltered the passengers and some budgets of goods which were
+done up in the inevitable _petates_, rush mats, and included two bags
+of silver. There were a couple of young women going to _pasear_—take
+a little vacation—at Texcoco. “It will be _triste_, of course,” they
+said, “like everything out of Mexico; still, we are going to try it for
+a while.” They offered a part of their lunch, as travelling companions
+were continually doing wherever I went, and the skipper offered us
+_pulque_. Two older women, in blue rebosas, sat like statues, holding
+their parcels and an Indian baby in their laps, from one end of the long
+journey to the other.
+
+The canal of San Lazaro on this side extends about a league to the lake.
+It is very much less attractive than that of Chalco. Its terminus in the
+city is the point of a most animated and Venetian-like market scene, but
+one earns his pleasure in dealing with this canal at the expense of many
+a bad odor. Six men put a sort of harness on themselves and dragged us
+along, plodding on the tow-path, as Russian peasants drag their boats in
+some of their rivers. A man on horseback with a tow-rope also assisted,
+on the other side.
+
+The water, shoal in the beginning, shoaled more as we went on, till
+we were aground on flats in the edge of the lake. The city sewage was
+aground with us. Still, the situation was relieved by the striking
+prospect. The teocalli-like Peñol, where there are warm baths, was
+close at hand. Sky and water were of an identical blue; the shallow
+expanse reflected the circuit of dark and purplish foot-hills and great
+snow-peaks beyond as perfectly as if it had been as deep as they were
+high.
+
+Our crew walked for an hour in the mud, pushing against long poles
+projected from the sides, before we could be said to be fairly afloat.
+Then they came aboard and poled the rest of the way. They walked up an
+inclined plane, carrying the poles over their heads, and came down,
+pushing, with them supported against their shoulders, in a bold and
+striking motion. It was eight o’clock when we set out, and four when we
+reached the mouth of the short branch canal which makes up to Texcoco.
+The distance must be about thirty miles. A cross arose out of the
+lake half way over, and our polemen stopped at it and shouted three
+times, with startling effect, “_Alabo al gran poder de Dios! Ave Maria
+purissima!_”—“Hail to the almighty power of God! Hail, Mary the purest!”
+
+Unexpectant of anything of the sort, I hurried out from the cabin, taking
+it to be some defiance at enemies, or disturbance among ourselves. We
+met other packets like our own, loaded with people. A considerable part
+of the cargoes was the fine large red earthen jars and dishes we saw at
+Mexico, which are made at Texcoco. The piled-up bales and pottery, the
+strange figures, and the flashing poles of one of these craft, coming on,
+make it a highly original and spirited subject.
+
+Then we fell in with one of the curiosities of the lake—disbelieved in by
+some—swarms of the _mosca_, a little water-fly, so thickly settled on the
+water that we took them for flats and reefs. They resemble mosquitoes,
+but neither sting nor even alight on the boat. They are taken in fine
+nets and carried to Mexico, as food for the birds; and they have eggs,
+which are sold in the market and made into tortillas, which are said to
+be very palatable.
+
+The shores are encrusted with native alkali, which has its share in the
+production of the disagreeable odors. Peasants gather the crude product
+and load it upon donkeys, to carry to a salt and soda works, and a
+manufactory of glass, situated at Texcoco.
+
+Was it in this same branch canal that Cortez launched his brigantines for
+the destruction of the naval power of the Aztecs? There is water in but a
+part of it now; and traces of substantial locks are found, where grass is
+growing and cows feeding.
+
+[Illustration: CREW OF “LA NINFA ENCANTADORA.”]
+
+
+II.
+
+I spent nearly a week at Texcoco assimilating the quiet interior life
+of the country. I dined at the Restaurante Universo, both cheaply and
+better as a rule than at Mexico, and found a chamber with the keeper of
+the principal _tienda_, there being no inn. I even became something of
+an expert in _pulque_. The true connoisseur takes it _mitad y mitad_:
+half of _agua miel_ newly from the maguey field, and half the stronger
+beverage of longer standing. I made the acquaintance of the Jefe
+Politico, a polite, youngish man, said to be a terror to evil-doers. He
+had made the roads safe. He had a way of shooting at brief notice, and
+transporting to Yucatan, or if he contented himself with a mere fine
+it was a sounding one. The _pulquerias_ must be closed at six o’clock,
+and other shops at nine. One day the Deputy returned from his seat in
+Congress, and was given a characteristic reception. A troop of twenty or
+so of his constituents mounted on horseback, and preceded the omnibus in
+which he was drawn, from the railway station back into the town, at the
+top of their speed, shouting and firing pistols. Crackers and pistols
+were fired also from the omnibus.
+
+I made the acquaintance also of the local druggist, an intelligent
+person, who had a collection of antiquities. He was of the pure Indian
+race, and professed himself proud of being an Indian, and proud of
+being a Texcocan. He had lately brought out a very strong distillation
+of _pulque_, a kind of patent medicine, and asked my advice about
+introducing it in the United States. He evidently thought we were made of
+money, for I am sure we never should have been willing to pay so much a
+bottle.
+
+The place has now about six thousand people. Its churches are immense.
+It has a long, shabby plaza, with a market arcade on one side, and an
+Alameda, also in poor condition. The Jefe Politico might extend his
+protection next to a few internal improvements. Hamlets cluster near
+together in a fertile area round about. I noted one day two peons soberly
+carrying on their shoulders, among the magueys, what appeared to be a
+dead body. It proved to be instead the saint of the village church, which
+they were quaintly conveying, as a loan, to one of the others, to assist
+in a festival of the morrow.
+
+In the hamlet of Santa Cruz the population are potters. Each has a little
+round tower of a furnace attached to his house, works on his own account,
+and sets out the large, ruddy jars on his roof to dry. He could acquire a
+competence if persevering, but the moment he has a dollar ahead he stops
+work till it is spent. In other houses persons were seen at looms weaving
+blue cotton stuffs for apparel.
+
+Numbers of ancient carven stones occur, let into the church walls
+and pavement, and set up in the Alameda. Remains of teocallis are
+also numerous, as they might well be in a place once the seat of the
+Augustinian age of Aztec culture. They are treated with no respect at
+all. They are worn down into mere knolls, and planted with crops. From
+the site of one now levelled a proprietor was said to have taken out a
+treasure. What with its age, the destruction of haciendas in the wars,
+and the practice of the Indians, still prevailing, of burying their money
+in the ground, there ought to be treasure-trove in Mexico, if anywhere.
+Certain it is that my host at the _tienda_, Señor Macedonia, had in his
+till some beautiful old Spanish coins, which he displayed to the gossips
+who came in the evening to sip beverages and play dominos.
+
+Among the gossips thus sociably _tomando copas_ (taking cups) at the
+_tienda_ there was one, a certain “Don Santiago,” who told me that he was
+pulling down, in his garden, the largest pyramid of the place, to sell
+the material for building purposes. This was of real interest. Going
+thither, his pyramid was found to be indeed of imposing size. It was laid
+up in regular courses of sun-dried brick, and there were vestiges of a
+facing and superposed pavements of cement, as at San Juan Teotihuacan.
+There was present in the place with me an archæologist—a newspaper
+archæologist, I should call him. He termed himself an “expedition;” he
+had an omnivorous taste for unearthing things, without knowledge of
+the language, or apparent acquaintance with any previous researches or
+theories; and his discoveries were intended principally to redound to
+the fame of a journal which had sent him out. Between us we brought to
+light a section of a great bass-relief which now occupies a place in the
+National Museum at Mexico. It was probably seven feet in its longest
+dimension and five in the other, and must have been a quarter or so of
+the whole work. It contained a calendar circle, no doubt establishing the
+date, and part of the figure of a warrior in elaborate regalia, possibly
+that of old Nezhualcoyotl himself. The archæologist, whom perhaps I
+unfairly disparage for the auspices under which he appeared, set to
+work with a will, and soon had half a dozen natives taking the surface
+off the rest of the soil in the vicinity, for the remaining fragments,
+but without success. It was the fierce practice of the Spaniards to
+break the religious emblems of the conquered pagans, to prevent them,
+as far as possible, from returning to their idolatrous practices, and
+most likely they rolled down one fragment of the great stone one way,
+and another another, to separate them as widely as possible; so that
+they will be found on different sides of the pyramid. All day long it
+was “Don Santiago!” here, and “Don Santiago!” there, as the excavators
+plied their labors; while I spent some part of it, shaded by an impromptu
+awning of mats, noting down in a drawing the peculiarities of the “find”
+we had made. I do not profess myself an archæologist, except from the
+picturesque point of view. It is my private surmise that a great deal of
+good investigation is lavished upon these matters which had much better
+be spent upon the present; but here was a case in which the sentiment
+of the picturesque was amply gratified. There was a genuine pleasure in
+being one of the first to salute this interesting fragment of antiquity
+after its long sleep, to tenderly brush the dirt from it and trace its
+enigmatic lines.
+
+[Illustration: THE “FIND.”]
+
+
+III.
+
+There is a decided resemblance, to this day, in looks and habits, between
+the Mexican peon and the Chinaman. Writers on the subject have generally
+represented America as originally peopled from Asia, the Asiatics having
+crossed over, perhaps, at Behring’s Straits, and made their way south.
+One Mexican writer stoutly maintains that Mexico was the cradle of the
+race, and the migration was in the opposite sense. This accords, at any
+rate, with Buckle’s general theory, that the thickly settled portions of
+the earth were at first those where climate and a natural food-supply
+made the maintenance of life easy. In these places, too, civilization
+began. The warm and fertile area of Central America, therefore, would
+have teemed with humanity before the waste North was peopled. There may
+have been sculptured cities, one upon another, long before even Uxmal and
+Palenque, the origin of which was lost in obscurity to the Aztecs.
+
+However this may be, the Aztecs themselves, whether descendants of a race
+expatriated from the South and become rugged in the North, or having
+crossed over from Asia, came down from the colder regions, like the
+Goths and Vandals upon Italy. The tradition on this point is clear. One
+day two leading personages, Huitziton and Tecpultzin, in their far-off
+northern regions, wherever they were, heard a small bird singing in
+the branches _ti-hui! ti-hui!_—let us go! They listened intently and
+took counsel together. “This is really very singular,” we may suppose
+Huitziton saying, while Tecpultzin sagely laid a finger beside his nose
+and listened again. One would like a historic picture by some competent
+humorist of these two simple worthies deciding the fate of their nation.
+_Ti-hui! ti-hui!_ piped the little songster inexorably, and that there
+seemed nothing for it but that the Aztec people should move southward,
+which they proceeded to do.
+
+They overwhelmed the civilized Toltec capital at Tula in their progress.
+They had a farther oracle saying that they were to stop when they should
+arrive where an eagle was sitting on a nopal plant; and this they found
+at Mexico, on the very spot which now is the plaza of San Domingo.
+The whole district became filled in time with small kings and princes
+tributary to the Montezumas. The most refined and peaceable type of them
+all arose at Texcoco.
+
+In the Cerro of Texcocingo, some ten or twelve miles back of the town,
+remain extensive vestiges of an architectural magnificence which show
+that the accounts of the historians are not made of whole cloth. We had a
+trooper appointed us, as an escort and guide, by the Jefe Politico, and
+rode out to visit them.
+
+Ascending the hill, of perhaps two thousand feet in height, overgrown
+with hardy nopal and maguey, you come to excellent flights of steps cut
+in the solid rock, giving access to aqueducts, bathing tanks, cisterns,
+and caverns, heavily sculptured within and without, which are remains of
+temples and palaces.
+
+Our trooper had little ambition in these matters, and after showing us
+a part declared that there was no more, and went comfortably to sleep.
+It was only by climbing alone to the top that I found the principal
+display. Here the philosophic Nezhualcoyotl, in his retirement, hung in
+the air, above the wide prospect of his capital, the lake, and his rival
+of Mexico. And here, in the deserted mountain, with a guide who had
+gone fast asleep below, his ghost might be half expected to be met with
+wandering in the still sunshine, but unfortunately it was not. He wrote
+poems of a pensive cast. He reflected even in his time as to whether
+life is worth living, and his general theme was the vanity of all things
+mortal.
+
+“Where is Chalchintmet, the Chicameca?” he asks. “Mitl, the venerator
+of the gods; Tolpiltzin, last of the Toltecs; and the beautiful
+Xinlitzal—where are they?”
+
+These no doubt once famous personages can be the better spared now,
+on account of their unpronounceable names, but to the writer they
+represented something very tangible and solid.
+
+“Very brief is the realm of flowers,” he continues, “and brief is human
+life.... Our careers are like the streams, which but run on to excavate
+their own graves the more surely.... Let us look, then, to the immortal
+life.... The stars that now so puzzle us are but the lamps that light the
+palaces of the heavens.”
+
+Such, if he be properly presented by Spanish adapters, were the
+sentiments of this early monarch. Truly the latent capacities even of
+the natural man are not so far below the surface; and it may be that no
+agency will be found so potent to awaken them with a rush as the modern
+facility in railway transportation.
+
+
+IV.
+
+On the return we visited a country residence, combined with large mills
+for making paper and grinding grain. It was called the Molino del Flores,
+and belonged to the wealthy Cervantes family of Mexico. One of this
+Cervantes family was the subject, in 1872, of a celebrated exploit by
+the _plagiarios_, or kidnappers. He was seized while coming out of the
+theatre at night, a cloak was thrown over his head, and he was bundled
+into a cab. He was buried a long time under the floor of a house, just
+enough food being given him to sustain life. The _plagiarios_ did not
+secure the large ransom they demanded, after all, but were finally
+apprehended, and shot—three of them—against the wall of the house, the
+Callejon Zacate, No. 8, where they had detained their victim.
+
+The Molino del Flores was not only charming in itself, but may serve as a
+text for mentioning the very different sentiment thrown around anything
+in the shape of a manufactory from that prevailing with us. Mills,
+residence, granaries, and chapel, terraced up into a steep hill-side
+from a little entrance court, are constructed upon the same _motif_, and
+form a single establishment. It is set in a striking little gorge. The
+water-power, after turning the mills, is utilized for lovely gardens,
+in which there are a hundred fantastic jets and surprises. There is an
+out-of-door bathing tank, for instance, at the end of a secluded walk,
+screened by shrubbery. The disrobing seat is managed in a small cave in
+the cliff, and the shower, on pulling a ring, falls from the summit,
+forty feet above. It is a place that might have served for such an
+adventure as that of Susannah and the Elders.
+
+In the novel of “Maria,” one of the most charming of stories, with which
+I first made acquaintance in Mexico, though its scene is laid among
+similar customs in South America, the heroine is represented as preparing
+the bath for the hero in such a tank by scattering fresh roses into it
+with her own fair hands.
+
+A rustic bridge, on which La Sonnambula might have walked, is thrown
+across the cataract to a quaintly frescoed, rock-cut mortuary chapel,
+where, among others, the last titled ancestor of the house lies buried.
+He had ten distinct surnames—was Marques de Flores, a General of Brigade,
+signer of the Declaration of Independence, Captain in Iturbide’s Guard,
+Cavalier of the Order of Guadalupe, Regidor, Governor, _Notabile_ under
+Maximilian, and more; from which it will be seen that the pomp of the
+hidalgos well survived in Mexico.
+
+The same caressing way of looking at industrial establishments here
+noticed is universal, and is, in part, no doubt, due to their rarity and
+a thorough appreciation of their usefulness. I recollect everywhere the
+sugar haciendas, “beneficiating” haciendas, or ore-reducing works, and
+cotton-mills treated in similar fashion.
+
+One voyage across Lake Texcoco was quite sufficient of its kind, and
+I returned by diligencia to the junction point of the since completed
+railway, and thence by rail to the capital. The pulling-gear of our
+diligencia was a thing of shreds and patches. A boy ran beside the mules
+all the way to mend the broken ropes and supplement, with whistling
+and flapping, the exertions of the driver. The houses in the villages
+are of unwhitewashed adobe, with palings of organ-cactus. It was like
+riding through a brick-yard. Fine irrigating canals, fed from the
+mountains, frequently crossed our course, indicating the substantial
+scale on which agricultural works are conducted. More than one monumental
+ruined hacienda, too, showed that they had formerly been on even a more
+elaborate scale than now.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+_POPOCATEPETL ASCENDED._
+
+
+I.
+
+I do not know whether I advise everybody to climb Popocatepetl. There it
+is always on the horizon, the highest mountain in North America, and one
+of the few highest in the world—a standing inducement to the adventurous.
+Few accept it, however, though among those who have done so are said to
+be ladies. I should somewhat doubt this, but, even if so, there seem
+to be some features of this ascent which make it uncertain whether the
+effort “pays” quite as well as Alpine mountaineering.
+
+At any rate, if one will go, let him have all the particulars and the
+necessary outfit in advance, at the capital itself. Little aid or comfort
+will be found elsewhere on his way. The proper preliminary for ascending
+Popocatepetl is to find some one who has been there and knows all about
+it, and to bear in mind besides the few following points, for his
+informant will be sure to have forgotten them.
+
+The feet are to be kept dry and warm, for there are hours of climbing
+in wet snow. This is, perhaps, best accomplished by superposed pairs of
+stout woollen stockings. The guides usually recommend strips of coarse
+cotton cloth, to be bound around in Italian contadino fashion; but this
+is a delusion and a snare, and they mean it to be so. They consider, very
+justly, that if the traveller can be made so uncomfortable as to quit
+the ascent before it is half accomplished they shall collect the price
+agreed upon and be saved a great part of their trouble.
+
+There should be shoes provided with some arrangement of spikes in the
+soles, against the painful slipping backward. There should be a supply of
+food and warm covering for camping-out, since absolutely nothing is to be
+had, and the temperature is very cold at the shelter of Tlamaca, where
+probably two nights will have to be passed.
+
+I accomplished the ascent with two companions. We had in the beginning
+such assurances of special assistance that it seemed about to be robbed
+of all its terrors. The volcano is regularly owned, and worked as a
+sulphur mine, by General Sanchez Ochoa, Governor of the Military School.
+We were put in charge of one of his superintendents, who was to see
+that we had every convenience, and that the _malacate_, or windlass,
+was put in order for us to descend into the crater. I surmise that this
+particular superintendent did not greatly care to encounter the needed
+hardships on his own account, for certain it is that in the sequel
+we were left short of many elementary necessities, and there was no
+_malacate_ for the descent, nor any reference to it.
+
+You arrive at Amecameca, forty miles from Mexico, by train. Everybody
+should go there. It is one of the loveliest of places, and has inns for
+the accommodation of visitors. Amecameca will one day be frequented
+from many climes, if I am not much mistaken. It has features like
+Interlaken. Cool airs are wafted down to it from the mountains, and its
+site resembles an Alpine vale. There are points of view in the vicinity
+whence a sharp minor peak separates itself from the main snow mass of
+Popocatepetl, like the Silberhorn from the Jungfrau, at Interlaken. The
+streets are clean, and the houses almost all neatly lime-washed in white
+or colors. The market-place is a scene for an opera—a long arcade, full
+of bright figures; behind this is a group of churches and court-yards;
+behind these the vast snow mountains, as at Chalco, but nearer. A little
+hill at the left, across a strip of maize-fields, is called the Sacro
+Monte, and has a sacred chapel of some kind. I climbed thither while the
+negotiations for horses and guides were in their first tedious stage, and
+found a quaint Christ in the chapel, and a most engaging view from its
+terrace.
+
+
+II.
+
+We set off with a captain, or chief guide, who called himself Domingo
+Tenario; a peon guide, Marcellino Cardoba, who had worked for three years
+at sulphur-mining in the volcano. He also acted as muleteer. We had four
+horses and a mule—the whole for eight dollars a day. Domingo Tenario
+would also ascend the mountain for a dollar more. We were to be gone
+three days, the greater part of which the expedition consumes.
+
+The first part of the way wound among softly undulating slopes, yellow
+with barley, out of which projected here and there an ancient pyramid,
+planted with a crop also. By the roadside grew charming white thistles,
+tall blue lupines, and columbines. We crossed _arroyos_, brooks, and
+_barrancas_, gorges. The aspect changed to that of an Alpine pasture.
+There were bunch grass, tender flowering mosses, and cattle feeding.
+An eccentric dog, who was attached, it seemed, to one of the horses,
+and had the ambition to ascend the mountain also, instead of saving his
+strength for it, here ran up and down and bit at the heels of the herds
+in the most wasteful manner. It seems a small detail of an enterprise of
+pith and moment to mention, but “Perro,” as we called him, for want of
+acquaintance with his name, if he had one, contrived a score of sage and
+amusing devices to attract an attention to himself beyond his deserts.
+The horses were frescoed on the flanks with a kind of Eastlake decoration
+made up of the brands of successive owners.
+
+The English landed proprietor in our small party occupied himself with
+collecting specimens, and soon had a kind of geological and botanical
+pudding in his satchel. The American engineer took observations with his
+barometer and thermometer. Crosses are set up at intervals along the way.
+These indicate places where a death by violence has occurred, but not
+always a death by the hand of man. Did the custom prevail of setting up a
+cross in New York, for instance, wherever a violent death had occurred,
+we too should have a liberal share of these emblems.
+
+We entered the deep, solemn pine-woods; the night came on, and a sharp
+cold seemed to penetrate to the marrow. Buildings appeared in the gloom,
+with red flames dancing merrily through the windows. Aha! the rancho
+of Tlamaca, with hospitable fires made up, no doubt, expressly for our
+reception!
+
+What a disappointment! The buildings proved to be but some shelters
+of rough boards, with plentiful interstices, and not a whole pane of
+glass. The cabin devoted to the uses of the superintendent contained
+but a single cot. The dancing flames were those from the process of
+smelting the crude sulphur, which is done in brick furnaces in the
+principal structure. Two Indian boys stirred the fires, and coughed in a
+distressing way all night long. We threw ourselves down to sleep among
+the sulphur-sacks. One was choked by the fumes, if near the furnaces,
+and penetrated by the draughts through crevice and broken window-pane, if
+remote. Tlamaca is itself 12,500 feet above the sea, and its thermometer
+ranges about 40° Fahrenheit. Without other covering than a light rubber
+overcoat—for I had not been instructed to bring other—it was impossible
+to sleep. I went out and paced the yard, sentry fashion, at three
+o’clock in the morning, as the only resource for keeping the blood in
+circulation. It was moonlight, and I had the partial compensation of
+studying the volcano, bathed in a lovely silver radiance.
+
+Mountains are rather given to making their poorest possible figure. Here
+we are, at this point, already 12,500 feet above the sea, and this is
+to be subtracted from the total. Shall we ever meet with a good, honest
+mountain rising its whole 19,673 feet at once, without these shuffling
+evasions? I fear not. They are only to be found in the designs of tyro
+pictorial art.
+
+I say 19,673 feet, because so much General Ochoa insists that
+Popocatepetl is, by a late measurement with the barometer of Gay-Lussac.
+He even estimates 1700 feet more for the upper rim of the crater, which
+has never been scaled. I do not know that this has ever passed into
+any official form, but I had it from his own lips. The latest Mexican
+atlas makes it but 5400 metres, or 17,884 feet, which coincides with the
+measurement of Humboldt. I much prefer to rally to General Ochoa, for
+my part, and to believe that I have climbed a mountain of 21,373 feet,
+instead of one of a mere 17,884.
+
+The barometer of our own expedition, unfortunately, stopped at 17,000
+feet, the limit for which it was set—a limit which barometers are not
+often called upon to surpass.
+
+
+III.
+
+We left the Rancho, at six in the morning, on horseback, and rode three
+hours toilsomely over rocks of basalt, and black sand. The poor animals
+suffered painfully, but we needed all our own strength for the later
+work, and could not spare them. They were left at a point called Las
+Cruces, where a cross tops a ledge of black, jaggedly-projecting volcanic
+rock. The lines of composition in this part of the ascent were noble and
+magnificent, the contrasts startling. Across the vast, black undulations,
+on which our shadows fell purple-black, appeared and disappeared in turn
+the rich red castellated Pico del Fraile, and the dazzling white breadths
+of the greater mountain engaging our efforts.
+
+Backward from Las Cruces lay a dizzy view of the world below. Across was
+the height of Ixtacihuatl, the White Woman, keeping us company in our
+ascent. The valley of Mexico could be seen in one direction, the valley
+of Puebla, and even the peak of Orizaba, 150 miles away, in the other.
+Against the mysterious vastness stood the figures of our men and horses
+on the ledge of volcanic rock, as if in trackless space.
+
+It was here that “Perro” charged down the slope after crows, which
+tantalized him and drifted lazily out of his reach, and so wasted his
+forces that he was obliged to abandon the expedition. Las Cruces was
+14,150 feet up. The climb now began on foot, in a soft black sand. One of
+the leading difficulties of the climb is said to arise from the exceeding
+thinness of the air, which makes breathing difficult. I cannot say that I
+discriminated between this and the shortness of breath due to the natural
+fatigue.
+
+Isolated pinnacles of snow stood up like monuments in the black sand,
+as precursors of the permanent snow-line. The cool snow-line was a
+luxury for the first few moments. We sat down and lunched by it, and
+from there took our last views backward. Cumulus clouds presently filled
+up the valley with a symmetrical arrangement like pavement. Such bits
+as appeared through furtive openings recalled the charming lines of
+Holmes’s, in which a spirit, “homesick in heaven,” looks back on the
+earth it has left:
+
+    “To catch perchance some flashing glimpse of green,
+    Or breathe some wild-wood fragrance, wafted through
+    The opening gates of pearl.”
+
+Up to this point—a little higher, let us say—the effort is rewarded. A
+view of “the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof” has been had
+which could not be got elsewhere. But above this it has little more
+reward than that of being able to boast of it to your friends. A few
+steps in the snow, and imperfectly protected feet were sodden, numb
+with cold, and not to be dried again till the final descent. There
+was a painful slipping and falling in the snow, and blood-marks were
+left by ungloved hands. The grade is excessive, the top invisible. Who
+can estimate when he shall attain it? The prospect consists of jagged
+snow-pinnacles without cessation, an endless staircase of them reaching
+up into the sky. Sometimes, in the sun, all the pinnacles glitter; again,
+thick fogs, like a gray smoke, gather round. There is no more casting
+yourself down now in warm scoriæ and sand. If you sit you are chilled.
+Yet rest you must continually. Every step is a calculation and an
+achievement. You calculate that you will allow yourself a rest after ten,
+after twenty more. The snow is not dangerous; there are no crevasses to
+fall into, as in the Alps; it is only monotonous and fatiguing. I seem
+to have gone on for an hour after farther endurance was intolerable.
+The guides encourage you—when they find that you really mean to go
+up—with the adjuration, “_Poco á poco_” (little by little); so that we
+paraphrased our mountain as “Poco-a-poco-catepetl.”
+
+Finally, with sighs and groans of labored effort, instead of the
+lightness with which one might be expected to salute a point of so
+extreme high heaven, we staggered over the edge of the crater at about
+two o’clock in the afternoon. I had doubted at one time whether the
+English landed proprietor would be able to reach it. He had grown purple
+in the face. Perhaps I had even hoped that he might need a friendly arm
+to assist him down again on the instant; but he said, with the true
+British tenacity,
+
+“Oh, _bless_ you, I am going to the _top_, you know.”
+
+And so he did.
+
+
+IV.
+
+It was a supreme moment. One seemed very near to eternity. It seemed easy
+to topple through the ice minarets guarding the brink, and down into the
+terrific chasm.
+
+There is no comfort at the top when reached. It is frigidly cold. None
+of the expected heat comes up from the interior. An elemental war rages
+around, and it is no place for human beings. There is a kind of fearful
+exaltation. A slope of black sand descends some fifty feet to an inner
+edge, broken by rocks of porphyry and flint, which the imagination
+tortures into fantastic shapes. Hence a sheer precipice drops two
+thousand feet, a vast ellipse in plan. There was snow in the bottom of
+the crater. Jets of steam spouted from ten _sulfataras_, or sources,
+from which the native sulphur is extracted. The hands who work there
+are said to live in the shelter of caves, and remain for a month at a
+time without exit. They are lowered down by windlass, on a primitive
+contrivance they call a _caballo de minas_—horse of the mines. The
+sulphur is hoisted in bags and slid down a long groove in the snow to the
+neighborhood of the rancho. It takes the palm in purity over all sulphurs
+in the world. A company has been formed, it is said, for the purpose of
+working the deposits more effectually and utilizing the steam-power in
+the bottom for improved hoisting machinery.
+
+The men were on strike at the time, as it happened, and the windlass was
+not in place, and was not adjusted. If it had been, and we had descended,
+we might have found the warmth for which we were well-nigh perishing.
+Snow began to drive from the heavy cloud-banks. When it snows the crater
+within is darkened, roarings are said to be heard, and strange-colored
+globules and flames play above the sulfataras.
+
+“What if there should be an eruption?” suggested the alarmist of the
+party, as we began to beat our retreat from the untenable position.
+
+“There has not been an eruption for at least seven thousand years,” said
+the scientific member, with contempt. “A certain kind of lignite in the
+bottom, requiring that length of time to form, establishes it.”
+
+“So much the more reason, then,” said the alarmist: “it is high time
+there was another.”
+
+With that we slipped and floundered down the snow-mountain with the same
+celerity with which Vesuvius is descended. We crossed again the black
+volcanic fields, mounted our horses, and spent once more the night at
+Tlamaca, having learned by experience how to make it slightly more
+comfortable than the other. The next day we rode back to Amecameca.
+
+When Señor Llandesio, Professor of the Fine Arts at Mexico, made this
+ascent, as he did in 1866, he says that he found two attempts necessary
+before he succeeded. I have the pamphlet in which he describes it. “The
+guide and peon whispered together continually,” he says, “which made me
+think they were going to play us some trick.”
+
+Sure enough, they did. After a good way up they represented that it was
+perilous, impossible, to go farther. He descended, and had taken his seat
+in the diligencia to return to Mexico, when he met another party, with
+more honest guides, and, turning back with them, this time succeeded. He
+describes a young man so fatigued on the mountain that he desired, with
+tears in his eyes, to be left to die. Another succumbed owing to the
+singular cause, that he had fancied that ardent spirits would have no
+effect in the peculiarly attenuated atmosphere, and had emptied nearly a
+whole bottle of brandy.
+
+Señor Llandesio was told by the Indians that they believed in a genius of
+the mountain, whom they called Cuantelpostle. He was a queer little man,
+who dwelt about the Pico del Fraile, helped the workmen at their labors
+when in a good humor, and embarrassed them as much as possible when in a
+bad. They said, also, that presents were offered by some to propitiate
+the volcano, for the purpose of obtaining rain, and the like. These were
+buried in the sand, and the places marked by a flat stone. This practice
+may account for some of the discoveries of Charnay, who unearthed about
+the foot of the mountain much interesting pottery.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+_A BANQUET, AND A TRAGEDY, AT CUAUTLA-MORELOS._
+
+
+I.
+
+When I saw Amecameca again it was to pass it on board a gala train going
+down to celebrate the completion of the Morelos railway to Cuautla, in
+_Tierra Caliente_. The Morelos railway is a native Mexican work. It was
+built under the auspices of Delfin Sanchez, a son-in-law of President
+Juarez, was rushed forward with great expedition, in order to secure
+valuable premiums, added to the regular subsidy by Government, and there
+was much defective work in its construction. It is laid to the narrow
+gauge, and projected ultimately to reach Acapulco, but this latter need
+hardly be looked for in any predicable time. At present it reaches about
+seventy-five miles—to Cuautla-Morelos, capital of the state of Morelos.
+
+All official and distinguished Mexico was aboard that day—the President,
+the justices of the Supreme Court, generals, senators, _littérateurs_,
+and, greatest of all, Porfirio Diaz. “Porfirio” wore a felt hat with a
+tall top, and his manner with his friends was easy and unpretentious. Had
+the accident of a week later happened that day instead, the Republic of
+Mexico would have needed to be reconstructed from the bottom upward.
+
+[Illustration: IN TIERRA CALIENTE.]
+
+A locomotive _exploradora_, a lookout engine, went on ahead of us to
+see that all was safe. Every little place had its music and firing of
+crackers, and the local detachment of _Rurales_ reined up at the station.
+At Amecameca there were as many as fifty of the latter, with drawn
+swords, all on white horses, which the firing made plunge with great
+spirit. At Ozumba was a battalion of mounted riflemen, under command of
+a handsome young officer in an eye-glass, who might have come fresh from
+the military school of Saint Cyr. The Indian populations, who could never
+have seen the locomotive before, maintained nevertheless, as their way
+is, a certain stoicism. There were no wild manifestations of surprise, no
+shouts; they even fired off their crackers with a serious air.
+
+The line is a congeries of curves without end, to overcome the
+three-quarters of a mile grade perpendicular from Amecameca to Cuautla.
+Cuautla has seven thousand people. For the ten years, up to this time,
+there had not been even diligence communication with it, and the railway
+was an event indeed. The enterprise was carried through chiefly by the
+exertions of a Señor Mendoza Cortina, who has great sugar estates in the
+neighborhood.
+
+The streets were decorated with triumphal arches, and borders of tall
+banana-plants. They were shabby, and the place more squalid than is
+the rule in the temperate climates above. The Indians had an apathetic
+look. Few young and interesting faces were seen among them, but an
+extraordinary number of hags. I found in use some very pretty pottery,
+which I was told was made at Cuernavaca, forty miles away. Simple bits of
+stone and shell were impasted in the common earthen-ware with an effect
+like that of old Roman mosaic. There was a distinctly Indian Christ in
+the parish church. In the plaza in front stands a great tree, somehow
+connected with a _noche triste_ of the patriot Morelos. Like Cortez at
+Mexico, he was forced to retreat one night in 1812, after a gallant
+resistance of sixty-two days to a siege by the Spaniards.
+
+
+II.
+
+The extremely civilized company pouring down to this shabby little
+place had a grand banquet in an old convent now adapted to the uses of
+a railway station, and plentiful speech-making afterward. There were
+a number of merry young journalists of the party, and they comported
+themselves as merry young journalists are apt to. They rapped on the
+table and called “otro!” “otro!”—another!—with pretended enthusiasm, even
+after the dullest speeches. It seemed typical of something curiously
+illogical in the Mexican mind that in festoons about the banqueting hall
+were set impartially the names of the presidents and other great men
+of the past, from Iturbide down to Manuel Gonzales. Iturbide adjoined
+Bravo and Guerrero, by whom he was shot as a usurper and enemy of the
+public peace; and Lerdo Porfirio Diaz, by whom he was ousted as traitor
+and tyrant. In the same way these personages, alternately one another’s
+Cæsars and Brutuses, are honored impartially in the series of portraits
+in the long gallery of the National Palace.
+
+There was naturally prominent here the portrait of the Padre Morelos,
+with the usual handkerchief around his head, and bold air of bandit
+chief. It is curious that priests should have taken such a share in
+the early insurrection. They recall those warrior ecclesiastics of
+the Middle Ages, who used to put on quite as often the secular as the
+spiritual armor. Probably the oppressions of the Spaniards were often too
+intolerable even for ecclesiastical endurance. Morelos, strangely enough,
+when the revolt broke out, was curate under Hidalgo at Valladolid, in
+Michoacan, and followed him to the field. He came, in his turn, to be
+generalissimo of the Mexican forces, and to have the name of Valladolid
+changed to Morelia in his honor. He had undoubtedly the military gift.
+His defence of Cuautla is considered one of the most glorious deeds of
+Mexican history. It was the third in the trio of priests, Matamoras, his
+intimate and lieutenant, who broke the siege with a hundred horse and
+aided his retreat when it finally became necessary.
+
+Matamoras in due course was taken and shot, at Valladolid, by no other
+than Iturbide, the future liberator. Iturbide, then in the Spanish
+forces, “had signalized himself,” to quote our history again, “by his
+repeated victories over the insurgents, and the excessive cruelty
+of which he made use on frequent occasions.” He routed Matamoras at
+Puruapan, took him prisoner, and put him to death, as has been said.
+To repay this, Morelos butchered two hundred Spanish prisoners in cold
+blood. So the strife of incarnate cruelty went on. Morelos himself was
+made prisoner by an act of treachery, and shot, after the customary fate
+of Mexican leaders, at San Cristobal Ecatapec, at four o’clock in the
+afternoon of the 21st of December, 1815.
+
+Iturbide’s account, in his minutes, of the insurgent chiefs whom he was
+so active in exterminating is very far from flattering. And here they
+are all apotheosized together. Verily it seems as if some high court
+of inquiry and review should be constituted for apportioning out a
+little the relative merits and defects of the past. The Mexican national
+anthem, a stirring and martial air, invokes among other things the
+sacred memory of Iturbide. But if Iturbide really deserved to be shot on
+setting foot on shore after his banishment, it seems much as if Americans
+should invoke the sacred name of Benedict Arnold. Arnold, too, rendered
+excellent services to his country. Nobody was a braver or better soldier
+than he before he attempted to betray it to the British.
+
+Well, I suppose the Mexicans understand it, but I don’t. Are they content
+with such a mixed ideal of good? Can a person have been such a patriot at
+one time that no subsequent crimes can weigh against him? One very simple
+lesson from it all would seem to be a less impatience with the ruling
+powers, on the one hand, and much less haste with powder and shot, on the
+other.
+
+
+III.
+
+I stayed a couple of days at Cuautla, to visit the sugar haciendas. The
+sugar product is large, and the district one of the most convenient
+sources of supply for central Mexico. A week afterward the newly
+inaugurated road was the scene of an accident unequalled, I think, in
+the annals of railway horrors. Five hundred lives were lost, in a little
+barranca, an insecure bridge over which had been washed out by the rain.
+A regiment in garrison at Cuautla was ordered to Mexico, and started
+in a train of open “flat” cars, there not having been passenger cars
+sufficient for the purpose. On other flat cars was a freight of barrels
+of _aguardiente_. The start was made in the afternoon. There was delay
+on the track. The shower came on, the night fell, and the men, pelted by
+the storm, without protection, broke open the _aguardiente_, and drank
+their fill. Some say that the engineer reported the road unsafe, but was
+forced by an exasperated officer to go on with a pistol at his head.
+They came to the broken bridge, and the train went through. The soldiers
+who were not mangled and incapacitated outright—drunk, and crazed with
+excitement—stabbed and shot one another. The barrels of _aguardiente_
+burst and took fire; the cartridges in the belts exploded; the swollen
+torrent claimed its own; and the fury of a tropical storm, in a night as
+black as Erebus, beat down upon the writhing mass of horror.
+
+It was at this price that the extra subventions for speedy completion
+of the work were earned. A whitewashing report was made afterward, I
+believe, but the Government caused the road to be put in order before
+it was again opened; and the case may serve as a needed lesson to all
+railway builders in Mexico.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+_SAN JUAN, ORIZABA, AND CORDOBA REVISITED._
+
+
+I.
+
+The impressions of the first journey upward from the coast are too vague
+to satisfy, yet it is better to push on to the capital and not take off
+the edge of the novelty by dallying on the way. The intervening places
+are returned to afterward.
+
+How different the feeling now! The things that had seemed so formidable
+are harmless enough. You take now with gusto the _pulque_, handed up at
+Apam. You understand the motley figures, the interiors, the flavors of
+the strange fruits and cakes, the proper expressions to use, and prices
+to pay. The helpless feeling of standing in need of continual directions
+is got rid of, and travel has become a matter of confidence and pleasure.
+Our Mexicans of the lower class are not over-quick in the matter of
+directions, to tell the truth. I recollect, as an example, asking a small
+shop-keeper, one day, the way to a neighboring street.
+
+“There it is,” he said; “but” (insisting, in a flustered way, on being
+puzzled by my accent, though he had comprehended what I meant) “_no
+hablamos Americano aqui_”—“We don’t speak American here.”
+
+I found a lodging at a tienda at San Juan Teotihuacan, the ancient city
+of the dead. The owner had before entertained Americans. He had a dog to
+which he had given, in pleasant recollection of one of them, as he said,
+the remarkable name of “Lovis,” which afterward proved to be “Lewis.”
+Adjoining was a barracks of _Rurales_, whose bugles sounded a cheerful
+_réveille_ in the morning. The central plaza is perhaps three miles
+from the station. On the way you cross a handsome stone bridge built by
+Maximilian. The river San Juan had vanished from under it and left a mere
+gulch, as is the way with most of the streams in the dry season.
+
+The inhabitants have their houses, gardens, and all, often above the
+cement floors left by the extinct race, and the edges of these floors
+crop out beside the road, worn down through them. Nobody has framed a
+satisfactory theory of the place, but it is supposed to have been a
+great pantheon, or burial-place, for the dead of importance. Maximilian
+encouraged excavations, and a great Egyptian-looking head, unearthed
+in his time, is seen. Charnay dug there later, and so did my friend of
+the newspaper expedition. Probably a commission ought to be issued by
+the Government for tunnelling, without impairing their form, the two
+pyramids, to ascertain if there be not something of importance within. It
+is at present both conservative and apathetic in such matters. The larger
+pyramid, that of the Sun, has an excellent zigzag plane approaching
+its summit. A long road, called the “Street of the Dead,” strewn on
+both sides with heaps of weather-worn stones, indicating constructions,
+extends from it to that of the Moon. Both are now grown with scrubby
+nopals and pepper-trees.
+
+A couple of children ran out from a cottage at the foot of the Pyramid
+of the Sun, to sell “_caritas_,” the little antiquities, the day I
+approached to climb it. From the top you see other villages, as San
+Francisco, Santa Maria Cuatlan, San Martin. The inhabitants of San
+Francisco have erected a cross here, where an idol, with a burnished
+shield, once stood to catch the first rays of the rising sun, and come in
+procession each year, on the 3d of May, to conduct a religious ceremonial
+and drape it with flowers. The white summit of Popocatepetl barely shows
+itself above the intervening range of the Rio Frio. The officiators
+at the pagan altar may have hailed it sparkling afar, like another
+sacrificial fire. The country round about is garden-like, abounding in
+maize and maguey, sheep and cattle. I observed some large straw-ricks,
+fashioned by leisurely employés, in the prevailing taste for adornment,
+into the form of houses, with a figure of a saint chopped out in
+bass-relief. It was a calm, lovely Sunday. A fresh breeze played, though
+the sun was warm; cumulus clouds piled themselves up magnificently; and
+the tinkle of the church-bells came up from the surrounding villages.
+
+The clouds—“luminous Andes of the air,” as a poet has aptly called
+them—are of especial impressiveness, I think, above this great plain.
+I noted them again with great pleasure at Huamantla, in the state of
+Tlaxcala. It is a shabby place of unpainted adobe, out of which rise the
+fine domes and belfries of a dozen churches, as if they were enclosed in
+a brick-yard. Thither Santa Anna retired for his last futile resistance,
+after the Americans under Scott had taken the capital; and there,
+according to the school history, “the terrible American guerilla, Walker,
+was killed in personal combat by an intrepid Mexican officer, Eulalio
+Villaseñor.” Near by is Malinche, a mountain dubbed with a nickname
+given by the Aztecs to Cortez, which is a feature of all this part of
+the country. It is not of great height, but of peculiar, volcanic shape.
+It is a long slope, made up of knobs and jags, reaching to a central
+point as sharp as an arrow-head. Peons are ploughing, with oxen and the
+primitive wooden plough, in fertile ground around its base, and its dark
+mass is thrown out boldly against dazzling banks of cloud.
+
+
+II.
+
+At Orizaba you are down in the tropics again, but not tropics of too
+oppressive a kind. A young friend from Mexico was making a visit there
+in a family to which I was admitted, and I was glad to see something of
+the place in a domestic way. It has, say, fifteen thousand inhabitants.
+The Alameda, with its two fountains, stone seats, orange-trees, and other
+shrubberies, is very charming; so is the little Zocalo, by the Cathedral.
+There grows in the gardens here the splendid tulipan, a shrub in size
+like the oleander, the large flowers of which glow from a distance like
+scarlet lanterns. Tall bananas bend over the neatly whitened houses.
+My Hotel de Diligencias was white and attractive. Next to it a torrent
+tumbled down a wild little gorge, amid a growth of bananas, and, passing
+under a bridge, turned flouring and paper mills. I had this under my
+eyes from my window; and I had also an expanse of red-tiled roofs, gray
+belfries and domes, and the bold hill of El Borrego beyond. The city is
+enclosed by a rim of hills. It was now the season when the rains were
+growing frequent; and a humid atmosphere, and wet clouds, dragging low
+and occasionally dropping their contents, kept the vegetation of a fresh,
+vivid green.
+
+At the hotel _table d’hôte_ a couple of young men of very Indian
+physiognomy—lawyers, I should judge, by profession—talked pantheism and
+such-like subjects in the tone of Victor Hugo’s students. A lady whose
+husband was a general officer told me that she had been in the United
+States—at New Orleans—accounting thus for a little knowledge of English.
+That meant that she had shared her husband’s exile there. One comes to
+understand and smile at it after a while. “_Tomo el rumbo á la costa,
+y salio de la Republica, embarcandose para Orleans_”—“He took the road
+to the coast and sallied from the Republic, embarking himself for New
+Orleans”—has passed almost into a formula in the accounts of public men,
+New Orleans having always been a notable place of temporary refuge and
+plotting for their return.
+
+[Illustration: THE HILL OF EL BORREGO, AT ORIZABA.]
+
+There was a gay party, of station, who had come down to _pasear_ a
+little, in a private car, and were taking back with them a great supply
+of the flowers and fruits of the tropics. Shall I reluctantly admit that
+they all ate with their knives, and with the sharp edge foremost? Our
+waiter gave us, smilingly, soup without a spoon, this and that other
+dish without a fork, and hastened off for long absences; or he would
+apathetically say, “_No hay_”—“There is none”—of a dish, but would bring
+it if it were insisted on with decision. A fellow-guest informed me at
+dessert that he had been in New York, and that the American fruits and
+_dulces_—sweets—were all alike and insipid. This shows that there is a
+natural equilibrium in things, for it is precisely the complaint that
+visitors from the North first make of those of the tropics.
+
+My acquaintances in the place were the family of the Licenciado—let
+us say—Herrera y Arroyo. The names of both masculine and feminine
+progenitors are thus usually linked together by the “_y_”—and. They told
+me that there was very little formal entertaining done. They occupied
+themselves with embroidery, studying English, and domestic matters. Their
+house was roomy, but had little furniture. The rocking-chair can never
+again be called a peculiarly Yankee feature by anybody who has seen it
+in the lower latitudes. The typical Mexican parlor, or living-room, has,
+like the one here, a mat spread down in the centre, on a brick floor, and
+two cane rocking-chairs on one side and two on the other, in which the
+inmates spend much of their time.
+
+We had a kind of picnic one day to the Barrio Nuevo, a very pretty
+coffee-and-milk-like cascade of the Rio Orizaba. Boys ran out from
+thatched cottages in the edge of town to pick flowers and offer them
+to the señoritas, expecting to be rewarded, of course, with a little
+consideration. There is another cascade, even prettier—the Rincon Grande.
+
+The next day we went to the sugar _ingenio_ of Jalapilla. A fine wide
+avenue of trees stretched up to it. The locusts were singing in them.
+The grass and trees were exquisitely green. The snow-peak of Orizaba,
+hidden at the town itself, here rises above intervening hills. There
+were arcades, and monumental gateways, and a massive aqueduct on arches,
+which brings the water from a fine torrent. In the sunless green archways
+of the old aqueduct the señoritas found with rapture specimens of rare
+and delicate ferns growing. Ox-wains brought the cane to the mills. We
+watched it through the processes of crushing in the machinery, and tasted
+the pleasant sap when first expressed, and later at some of the stages of
+boiling down. _Aguardiente_ is also made on a large scale. The peasants
+along the road sell you a draught of it in its unfermented state, with
+tamales. The residence attached is a large, two-story white house, with
+a high iron gate between white posts. It was loaned to Maximilian as
+a country retreat by the conservative owners at one time. At present
+it is shabby and unfurnished, but a single room being occupied by the
+proprietor, who has the rough-and-ready tastes of a ranchero, and little
+taste for display.
+
+
+III.
+
+At one of the theatres at this time was playing, by a Zarazuela, or
+“variety” company, “La Torre de Neslo ó Margarita de Borgogno;” at the
+other, by a juvenile company, “La Fille de Madame Angot.”
+
+Whoever would thoroughly enjoy Mexico must have the taste for old
+architecture. There is no end to it, and it is often the only resource.
+It is of that fantastic rococo into which the Renaissance fell, in
+the luxury and florid invention of its later stages; but even where
+least defensible, from the point of view of logic and fitness, it is
+redeemed now by its mouldering, its time-stains, and superposed layers
+of half-obliterated colors. Little can be said, except in this way, for
+the carvings and various detail, but the masses are invariably of a
+grand and noble simplicity. The material is generally rubble-stone and
+cement, and cannot be very expensive. The principal lines of the style
+are horizontal. The dome, semi-circular in shape, plays a great part
+in it. I have counted not less than eight, like those of St. Mark’s,
+at Venice, on a single church. The dome is built, if I mistake not, of
+rubble and cement also, on a centring of regular masonry, perhaps even of
+wood. It is a reminiscence of the Moors. These edifices were put up three
+hundred years ago, by builders in the flush of the Byzantine influence,
+which radiated from Granada, then lately conquered. I know of no school
+in which the niggling, petty, and expensive character of our own efforts
+in this line could be better corrected. _Vamenos!_ Will not some of our
+leisurely young architects with a taste for the picturesque travel here,
+with their sketch-books, and bring us back plans and suggestions from
+this impressive work, for use among ourselves?
+
+Some of the old churches take an added interest from their present fate.
+It would have been monotonous to have them all alike in full ceremonial,
+and now they are pathetic. I used to linger to hear the buglers practise
+in the cloistered church of Carmen, used as a barracks. It is stripped
+of everything, the pavement broken, the walls full of bullet-holes,
+and painted with the names of detachments, as 18º _de Infanteria_, 7º
+_Compaña de Grenaderos_, which have occupied it. In the smoke-stains,
+the damp, to which patches of gilding still adhere, and the vestiges of
+scaling fresco, dim, mysterious visions are made out. The bare chancel
+daïs, still surviving, gives to the interior the aspect of some noble
+throne-room. In our own country such a monument would be inestimably
+prized, and would become a pilgrimage-place from far and near; but here
+it is simply one of a great number.
+
+In the little public plaza outside a few convicts were repairing
+the paths. A pair of them would bring some dirt, about an ordinary
+wheel-barrow full, on a stretcher, dump it in a leisurely way, and go
+back for more, all with plentiful deliberation. They might have been
+laborers, engaged by the city aldermen, on a New York boulevard. A couple
+of soldiers with muskets lounged on the stone benches to guard them as
+they worked. The punishment of the prisoners could hardly have been in
+what they did, but principally in the exposure—unless, indeed, they were
+taken from a different part of the country. I wondered if their friends
+came here sometimes and watched them; and what a pain it must have been
+for the sensitive to work thus, hedged round by an invulnerable restraint
+and infamy, in sight of the homes where they had lived and all the
+ordinary avocations of life in which they had engaged.
+
+An important cotton-factory at Orizaba has a fine architectural
+gate-way, and a statue of the founder, Manuel Escandon (1807 to 1862),
+in the court, after the practice heretofore adverted to. Paper is also
+made here. A series of fines is prescribed, in printed rules, for the
+hands coming late in the morning and falling into other misdemeanors.
+The sum of these makes up a fund for charitable use among themselves.
+A savings-bank department is also conducted for the benefit of the
+operatives. To encourage savings an extra liberal interest is paid when
+the amount on deposit has reached fifty dollars. To avoid in part the
+interruption of the frequent church holidays, a dispensation had been
+obtained from the ecclesiastical authorities, allowing work to go on, on
+most of them, as usual.
+
+
+IV.
+
+From Orizaba the next stage was to Cordoba. Cordoba is in the full
+tropics, and there I first made acquaintance with the coffee culture,
+the leading industry of the place. The plant is less striking in aspect
+than I had expected. It is a bush, with small, dark, glossy leaves,
+its stem never over six or seven inches in diameter, even at an age of
+fifty years. It is twelve feet high at most, but usually topped and
+kept lower for greater convenience in harvesting the product. It bears
+a little axillary white flower, fragrant like jasmine, and the green
+berries at the same time. A coffee plantation has not the breadth of the
+_platanaras_, the fields of towering bananas; but it needs shade, and
+large oaks are left distributed through it which accomplish this purpose.
+If left to the sun wholly it yields large crops at first, then dies. The
+coffee plant should bear after the fourth or fifth year, and yield a
+half-pound yearly for fifty or sixty years. It should have cost, up to
+the time of beginning to bear, about twenty-five cents. This is supposing
+a high cultivation. By the more shiftless method commonly found in use
+here it costs but half as much, but, on the other hand, yields no more
+than three ounces on an average.
+
+Some few Americans, and other foreigners, have established themselves at
+Cordoba, and lead a dreamy existence in the shade. At one time it was
+the scene of an extensive coffee-planting by ex-Confederate generals,
+but these attempts were not successful. I was fortunate enough to be
+conducted about by an old gentleman, of German birth, who had lived
+here forty years. He had the tastes of a naturalist and farmer, and the
+existence pleased him. He took in his hand a _machete_ from the wall, and
+we set forth for a walk, with much improving discourse by the way, in the
+fields and plantations. The _machete_, a long half cleaver, half sword,
+opens you a path through a thicket, cuts you a coffee or an orange stick,
+lops an orchid from its high perch on the rugged tree-bark, or brings
+down a tall banana, and splits open its covering to serve as a protection
+to a budget of botanical specimens. Some small grandchildren of the house
+begged to accompany us. They had hardy, out-of-door habits, and ran by
+our sides with merry clamor, finding a hundred things to interest them
+along the way.
+
+My genial guide had planted coffee himself. Much money has been lost at
+it, it seems, and it cannot be very profitable except under economical
+processes and an improved market. When transportation becomes cheaper we
+shall have introduced into the United States from Mexico also many choice
+fruits, notably the fine Manilla mango, not now known. The fruits of the
+country grow on you with experience. To my taste the juicy mango, which
+at its best combines something of the melon, pine-apple, peach, and pear,
+is the most delicious of them all. Other fruits are the chirimoya, guava,
+mamé, granadita (or pomegranate), zapote, chazapote, tuna, aguacate, and
+many more, the distinctive peculiarities of which I could not describe in
+a week.
+
+The best soil for the coffee is that of virgin slopes, capable of being
+well manured. It should be manured once in two years. The planting takes
+place in the rainy season, and the principal harvest is in November and
+December. Women and children cut off the berries, which are then dried
+five or six weeks, and barked; or are barked earlier by a machine. The
+chief labor consists in destroying the weeds, which must be done from
+two to six times a year. The plants are set in squares, at a distance of
+about seven feet apart. The trees recommended for shade are the fresno,
+or ash, cedro (cedar), the huisache, aguacate, maxcatle, cajiniquil,
+and tepehuajé, the characteristics of which I could hardly explain,
+more than those of the fruits, except that they are generally dark and
+glossy-leaved, and many of them as large as our elms. There is a theory,
+too, in favor of shading by bananas, and plantations are found where the
+two grow together.
+
+But a native proprietor with whom I talked objects to this. “The platano
+is a selfish and grasping plant,” he says, indignantly. “It draws twice
+and thrice its proportionate amount of nourishment from the soil. Is it
+not beaten down, too, in every storm? And the ravaging hedgehog comes in
+search of it, and, while he is about it, destroys the coffee as well. No,
+indeed, no combination of platano and coffee for me!”
+
+The poor platano! However, it can stand abuse. How quickly it grows!
+Its great leaves, more or less tattered by friction, flap and rustle
+above your head like banners and sails as you walk about in the tropical
+plantation. It is called the “bread of the tropics.” An acre of land
+will produce enough of it to support fifty people, whereas an acre in
+wheat will support only two. If the tropics had had a good deal harder
+time in getting their bread, by-the-way, they would not have been in so
+down-trodden and slipshod a condition.
+
+I will not say that we had the better coffee at our hotel for being in
+its own country. It is the old story of “shoemaker’s children” again,
+I suppose. On the contrary, I recollect it as especially poor. The
+hotel—possibly it has improved by this time—was wretchedly kept and
+served. They gave us half a dozen kinds of meat in succession, without
+ever a vegetable, in such a luxuriance of them. The waiters were sunk in
+apathy, the management even more so. They seem often to say to you, with
+an ill-concealed aversion, at a Mexican hotel, “If you _will_ stay, if
+you will insist on bringing your traps in, we will do what we can for
+you, but we are not at all anxious for it.”
+
+Pack-mules were kept in the court, and under a cloister at one side women
+and girls were stripping tobacco. Your room, at a provincial hotel, opens
+upon a gallery in which mocking-birds are hung in wooden cages—always
+one at least. It is the practice of the Mexican mocking-bird to sleep
+continuously throughout the day, so as to be in health and spirits for
+the exercise of the night. He begins at midnight, and continues his
+dulcet ingenuity of torture till daybreak. Naturalists have had much
+to say of the mocking-bird, comparing him to a whole forest full of
+songsters, and the like. It may be unwise to set up in opposition to so
+much praise, but there are times when a planing-mill in the vicinity, or
+a whole foundery full of trip-hammers, would be a blessing and relief in
+comparison.
+
+Should the mocking-bird have injudiciously impaired his strength during
+the day, so as to allow of a brief respite, the interval is filled in by
+the shrill, quavering whistles of the street watchmen, who blow to each
+other every quarter of an hour during the night, to show that they are
+awake and vigilant.
+
+You leave Cordoba at 4.30 in the morning; that is, if you go by the
+up-train. I was awakened an hour too soon at my hotel, which, having
+to call me, wanted it over as soon as possible. I had leisure while
+waiting to collect the views of one of these watchmen. He showed me
+the Remington rifle with which he was armed. He said that he went on
+duty at 7 P.M. and finished at 5.30 A.M., and received three and a half
+reals—forty-two cents—a day, which he did not think enough. There are no
+cabs at Cordoba. It is a tram-car, making a total of two trips a day,
+that takes you, bag and baggage, two dark miles or so to the station.
+
+
+V.
+
+But I did not leave before first visiting the Indian village of Amatlan.
+I do not insist that erudition of incalculable value has been brought
+to light in these travels, but they were a succession of excursions
+into the actual heart of things. I was pleased when I could find
+something unmodified by the innovations of railway travel, and witness
+the familiar, every-day life of the people. Perhaps we never thoroughly
+understand anybody until we learn his routine. A stimulus to what we
+usually neglect, and take as a matter of course, is aroused abroad.
+Law-making, education, buying and selling, eating and drinking, marriage,
+and the burial of the dead, all yield entertainment. The traveller who
+spreads before us only the _outré_ and startling that he has seen may
+still leave us very much in the dark about where he has been. In Mexico,
+however, almost everything is _outré_.
+
+To Amatlan and back is a comfortable day’s excursion. We found
+saddle-horses for hire, and a young Indian as a guide, and set off. My
+companion on this excursion was a commercial traveller, a sprightly
+young American of Spanish origin. Commercial traveller in machetes and
+other cutlery: such was his profession. The machetes were of American
+make. I have one hanging in my room at this writing which came from
+Water Street, in New York. This agent had taken his last order (having
+canvassed the little store-keepers in the plaza under my own view, as if
+they had been those of Kalamazoo, Aurora, or Freeport), and was awaiting
+the sailing of his steamer from Vera Cruz. Having nothing more to do, he
+entered into the examination of manners and customs for their own sake
+with a certain zest, though perhaps comprehending for the first time that
+such things could be worth anybody’s notice.
+
+Amatlan is the richest Indian village in—well, one of the richest of
+Indian villages. Its plantations of pine-apples are the finest in the
+state of Vera Cruz, to which all this territory from Orizaba down
+belongs, Orizaba being its capital. The pines grow about sixteen inches
+in height, and should last ten years. They are set in narrow lines, and
+the general aspect of the field from a little distance is that of large
+sedge-grass. You will buy three of them sometimes for a _tlaco_, one
+cent and a half. We met natives driving donkey-loads of them to market.
+There were some fields of tobacco, of fine quality, in flower. The Peak
+of Orizaba is magnificently seen from all this district. It is lovelier
+and bolder than at first upon familiar acquaintance. Church, the painter,
+finds the preferable point of view farther up the railroad, using the
+wild gorges of Fortin as a foreground. The village proved to be composed
+chiefly of wooden and cane huts, shingled or thatched, and the population
+to be exclusively Indian. They do not wish any others to join them. They
+display everywhere the same clannish disposition. If persons of European
+origin who might come to remain could not be got rid of by churlishness,
+it is thought that severer means would be resorted to.
+
+The Indian race, as a rule, is patient and untiring in certain minor
+directions. They make long, swift journeys, for instance, acting as
+beasts of burden or messengers, so that, seeing their performances, the
+words of Buffon come forcibly to mind: “The civilized man knows not
+half his powers.” But in the greater concerns of life, those requiring
+forethought for a permanent future, they are very improvident. Perhaps,
+however, those of Amatlan differ from others, or perhaps the general
+reputation may not be wholly deserved, for the Cordobans tell you that
+Amatlan is even richer than Cordoba.
+
+There are said to be a number of native residents worth from $50,000 to
+$80,000 each. They buy land, and bury their surplus cash in the ground.
+It may well enough be that the lack of savings-banks, or any more secure
+place of deposit for money than the ground, has something to do with the
+improvidence complained of. The alcalde, the chief of them, was estimated
+as worth a million, though this I should very much doubt. He had no
+large ways of using his wealth, but was said to incline to avarice and
+delight in simply piling it up. There was a project at one time to build
+a tram-road hence to Cordoba, the capital to be supplied in part by the
+Indians, but it fell through. Some of the well-to-do send their sons to
+good schools, and even to Mexico, to take the degree of licentiate. These
+favored scions, on their return, must put on the usual dress, and live in
+no way differently from the rest. The daughters, on the other hand, are
+never educated, but set, without exception, to rolling tortillas and the
+other domestic drudgery.
+
+
+VI.
+
+We dined at an open-air shanty posada, with dogs and pigs running freely
+about under our feet. Coffee, without milk, sugar, and pine-apples were
+all supplied by the fields about. Some few spectators were interested,
+but not very much, in a slight sketch I made of their buildings and
+costume. My commercial traveller, by way of arousing greater enthusiasm
+in this, represented that it was to be “put in a machine” afterward, and
+showed, by a dexterous chuckle and twist of the thumb, how it would then
+be so improved that you would never know it. But even this stirred them
+only indifferently.
+
+We visited the alcalde in his quarters. He was bristly-haired, clad
+in cotton shirt and drawers, and bare-legged, like the rest. Official
+business for the day was over, but he showed us the cell in which on
+occasion he locked up evil-doers. He was said to administer justice
+impartially to the rich and poor alike, and with a natural good-sense.
+But for occasional perversions of justice effected by a Spanish secretary
+he was obliged to employ, he himself being illiterate, it was thought
+that his court averaged well with the more pretentious tribunals of the
+country.
+
+We rode back by a different way, through a large, cool wood. It abounded
+in interesting orchids, and there was an undergrowth of coffee run
+wild, the glossy green of its leaves as shining as if just wet by
+rain. There was not that excessive tangle and luxuriance supposed to
+be characteristic of the tropics; our own woods are quite as rampant.
+All that is found, you learn, in Tehuantepec, for instance, and Central
+America. There tree-growths seize upon a dwelling, crunch its bones, as
+it were, and bear up part of the walls into the air; and it is vegetable
+more than animal life that is feared. We forded three pretty brooks, and
+came to an upland where cows were pasturing, and the steeples of Cordoba
+were again in sight. Our young guide lassoed a cow, led her to a shed
+where tobacco was drying, and offered us the refreshment of a draught of
+new milk.
+
+Being asked if this were quite regular and correct, he answered that the
+cows were there at pasturage in charge of his uncle. I trust that this
+was so.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+_PUEBLA, CHOLULA, TLAXCALA._
+
+
+I.
+
+You turn off from the junction of Apizaco, on the Vera Cruz railway, to
+go to the large, fine city of Puebla. It is the capital of the state of
+the same name, and has a population of about seventy-seven thousand. Many
+prosperous _fabricas_ (factories) are seen along the fertile valley of
+approach; then the forts, attacked and defended on the great Cinco de
+Mayo, appear on the hills, looking down, like Mont Valerien and Charenton
+above Paris.
+
+Certainly everything out of Mexico is not Cuatitlan. Puebla is very
+clean, well paved, and well drained. The streets are not too wide, as
+many of them are at the capital. I thought our hotel, De Diligencias,
+which was very well kept, by a Frenchman, much better than the Iturbide.
+It had been a palace in its day, and had traces yet of armorial
+sculptures. Our rooms opened upon a wide upper colonnade, where the
+table was spread. It was full of flowers, which shut out whatever
+might have been disagreeable to the eye below. I am bound to admit
+that the remorseless mocking-bird sang all night among them. I have
+mentioned heretofore the tiled front of a shop, “La Ciudad de Mexico.”
+A picturesque mosaic-work in tiles of earthen-ware and china upon a
+ground of blood-red stone abounds. Sometimes it is a diagonal pattern,
+covering a whole surface; again only a broad wainscot or frieze.
+Plaques, representing saints, which you take at first for hand-bills,
+are let into walls. These tiles are made at Puebla, where there are as
+many as ten _fabricas_ of them, the best in the country. I visited one
+of these, found the manufacture cheap, and brought away some specimens.
+The workmanship is rude and hasty, but the effect artistic and adapted to
+its purpose. The most liberal example of their use, and one of the most
+charming interiors I have ever seen, was that of what is now the _Casa
+de Dementes_, or lunatic asylum for men, of the state of Puebla. It was
+formerly a convent of the nuns of Santa Rosa, and was decorated after
+their taste. Entrance, vestibule, stairs, central court, and cloisters,
+with fountain in the centre; balustrade, benches, tanks and bath-tubs,
+kitchen furnace, and numberless little garden courts, are all encrusted
+with quaint ceramics. It is like walking about in some magnified piece
+of jewelry. The blue-and-yellow fountain in its court is as Moorish as
+anything in Morocco.
+
+There are forty-two patients in this institution, with an attendant
+appointed to each ten. The rich among them pay $16 a month, the rest
+nothing. Another one, San Roque, contains thirty-two women, also
+maintained by the state. The general hospital, of San Pedro, another
+large ex-convent, with a nice garden, was clean, cool, and well ordered;
+and—curious feature to note—departments for allopath and homœopath
+arranged impartially side by side. These governments take, officially, no
+sides with either, but give them both a showing.
+
+The Cathedral at Puebla is equal in magnificence to that at Mexico.
+There is the usual Zocalo, full of charming plants, before it. The large
+theatre, “De Guerrero,” entered by a passage from the portales, had but a
+scant audience on the evening of our attendance, but was itself worthy
+of inspection. It had four tiers of boxes and a pit; the decoration was
+in white and gold, upon a ground of blue-and-white wall-paper, the whole
+of a chaste and elegant effect. The peasant costumes of women in each of
+the provinces vary in colors and material, though the same general shapes
+are preserved. At Cordoba, white and striped cotton stuffs were in order;
+at Mexico, Egyptian-looking blue-and-black woollen goods. Those in all
+this part of the country I thought particularly pleasing; and the great
+market and gay Parian, or bazaar, where they are principally displayed,
+were not soon exhausted as a spectacle. The men are usually bare-legged,
+and in white cotton. In the warm part of the day they carry their
+bright-colored serapes folded over one shoulder, and when it is cooler
+put them on, by simply inserting their heads through the slit.
+
+Now comes by a woman in white, with a red cap and girdle; now two girls
+of fourteen, all in white, hurrying swiftly along under heavy burdens.
+Here are women in embroidered jackets, others in chemises, with profuse
+bands of colored beads, or rebosos of rayed stuff, like the Algerian
+burnous. Skirts are of white blanket material, with borders of blue,
+or blue with white, or yellow. The principal garment is a mere skirt
+of uncut goods, wrapped around the hips and kept in place by a bright
+girdle. Above this is whatever fantastic waist one pleases, or a garment
+with an opening for the head, after the fashion of the serape. To all
+this is added a profusion of necklaces of large beads, amber, blue, and
+green, and large silver ear-rings, or others of glass, in the Mexican
+national colors, green, white, and red. There is a universal carrying of
+burdens. The men accommodate theirs in a large wooden cage divided into
+compartments. The women tie over their backs budgets done up in a rug of
+coarse maguey fibre. Often they carry a child or an earthen jar in it;
+or, when full, pile a large green or red water-jar on the top.
+
+Affording so abundant material for the artist, they were excessively
+suspicious of any attempt to turn it to account. There were traditions
+among them that bad luck would be encountered should they allow pictures
+to be taken. It was to take away something from themselves, and they
+would be left incomplete—probably to waste and die. Nor could their
+costumes be bought from them except with great difficulty. Much as still
+remains, there has been a great change, and disappearance, since the
+close of Maximilian’s empire, of local peculiarities in dress. There has
+been a disappearance, too, with the advent of machinery and imported
+notions, of many pretty hand-made articles that formerly adorned the
+markets. Among these were carvings in charcoal, once of a peculiar
+excellence. Of those that remain still of great interest are life-like
+puppets, in wax and wood, of figures of the country, costumed after their
+several types.
+
+On the evening of May 19th, as we sat at dinner in the hotel corridor,
+down came the rain in the court. In a few moments a row of long gargoyles
+were spouting streams which were white against the blackness, and crossed
+one another like a set display. “_Va!_ for the rainy season!” said the
+host. It usually begins by the 15th. “_Voilà!_ ten months past in which
+we have had scarcely a drop!”
+
+As almost any desired climate can be had by varying more or less the
+altitude, the rainy season is of variable date in different parts of the
+country. At Mexico it is very much later. I did not find it, either here
+or elsewhere, so incommoding as might be fancied. It rains principally
+at night, and the succeeding day is bright and clear. In Mexico, as in
+California, the rainy season means that in which rain falls about as with
+us, while the dry season is that in which there is none at all.
+
+
+II.
+
+Have any forgotten the tragic advent, and preliminary agitations, of
+the entry of Cortez into the sacred city of Cholula? He assembled the
+caciques and notables in the great square, and at a given signal, turned
+his arms upon them and slew them, to the number of three thousand. He had
+discovered an artful plot among them for the destruction of his army, and
+it was his aim in this way to strike such a terror into the country that
+he should have done with such things once for all. The god worshipped
+at Cholula was a far milder one than the bloody war god at Mexico—the
+peaceful Quetzalcoatl, God of the Air. He instructed the people in
+agriculture and the arts. His reign was a golden age. Cotton grew already
+tinted with gorgeous dyes, and a single ear of maize was as much as a man
+could carry. To his honor the largest of all the teocallis and temples
+was erected. He was represented with painted shield, jewelled sceptre,
+and plumes of fire. Could Cortez have waited till now (such are the
+changes of time) he might have gone into Cholula from Puebla, to the foot
+of this very pyramid, in a beautiful horse-car. A tramway, ultimately to
+be extended, and operated by steam, reached to this point, a distance of
+six miles, and our conveyance was a horse-car with a glass front (New
+York built) which I have never seen equalled elsewhere. The driver of it
+was a Tennessee negro, who had married an Indian maid and settled, much
+respected, in the country. He had formerly been body-servant of a Mexican
+general, had travelled with him in the United States and Europe, and
+picked up several languages. He called upon us afterward at our hotel, to
+politely inquire our impressions of his tramway.
+
+The principal features of the trip were exquisite views of Popocatepetl
+and Ixtacihuatl across yellow grain-fields; a dilapidated convent turned
+to an iron foundery; an old aqueduct crossing the plain; a Spanish
+bridge, sculptured with armorial bearings, across the river Atoyac; and a
+fine grist-mill; and farther on a cotton-mill, turned by the water-power
+of the same river.
+
+There has been a controversy as to whether the great mound was natural
+or artificial in origin. I do not see how there can be doubt about it
+now, for where numerous deep cuts have been made in it, for roads or
+cultivation, the artificial structure of adobe bricks is plainly visible.
+Such a place as it is to lie upon at ease and dream and go back to the
+traditions of the past! You may cast yourself down under large trees
+growing on the now ragged slopes, or by the pilgrimage chapel on the
+crest, where the God of the Air once reared his grotesque bulk. There
+is a sculptured cross, dated 1666, at the edge of the terrace, and
+rose-bushes grow out of the pavement. I know of no prospect of fertile
+hill and dale, scattered with quaint villages, in any country that
+surpasses it. An American was there that day with the purpose of buying a
+hacienda, if he could find one suitable, and I for one thought there were
+many plans much less sensible.
+
+Cholula had four hundred towers in its pagan times, and it may have
+had round about it almost as many spires when the Christian domination
+succeeded. Let me recite the names of a few of the villages seen from the
+top of the great pyramid, all with their churches, by twos and threes,
+or more: San Juan; San Andres; Santiago; Chicotengo; La Santissima; La
+Soledad; San Rafael; San Pablo Mexicalcingo; San Diego; La Madalena;
+Santa Marta; Santa Maria; San Isidoro; San Juan Calvario; San Juan
+Tlanutla; San Mateo; San Miguelito (Little Saint Michael); Jesus; San
+Sebastian.
+
+One of the old churches lying deserted in the fields might be purchased,
+no doubt, and utilized for the basis of a picturesque manor-house.
+Suppose we should take yonder one, for instance, down by the Haciendita
+de Cruce Vivo—the Little Hacienda of the Living Cross? A cloud is just
+now passing over, marking the place with a dark patch. A brook is leaping
+white through the meadow, trees stretch back from the walls, and the rest
+lying in strong light is divided by patches of an exquisite cultivation
+with the regularity of market-gardens.
+
+We dined, at Cholula, at the clean Fonda de la Reforma, in a large,
+brick-floored room, invaded by flowers from a court-yard garden. No
+people can fashion such charming homes without excellent traits; so much
+is positive beyond dispute. We were admitted, I think, to the residence
+portion of the house, the owner of which was a doctor, and we examined,
+while waiting for our repast, a lot of his antiquated medical books, some
+dating from 1700.
+
+The plaza is as large as at Mexico, but grass-grown—for the place is of
+but modest pretensions now—and lonely, except on market-day, when the
+scene is as gay and the costumes even prettier than at Puebla itself.
+In the centre is a Zocalo; at one side a vast array of battlemented
+churches. That of the Capilla Real, consisting of three in one, is now
+decayed and abandoned. On the other is a fine colonnade devoted to the
+Ayuntamienta, or town council, with the jail. What a pity it is that we
+have so scant accounts left us of the life of Mexico when all this feudal
+magnificence was in full blast!
+
+[Illustration: PRISONERS WEAVING SASHES AT CHOLULA.]
+
+I cannot say just why I visited so many prisons. Perhaps because they
+were always under the eye, adjoining the public offices, and the
+prisoners were a cheerful lot, who did what they could to attract
+attention. At Cholula we found them weaving, on a primitive kind of
+hand-loom, bright sashes of red and blue, which are sold in part for
+their own benefit. Their accommodations compared favorably with the
+barracks along-side. When we asked questions about them they stopped work
+and listened attentively. The guards, I fancy, thought we were trying to
+identify some persons who had robbed us—not conceiving of such a visit
+for the pure pleasure of it.
+
+
+III.
+
+When I inquired the way to Tlaxcala there was such an ignorance on the
+subject at my hotel, at Puebla, that it almost seemed as if I was the
+first person who could ever have been there. A luxurious Englishman
+abandoned me at this part of the expedition, claiming that nobody knew
+whether there were conveyances from the junction, whether there were
+even inns. It seemed to him a case of sitting on a Tlaxcalan door-step
+and perishing of hunger, or being washed away by the torrents of the
+rainy season. I found, however, that there was a choice of two trains a
+day, and went on alone. What then? I suppose Cortez did rather more than
+that. Tlaxcala was the most undaunted and terrible of all his enemies. He
+made his way to it after insuperable obstacles, and it was only by the
+alliance of the warlike Tlaxcalans, when he had finally won them over to
+his cause, that he effected the conquest of Mexico.
+
+The recollection had involuntarily given me rather dark and depressing
+ideas of Tlaxcala, as a place of gloomy forests and gorges suited for
+martial resistance. Who that has not seen it, I wonder, has the proper
+conception of Tlaxcala?
+
+
+IV.
+
+It is not gloomy; there are no forests; the country is open and rolling;
+and the name “Tlaxcala,” it now appears, is fertility, the “Land of
+Bread.” I left at 11 A.M., and arrived at the village of Santa Ana, on
+the railroad to Apizaco, in a couple of hours. After a time a conveyance
+was to be had, in the shape of a dilapidated hack drawn by three horses,
+in the lead, and two mules. This was run as a stage-line to Tlaxcala; and
+in an hour more, largely of floundering over ruts and following the beds
+of swollen brooks—for nobody ever thinks of mending a road in Mexico—we
+were there. We met, on the way, the carriage of the state Governor, an
+ancient coupé, improved by the addition of a boot, and drawn by two
+horses and two mules. I was deposited on the sidewalk at the upper side
+of a plaza, and scrutinized keenly when there by the shop-keepers of the
+surrounding arcades and loungers on comfortable stone benches.
+
+Tlaxcalan allies, in the shape of a small boy and a larger assistant,
+seized upon my satchel, and we set out for a personal inspection of such
+houses of entertainment as were to be heard of. The Posada of Genius
+was altogether too wretched and shabby, as is apt to be the way with
+genius. The Meson of the—I have forgotten its name—was too full to offer
+accommodation, and had a morose landlord, who seemed to rejoice in the
+fact. I came at last to a house where simply chambers were to be let. It
+was highly commended by my smaller Tlaxcalan ally, a very rapid-talking
+small boy, with the air of one much in the habit of dodging missiles.
+
+“It will be two reals” (twenty-five cents) “the night, as you see it,”
+said the proprietor, waving a hand in an interior bare of furniture.
+
+“Ah! two reals the night!”
+
+“But perhaps the gentleman would desire also a bed, a wash-stand, and a
+looking-glass?”
+
+“Yes, let us say a bed, wash-stand, and looking-glass.”
+
+“Then it will be four reals the night.”
+
+The larger Tlaxcalan ally, who had had nothing to do, established a claim
+for services by offering praise of each successive article of furniture
+as it was brought in, as, “_Muy buena cama, señor!_” “_Muy bonito
+espejo!_”—“A very fine bed, señor!” “A very charming mirror, señor!”—and
+the like.
+
+
+V.
+
+Now, all this is all exactly as it happened, and one should hardly be
+compelled to spoil a good story by adding to it. Yet this appearance of
+amusing stupidity is dissipated, after all, by remembering the methods of
+travel in the country. Many, or most, journeys are made on horseback, and
+the guest is likely to want only a room where he can lock up his saddle
+and saddle-bags and sleep on his own blankets, or, if luxurious, on a
+light cot, carried with other baggage on a pack-mule. This is all the
+accommodation provided at the general run of the mesones.
+
+At the Fonda y Cafe de la Sociedad I supped, by the light of two
+candles, with a gentleman in long riding-boots, who had a paper-mill
+in the neighborhood. He told me that he had learned the business at
+Philadelphia. He was of a friendly disposition, and declared that I was
+to consider him henceforth my correspondent, so far as I might have need
+of one, on all matters, commercial and otherwise, at Tlaxcala. And to
+that extent I may say I do so consider him to this day.
+
+My room had, first, a pair of glass doors, then a pair of heavy wooden
+ones, and opened on a damp little court, in which the rain was falling.
+There were no windows nor transom, positively no other opening than a
+couple of diminutive holes in the wooden door, like
+
+    “The fiery eyes of Pauguk glaring at him through the darkness,”
+
+as one awoke to them in the early morning. Another streak under the door
+figured as a sort of mouth. There was a clashing of swords in a corner
+of the shady and handsome Zocalo when I went out, and I fancied at first
+a duel, but it was only a couple of _Rurales_ going through their sabre
+exercise under direction of an officer. The morning was bright and
+beautiful. Hucksters were putting up their stands in the arcades for the
+day’s business. A new market elsewhere, consisting of a series of light,
+open pavilions, was one of the best in arrangement I have ever seen.
+
+Tlaxcala recalls some such provincial Italian place as Este, seat of the
+famous historic house of that name. It has once been more important than
+now. The persons of principal consideration are the state employés. It is
+the capital of the smallest of the states, the Rhode Island or Delaware
+of the Mexican federation. I entered the quarters of the Legislature, and
+found there the Governor, a small, fat, Indian-looking man, scarred with
+a deep cut on his cheek, conferring with a committee of his law-makers.
+There are eight of these in all, and they receive an annual stipend
+of $1000 each. In the legislative hall a space is railed off for the
+president and two secretaries. There is a little tribune at this rail,
+from which the speeches are made. The members face each other, in two
+rows, and comfortably smoke during their sessions, after the custom of
+the Congress at Mexico also. The rest is reserved for spectators. On the
+walls are four quaint old portraits of the earliest chiefs converted to
+Christianity, all with “Don” before their names.
+
+[Illustration: OLD FONT AT TLAXCALA.]
+
+The secretary of the Ayuntamienta has in a glass case in his office some
+few idols, the early charter of the city and regulations of the province,
+and the tattered silken banner carried by Cortez in the conquest. This
+last, once a rich crimson, is faded to a shabby coffee-color, and the
+silver has vanished from its spear-head, showing copper beneath. Tossed
+into corners were two large heaps of old, vellum-bound books from the
+convents. This is a common enough sight in Mexico. Treasures are abundant
+here which our own connoisseurs would delight to treat with the greatest
+respect. Apart from this there is no other museum nor especial display
+of antiquity. The town, kept nicely whitewashed, looks rather new.
+It contains, however, the oldest church in Mexico. The chapel of San
+Francisco, part of a dismantled convent, now used as a barracks, bears
+the date of 1529, and within it are the first baptismal font (the same in
+which the Tlaxcalan chiefs above-mentioned were baptized by Cortez) and
+the first Christian pulpit in America. The ceiling is of panelled cedar,
+picked out with gilded suns and the like. The approach is up an inclined
+plane, shaded with ash-trees. Through three large arches of an entrance
+gate-way, flanked by a tower, the town below appears as through a series
+of frames. A massive church in the town plaza was cracked and unfitted
+for use by an earthquake in the year 1800, and its ruins stand untouched,
+with the bells still hanging in the steeple.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST CHRISTIAN PULPIT IN AMERICA. TLAXCALA.]
+
+To counterbalance this a modern church, very white, and a landmark to all
+the country round about, has been put up on the high hill of Ocatlan, a
+couple of miles back. I climbed there and looked down upon the prospect.
+Women and girls were going up to the sanctuary with bunches of roses, on
+some religions errand. There were wild pinks by the wayside, the air was
+full of the twittering of birds, and the chimes rang musically. Looked
+down upon from the height, Tlaxcala was seen to be a compact little
+place, flat-roofed, low, almost exactly square. The wide bed of the
+Zatuapan River, now very shallow, wound by it. The opposite hills, hung
+over by vapors and rain-clouds with changing lights among them, were now
+purplish and now indigo black.
+
+[Illustration: PART OF CONVENT OF SAN FRANCISCO. TLAXCALA.]
+
+
+VI.
+
+On the floor above me at my lodging resided, in a comfortable way, a
+doctor. He had with him a friend, French by nationality but long resident
+at Mexico, who was at present _paseando_ a little here for his health.
+This gentleman confided to me, mysteriously, that, since spending some
+time here, he had reason to believe that there were mines of silver and
+gold in the vicinity. In fact, he knew of some. “An Indian, some years
+ago,” he said, “brought to the padre of one of the churches two papers
+containing a fine dust. It was _poudre d’or_—gold-dust—nothing less. What
+do you think of that?”
+
+I thought highly of it—as I always do of treasure stories; nothing is
+more entertaining.
+
+“There are indications, in reading history,” he went on, “that much of
+the supply of the precious metals in the time of the Conquerors was taken
+from here. You are aware that most of the valuable mines were abandoned
+by the Spaniards in the terrors of the War of Independence, and have
+never since been worked. Often their very location has been forgotten.
+I have a friend here who has certain knowledge of a place where _poudre
+d’or_ can be found.”
+
+He paused, perhaps to allow an offer to be made for an interest in the
+attractive enterprise, but none was made.
+
+He continued, alluringly: “It is my intention to enter into thorough
+explorations, now that I have leisure, as soon as my health is slightly
+more restored.”
+
+I took the seat beside the driver on the ancient conveyance, going
+back to Santa Ana. We went along sandy lanes, in which the rain of the
+night before was almost dry, and between hedges of maguey. Maize on the
+right—tall but slender, and without the large ears we are accustomed to;
+barley and wheat on the left. All the country fertile. Malinche boldly in
+sight, and a sky of rolling clouds, as in Holland. Shock-headed Indian
+children, with a Chinese look, holding babies, and peering at us out of
+rifts in palisades of organ-cactus. Bright skeins of wool in door-yards,
+and glimpses of peasants weaving serapes in interiors. I recollect that
+morning as one of a few of unalloyed content. Perhaps it was because,
+in being at Tlaxcala, I had gratified a curiosity of an exceptional
+eagerness.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+_MINES AND MINING TRAITS, AT PACHUCA AND REGLA._
+
+
+I.
+
+We bought tickets for Pachuca at the Hotel Gillow, in Mexico. Pachuca,
+one of the earliest, and richest, of the mining districts in the country,
+notable for both its earlier and later history, is, fortunately, also one
+of the most accessible to the traveller from the capital.
+
+We took the train, from Buena Vista Station, at six in the morning. At
+Omeltusco, forty miles down the Vera Cruz Line, a group of diligences
+stood in waiting. Our own proved to be drawn by eight mules—two wheelers,
+four in the centre, and two leaders. We jolted along execrable roads,
+turned out where the mud-holes threatened to engulf us, and rode instead
+over high maguey stumps which threatened to hurl us back into them.
+The country was covered with magueys. The driver, by whom I sat, on
+the box-seat, for the better view of what was passing, asked me, in a
+patronizing way,
+
+“Have the Norte Americanos also _pulque_? and do they _se borrachau_ (get
+drunk) with it, like people here?”
+
+We reached San Agostin, a shabby adobe hamlet, at eleven o’clock, waited
+there a while for the Philadelphia-built horse-car on the tramway, of
+which I have before spoken, and were at Pachuca about sundown. As to
+scenery, historically, and from the point of view of its returns, Pachuca
+is rivalled among raining districts perhaps only by Guanajuato; but the
+place itself is shabby, and, lying nine thousand feet above the sea, its
+atmosphere is raw and penetrating even in July. Regularly every afternoon
+blow up a breeze and a dust like those which have attained celebrity at
+San Francisco.
+
+There were said to be ten thousand miners at work in the district.
+Perhaps five hundred are British subjects, originally from the tin mines
+of Cornwall. They manifest in their new surroundings a rude independence
+of character amounting to surliness. I heard here of my French engineer
+who had been sent over to examine mining property. He had eccentrically
+given his left hand, after a way some Frenchmen have, to the captain of
+one of the mines, on his descent, and the colony talked of nothing but
+this. They had banded together to guy and mislead him in his inquiries as
+much as possible, and one of them told me, with a bitterness the trivial
+circumstance hardly seemed to warrant, that if he came again, with his
+supercilious way of treating people, they would try to tumble him into
+some pit. Our poor friend, I fear, went away, if he believed what was
+told him, with some very singular items of information.
+
+
+II.
+
+Pachuca has become a good-sized city within a comparatively modern
+period, while Real del Monte, adjoining, once more important, still
+remains a village. The English element is not new in either. There was
+probably more of it toward 1827 than even now. On the close of the War of
+Independence an impression went abroad of most brilliant profits awaiting
+whoever would furnish capital to reopen and work the old Spanish mines
+abandoned and ruined in the disasters of the long struggle.
+
+The idea was seized upon with especial avidity in England. It was
+represented that but two simple things were needed: the pumping-out of
+the water which had accumulated in the disused shafts, and improved
+machinery for working at lower levels, than those which had been within
+the reach of the primitive appliances of the country. Seven great English
+companies were formed, which proceeded to pour out millions upon millions
+of pounds, distributing the money among the several mining districts of
+chief repute; and these half depopulated Cornwall for laborers for the
+new interests. The idea was in itself a good one. Mexico had produced in
+three hundred years of mining, according to the estimate of Humboldt,
+$1,767,952,000 of value in the precious metals. The yield had been going
+on before the Revolution at the rate of $30,000,000 yearly. It was an
+industry of the greatest regularity. From 3000 to 5000 mines were in
+operation, and constituted its chief wealth. Its towns were mining towns;
+its great families mining families. The funds from this source had built
+the churches, the dams for irrigation by which the great agricultural
+estates were brought under cultivation, and had supplied the gifts and
+loans to the King by which the nobility secured their titles. By the
+Revolution this source of wealth was exhausted and dried up. The new
+Congress of the country felt the imperative need of doing something to
+reopen it, and encouraged the advent of foreign capital by a legislation
+which is still felt as a liberalizing influence in mining matters.
+
+The idea was a good one, as I say, but the foreign investors did not
+sufficiently estimate the difficulties of their undertaking, the novelty
+of the country, language, persons, and processes, and the physical
+obstacles with which they had to deal. Almost without exception they lost
+money. The “boom” of 1824 was followed by a panic in 1826, a general
+depression at home, and, in course of time, the transfer of the interests
+to cheaper hands.
+
+Among the English companies mentioned was the Real del Monte Company,
+which bought up, among others, all the mines of the Count of Regla,
+at Real del Monte and Pachuca. These had produced in fifty years
+$26,500,000. The history of the growth of the Count’s magnificence
+is briefly this. His principal vein, the Biscaina, had been worked
+continuously from the middle of the sixteenth century. Its yield in 1726
+was nearly $4,500,000. In the beginning of the eighteenth century it
+was abandoned in consequence of the impossibility of drainage with the
+defective appliances of that day. A shrewd individual took up these mines
+anew in later years, and associated with him Don Pedro Tereros, a small
+capitalist, who became his heir. In 1762 Tereros struck a bonanza, and
+in twelve years took out $6,000,000. He procured the title of Count of
+Regla by his munificent gifts to Charles III., and, investing his money
+judiciously, entered upon the career of splendor to which reference has
+heretofore been made.
+
+By 1801, however, he found himself at such a depth with his levels that
+the yield was insufficient to pay the expenses of extraction, and the
+mines were again disused. It was in this condition that the English
+company took them, knowing full well that there was treasure in the
+deeper levels, and proposing to bring it out with its improved machinery
+and Cornish labor.
+
+The director took a salary of $40,000 a year, built himself a castellated
+palace, and rode out with a body-guard of fifty horsemen. A magnificent
+road was built to Regla, six leagues away. The only access thither, for
+the six hundred mules of the Count of Regla, had been by a dangerous
+bridle-path. Five large steam-engines and lesser machinery were dragged
+up from the coast at Vera Cruz, occupying the labor of a hundred men and
+seven hundred mules for five months.
+
+In all this probably a million pounds was consumed. Treasure was not
+found as expected—what there was appearing instead in new mines. After
+struggling hopelessly a while the management passed into other hands.
+The parade was dispensed with, and the costly machinery sold out, to a
+Mexican company, for about its value as old iron, and then the property
+began to pay.
+
+An English “Anglo-Mexican Company” also owned mines at Pachuca, and in
+like manner came to grief. There was an element of luck in all this, too,
+it must be admitted. Less than a hundred feet from where work was stopped
+in the Rosario, for instance, one of the mines of the latter, the new
+company struck a bonanza, which has been paying munificently ever since.
+
+The present director, Señor Llandero y Cos, a brother of the Secretary of
+State, lives in the same castellated palace, but on a simpler scale. I
+had reason to know that even he had had not a little to suffer from the
+fierce independence of his surrounding Cornishmen. I descended into two
+of the richest mines, Santa Gertrudis and San Rosario. Of these Santa
+Gertrudis has paid in a brief space thirty-nine dividends of $20,000 each.
+
+
+III.
+
+The interior, even of the richest Mexican silver-mine, is hardly what
+the novice might expect. You put a candle, pasted by a lump of mud, on
+the top of your hat and crawl through all sorts of dark and dripping
+holes. Now and then a guide flashes his light on some black and grayish
+discolorations with a look of professional pride, but you do not exactly
+fall down in ecstasy over these. There are no forks and spoons hanging
+ready to your hand, no presentation plate, nor even ingots. The heaps of
+ore about the shafts do not glitter, and seem good for little but to mend
+the roads. The principal shafts are about sixteen feet in diameter, the
+galleries five by eight, and spaced about eighty feet apart. At the San
+Pedro mine the pumping-engine was of one hundred and fifty horse-power,
+and another of the same power drew up the malacate, or skip, full of ore
+in bags of maguey fibre. In some of the old mines, at Guanajuato and San
+Luis Potosi, they tell us, peons still tote the ore up the interminable
+ladders on their backs; but this, I think, must be rare. The depth of
+the Santa Gertrudis is about six hundred feet. The material is marl,
+limestone, and quartz, all of a soft character and easy to work, but
+requiring a heavy timbering-up. The clothing of the laborers is ransacked
+for nuggets by three separate searchers in turn, as they emerge from
+their work.
+
+There is a Government School of Practical Mining at Pachuca, to which
+students are sent after finishing the theoretical course at the Mineria,
+or school of technology, in Mexico. The director, an affable man, showed
+us the process of beneficiating, or extracting the metal from the rough
+ore, in miniature. You see the rock first crushed and reduced, with
+water, to a paste, then mingled with sulphate of copper, common salt, and
+quicksilver, which get hold of the metal. The quicksilver is afterward
+withdrawn and reserved for continued use. He gave me, also, a pamphlet of
+his on a new form of application of “La Accion Mechanica del Viento”—the
+mechanical action of the wind. A large wind-mill was moving in the
+court-yard made in accordance with his principle, which substituted
+large zinc cones for the ordinary sails and slats.
+
+The extracting processes were more entertainingly seen, however, at the
+beneficiating haciendas themselves. The “Loreto” is one of the principal.
+The ore is crushed either by the Cornish stamp, which drops a succession
+of iron-shod beams upon it; the Chilean mill, which grinds it by means
+of superposed revolving stones; or the _arrastra_. The last is the most
+primitive, cheapest, and still most in use. The crushing is done by
+common stones, hung to the arms of a horizontal cross, dragged round and
+round in a circular bed by mule-power.
+
+Then follows the making of _tortas_, “the patio system,” which had
+its origin here in 1557. Numerous large mud-pies of the powdered ore
+and water are laid out on a vast open court floored with wood. The
+chemicals mentioned are thrown in in successive stages, and troops of
+broken-down horses are driven around in the mass for from two to three
+weeks in succession, thoroughly mingling it together. It is then brought
+in wheel-barrow loads to washing-tanks, where men and boys puddle it
+bare-legged till the metal falls to the bottom and the detritus runs
+away. “Rebellious” ores are treated by first calcining, then separating
+with mercury by “the barrel process.” This last is done chiefly at the
+hacienda of Velasco, on the way to Regla.
+
+Of the two hundred and sixty-seven mines in the district, seven are
+worked by the Real del Monte Company. The paying mines are comparatively
+new, discovered within the last twenty or thirty years. The old Spanish
+mines do not pay, and are, in fact, little worked. The stories of old
+Spanish mines, abandoned, perforce, at the date of the Independence,
+and ready to yield splendid returns to whoever will reopen them, serves
+very well as romance; but it must be remembered that sixty years
+have elapsed since the Independence, and there have been plenty of
+prospectors with a shrewd eye for gain in the country in the mean time.
+The Mexicans themselves are good miners. It will not do to look on with
+amused contempt even where very primitive processes are largely retained,
+for these are often better adapted to the peculiar conditions than any
+others. Thus the puddling of the _tortas_ by mules and human legs, with
+labor at but thirty cents a day, is deliberately preferred to machinery.
+
+Whoever might care to make purchases in such a place would do well to buy
+among the newly discovered mines. Or one may yet prospect for himself,
+for the district appears by no means exhausted. Robbers in the state
+of Hidalgo long served as an impediment to freedom of prospecting in
+out-of-the-way places, and it is only of late that their power has been
+broken. The last Governor is said to have shot three hundred of them.
+Wild-cat properties and pitfalls of the usual sort await the unwary here.
+That perversity which, by some natural law, seems to take hold upon
+dealers in mines as well as in horses possesses them in Mexico not less
+than elsewhere.
+
+The Mexican mine is divided into twenty-four imaginary equal parts,
+_barras_, and fractional parts of these are bought and sold as its stock.
+
+
+IV.
+
+As to the mining laws of the country, I have heard them described by
+some Americans as better than our own. In certain respects this is true.
+The reprehensible looseness with which our American “district recorders”
+receive conflicting claims covering the same property many times over
+is unknown. An official goes to the field and settles the equity of
+the case at once, and never records but one title. Litigation about the
+original title of a Mexican mine is almost unknown, while that of an
+American mine of any value is invariably in litigation.
+
+On the other hand, there are some drawbacks. While a foreigner may hold
+property in mines in Mexico without being subject to the obligation
+of residence, as in respect to other real estate, provided he have a
+resident partner, nobody in Mexico, foreigner or otherwise, can acquire
+a mine outright and in absolute ownership. He cannot own it in fee, no
+matter what sum he pays for it. The legal theory is that the title to
+a mine is only that of “conditional possession,” and in the nature of
+usufruct, which is “the right of using and enjoying a thing of which the
+owner is another.” On violation of the conditions the title reverts to
+the sovereignty—formerly the King of Spain, now the Republic of Mexico.
+The body of the Ordinances as at present followed was promulgated by the
+King of Spain in the year 1783. To allow a mine to stand idle is assumed
+to be an injury to those who might otherwise work and extract profit from
+it. It is enacted, therefore, as follows:
+
+“I (the King) order and command that any one who shall for four
+consecutive months fail to work a mine, with four operatives, regularly
+employed, and occupied in some interior or exterior work of real utility
+and advantage, shall thereby forfeit the right which he may have to the
+mine, and it shall belong to the denouncer who proves its desertion.”
+
+The method of acquiring title to a new and original mine is to go before
+the proper officer in the district in which it has been discovered and
+register a claim. Ninety days is then allowed to any other persons
+who may advance pretensions to it also, to appear, after which it is
+confirmed to him whose case is best established. Abandoned and forfeited
+properties are “denounced” by a similar formality. Veins or mines may be
+denounced not only on common lands, but those of any private individual,
+on paying for the surface occupied. In order, however, to obviate
+malicious or idle destruction, the searcher may be made to give security,
+before beginning his trial, for any damage he may occasion to the owner
+of the ground. Sites and waters for reducing works are included in the
+same permission.
+
+The denouncer must take possession and begin the prescribed work within
+sixty days. The discoverer may have three _pertenencias_, or claims,
+continuous or interrupted, on any principal vein which is absolutely
+new. The _pertenencia_ consists of two hundred metres along the line
+of the vein and one hundred on each side (or as the miner may desire),
+as measured on a level. A person, not the discoverer, can denounce two
+contiguous mines, on the same vein, but one may acquire as many others as
+he likes by purchase.
+
+The ancient code created a General Tribunal of Mining for New Spain, and
+gave it cognizance of all mining matters. It was composed of a President,
+Director-general, and three Deputies-general, elected by the _Reales_,
+or mining districts, and two Deputies besides, elected by each _Real_.
+The _Real_ had to be a place containing a church, six mines, and four
+reducing establishments, in actual operation. The qualifications for
+holding office were, that one should have been engaged in practical
+mining for ten years, that he should be an American, or European
+Spaniard, free from all inferior blood, and that he should agree to
+“defend the mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady.”
+
+It would seem that offices were not always in as active demand as in our
+days, for heavy fines are enacted for non-acceptance on election, besides
+being compelled to serve afterward. An honest and straightforward purpose
+appears in the rules of procedure quite worthy of imitation elsewhere.
+Let us cite some examples.
+
+“As said classes of causes and suits,” says the King, “ought to be
+determined between the parties briefly and summarily, according to
+manifest truth and good faith, as in commercial transactions, without
+allowing delays, declarations, or writings of lawyers, it is my will that
+whenever any persons appear in said Royal Tribunals ... to institute any
+action, they (the tribunals) shall not admit any complaint or petition
+in writing until after they have cited the parties before them, if it be
+possible, so that, hearing orally their complaints and answers, they may
+settle with the greatest despatch the suits or dispute between them; and
+not being able to succeed in this, and the matter in question exceeding
+the value of two hundred dollars, petitions in writing will be admitted,
+provided they be not drawn up, arranged, or signed by lawyers.... In
+the judgments which may be pronounced no consideration shall be paid
+to any default in observing the minute formalities of the law, or to
+inaccuracies or other defects; but, in whatever stage of the proceedings
+the truth may be ascertained, the causes shall be decided and adjudged.”
+
+The legal fraternity had secured a repute for sometimes misleading
+justice, it is seen, even so far back as this. There appears to have been
+a _Consulado_, or Tribunal of Commerce, upon pretty much the same plan.
+This ancient system has been swept away by various stages. Since the day
+of the republic the power once vested in the old tribunal has been lodged
+with the ordinary civil courts and political authorities.
+
+It is doubtful whether mining has ever been pursued to better advantage,
+made more productive and regular, and more effectively freed from
+the element of wild-cat speculation, than in New Spain of the period
+considered.
+
+There were decrees to prevent miners, especially those of affluence, from
+wasting their substance. Negligence in tunnelling, imperfect ventilation,
+and the like, by which life and health are endangered, were severely
+punished.
+
+Criminals and vagabonds were made to labor in the mines, but the main
+bulk of laborers in early times consisted of the Indians, apportioned to
+proprietors as _repartamientos_, and held in a kind of slavery.
+
+
+V.
+
+The gorgeous Count of Regla was a great mine-owner here in his day. It
+was hence that he would have taken the ingots for the King of Spain to
+ride upon from the coast to the capital, should they have been called for
+by an actual acceptance of his splendid invitation before mentioned.
+
+His ancient beneficiating hacienda of Regla, say eighteen miles from
+Pachuca, is of great interest. A most excellent wagon-road, constructed
+by the Real del Monte Company, at large expense, leads to it. As many as
+eighty heavily loaded ore-wagons, each drawn by from eight to a dozen
+mules, traverse it in a single day.
+
+Señor Llandero y Cos kindly provided us, for this and the remaining part
+of our expedition, with horses and a mozo, to be kept at our convenience.
+White posts of substantial masonry dotted the abrupt slopes, by way of
+locating the various claims. Some lonesome-looking wooden structures, not
+unlike Swiss chalets, generally marked the shafts of the smaller mines as
+we went onward, while a small _arrastra_ or two was turned by mule-power
+in the neighborhood. One, called the Fortune, if what was said were true,
+should rather have been the Misfortune or the Ill-fortune, for it had
+never produced a tlaco of profit.
+
+Convolvuli and fragrant _flor de San Juan_ touched with a trace of beauty
+the sterile hills. Real del Monte, embowered in rich woods, presented a
+scene like a fine landscape in Pennsylvania. We stopped first at the old
+_Presidio_, above the Tereros Mine, where the convicts drafted for mining
+labor were formerly kept; then dismounted and went down a ravine, to see
+the mouth of a tunnel, seven thousand yards in length, built to drain the
+works of the original Real del Monte Company.
+
+Hamlets were set near together along the road, and the country continued
+bold and generously wooded. At the abandoned Moran Mine, one of the
+Count of Regla’s principal treasure-stores in its time, we found
+picturesque remains of walls and columns, with a round tower, which had
+once contained a hoisting drum. It was obliged to be abandoned, like the
+Sanchez, in the vicinity, for lack of water. Near the Sanchez is the
+mouth of the general drainage tunnel constructed by the Count. Esteemed
+very important in its day, it has been wholly eclipsed by works on a
+larger scale prevailing in the mean time. Velasco, where “rebellious”
+ores are treated, is presided over by an English superintendent. He
+had in use a crushing-machine of still a different pattern from those
+described. Heavy iron rockers, driven by steam-power, were worked back
+and forth upon the ore in a bath of water. It was claimed that one-fourth
+more work could be done with this at an equal expenditure of power than
+by the Chilean mill. Attached to the establishment in the usual way were
+a charming villa and gardens. The superintendent at Pachuca sometimes
+came there to pass a fortnight’s vacation.
+
+The immediate approach to Regla is along the side of a deep tropical
+barranca. Bananas grow generously within it, and a palm-thatched Indian
+village crowns its opposite verge. The hacienda itself is set down in a
+most impressive natural formation. It is encompassed by grand columniated
+cliffs of basalt, like those of the Giant’s Causeway. The columns are
+hexagonal in shape, with an average diameter approaching three feet. At
+places whole areas of them have been distorted and twisted hither and
+thither in the cooling, with a most wild and singular effect.
+
+A cascade like a little Niagara tumbles roaring down among them, and
+furnishes the strong water-power for the works. The hacienda belongs
+to the Real del Monte Company, and it is chiefly ores of that company
+which are brought to this strangely attractive scene to be treated.
+Troops of horses were going round in the usual way in a great walled
+patio, making the tortas. Connected with this were smelting-furnaces and
+kindred buildings of many sorts. Madame Calderon de la Barca, who also
+visited Regla, found it such a place as might have been conjured up by
+magic, by some giant enchanter, for his own purposes. Mediæval-looking
+towers, gateways, terraces, a chapel, and prison garnish it. Opposite the
+chapel is a pretty residence, Moorish in aspect, surrounded by vines and
+flowers. The whole is said to have cost some two millions of dollars.
+
+We spent a night here with the superintendent, Don Ramon Torres, a
+youngish man, who had learned his avocation in the mines at Guanajuato.
+He seemed but too delighted, in his comparative isolation, to entertain
+company and honor the introduction of his chief, Señor Llandero. He
+dwelt in his talk upon the lack of ambition among the Indian laborers.
+He said, among other things, that in the Tierra Caliente the women were
+better workers than the men.
+
+[Illustration: SUPERINTENDENT’S HOUSE AT REGLA.]
+
+Our next stage from here was to be the hacienda of Tepenacasco, near
+Tulancingo, where Mr. Brocklehurst and myself had been invited to visit,
+in order to witness the manner of life on one of the great country
+estates. Regla is rather famous for thunder-storms, and on the day of
+our departure we had one of the traditional sort. Within a few minutes
+after its commencement the cascade was blood-red with soil torn out by
+the swollen stream. The storm abated at first, but we encountered it in
+renewed fury on wide green uplands like an Illinois prairie, known as
+the Plains of Mata. As we galloped in the midst of it, the rain pouring
+in torrents from our rubber blankets, the lightnings (_rayos_) darted
+into the ground, now on this side, now on that, in a way which I can
+only compare—perhaps too trivially—to spearing for olives in a jar with
+a fork. The _rayos_ are dangerous in this region, as naturally on open
+plains everywhere, and crosses mark places where herdsmen have been
+stricken down among their flocks. One of these victims had been found
+recently, with his animals gathered around in a circle at close quarters
+staring at him curiously, while he lay stark on his face.
+
+The rain had its lulls and relapses, and twice in succession we took
+shelter under the sheds of isolated _ranchitos_ which we fell in with.
+We were joined here by an occasional ploughman, wearing the long cloak
+of coarse woven grass, which diverts the water from the wearer. We were
+joined, too, by all the domestic animals of the neighborhood. The wait at
+the last retreat seemed as if it would never end. At last a pig ventured
+forth, and we said, idly, that if he should return we would accept it as
+an augury that the deluge was over and the waters had ceased upon the
+face of the earth. Sure enough, he came back presently, munching a green
+carrot-top; and, receiving this like the olive-branch brought to Noah, we
+sallied forth. Our confidence proved well justified. A lovely prismatic
+bow of promise was presently set in the sky, the clouds rolled away,
+scattering their last lingering drops, the rills babbled merrily, and
+the face of the country sparkled with an enchanting freshness. We paused
+again briefly at a hacienda which belonged to the Governor of the state.
+The main building was large, plain, and yellow-washed, and had before it
+an enclosed threshing-floor, on which grain is tramped out by the feet of
+horses. A young American girl had been employed as governess here up to a
+recent date.
+
+[Illustration: PLOUGHMAN IN GRASS CLOAK.]
+
+It was now toward evening. The sunset glowed warm upon the little hamlet
+of Acatlan, through which our road was seen winding below. In its midst
+lay a dismantled convent, with belfries still standing, which from
+a distance resembled an English ruined abbey. It was found on being
+reached, however, unlike the latter, to be built of bricks and adobe. I
+had at first taken this for our hacienda itself, but the hacienda proved
+equally attractive in a different way. After a couple of miles farther on
+we sent back our horses and guide with a warm missive of thanks to their
+owner, and were hospitably installed at Tepenacasco.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+_A WEEK AT A MEXICAN COUNTRY-HOUSE._
+
+
+I.
+
+With a taste for country life, so novel a domain to explore, and
+constantly agreeable weather, I found a week’s stay at the hacienda one
+of the most agreeable of experiences. From a distance the extensive
+habitation has a stately air, like some ducal residence. In approaching
+it you pass first through fields of maguey and blossoming alfalfa,
+then by a long stone corral for cattle, extensive barracks and huts
+of laborers, and a pond bordered with weeping willows. It is built of
+rubble-masonry and plaster, whitewashed, and consists of a single liberal
+story. The dwelling, with numerous connected buildings, makes in all a
+façade of about six hundred feet. A belfry, with two tiers of bronze
+bells hung in arches, sets off the centre. The large windows are defended
+by cage-like iron gratings. A door, flanked by holy-water fonts, at the
+left of that forming the main entrance, opens into a family chapel. In
+a gable above the main entrance is inscribed this motto—which has not,
+however, prevented the hacienda from being the scene of more than one
+sack by revolutionary forces:
+
+“_En aqueste destierro y soledad disfruto del tesoro de la paz_”—“In this
+retirement and solitude I enjoy the treasure of peace.”
+
+[Illustration: THE HACIENDA OF TEPENACASCO.]
+
+Immediately in front of the buildings is laid out, after a usual custom,
+a substantially paved and enclosed area, semi-circular at one end,
+used as a threshing-floor. Troops of running horses are driven around
+here upon the grain, like those in the _patio_ process, only in a very
+much livelier fashion. The long façade was made up in part of massive
+_trojes_, or granaries, comprised under the same roof as the house.
+Each _troje_ has a special name of its own inscribed upon it. There
+were, for instance, the “_Troje de la Espigero_” (“Corn in the Ear”),
+the “_Troje de la Teja_” (“Tiled Roof”); and the “_Troje de Limbo_”
+and “_Troje de Nuestro Señor del Pilar_.” The walls of these granaries
+were of great thickness, in order to preserve the contents cool and
+at an even temperature. Heavily buttressed, and with their long lines
+of piers, a yard square, extending down the dim interiors, they are
+more like basilicas of the early Christian era than simple barns. The
+central cluster of buildings alone, not counting those detached, covers
+perhaps from four to five acres. Mounting to the roof and looking over
+its expanse, broken by the openings of numerous courts, you seem to be
+contemplating, as it were, some agricultural Louvre or Escorial. Its
+rear wall is washed by a _presa_, or artificial pond for irrigation,
+which stretches away like a lake. Beyond this rises a charming grassy
+hill, called the Cerro. We climbed the Cerro, and lounged away more than
+one afternoon there in sketching, and contemplating the beautiful level
+valley of Tulancingo, spread out below.
+
+The white hacienda with red roofs lay in front, reflected clearly in
+its pond. Tulancingo was a white patch at a distance, and other white
+patches nearer by were the hamlets of Jaltepec, Amatlan, and Zupitlan—the
+latter in ruins. Straight, lane-like roads led from one to another.
+The mountains on the horizon afforded glimpses of basaltic cliffs
+of the same formation as those at Regla, and of the white smoke of
+charcoal-burners rising from their forests. Cattle wandered in fine herds
+in the grassy pasture, each tended by its herdsman and dog. We saw a
+troop of them at twilight come to drink at the pond, and the complication
+of all their moving forms was curiously picked out in silhouette against
+the gleaming brightness of the water.
+
+At evening there returned to the court-yard of the hacienda, to disband
+after their day’s labor, sometimes as many as forty ploughmen. If it had
+rained they wore their barbaric-looking grass cloaks. They drove yokes of
+oxen and bulls harnessed to the primitive Egyptian plough, and carried
+long goads to prod their animals. After them rode in now and then an
+armed horseman, wrapped in his serape, who overlooked and guarded them
+at work. At the same time came troops and droves of the other animals
+needing to be housed: black swine from the grassy slopes of the Cerro;
+mules released from harness; young horses and mules not yet put to work;
+milch-cows, and young steers and heifers, each wending its way sedately
+to its own department.
+
+Most of the cattle, I observed, were hornless. This is brought about
+by a practice of paring the young horns when first sprouting. It would
+seem that this might be desirable among ourselves, both on the farm
+and especially in transporting cattle in the cars ordinarily in use.
+Milking-time came only once a day—in the morning—and not, as with us,
+twice. The hind-legs of the cows are lassoed together when being milked.
+The calves of tender age are also lassoed to the side of the mother, and
+it is a quaint and amusing sight to see their impatient demonstrations
+while awaiting the conclusion of the process.
+
+[Illustration: THE THRESHING-FLOOR.]
+
+I sat down one day with “Don Rafael,” the administrador, or salaried
+manager, of the estate, to make a rough map of its general distribution
+and extent. The property proved to be some eighteen miles in length by
+twelve in its greatest width, and of very irregular pattern. It had no
+less than eleven large _presas_, formed by dams at convenient points for
+irrigation. The principal dam was a mile in length, and by means of it
+had been formed a lake of two miles in its principal dimension. On the
+borders of this stands the feudal-looking ruined hamlet, with church and
+hacienda, of Zupitlan, before mentioned. The bulk of the estate was in
+grass, but irregular patches of ground had been taken out here and there
+for various crops, and to each was given its special name. Thus the field
+of San Pablo was devoted to maize and alfalfa; Las Animas, San Antonio
+the Greater, and San Antonio the Less were given up to maize; Del Monte
+and San Ignacio el Grande to barley.
+
+The _magueyales_, or maguey fields, were of considerable extent. The
+making of the _pulque_ from their product was confided to a special
+functionary called the tlachiquero. The heart of the maguey is cut out
+at a certain stage of its growth and a bowl thus formed, into which a
+quantity of sweet sap continues to run regularly for several months. By
+the end of that time the plant is dead, and is uprooted and replaced by
+another. The sap is at first called _agua miel_, or honey-water, which
+it resembles. The tlachiquero makes a daily pilgrimage to the fields,
+and draws off the _agua miel_ by means of a bulky siphon formed of a
+gourd. Sometimes he bears simply a bag, made of undressed sheepskin,
+like the wine-skins of Old Spain, on his back; again, he is accompanied
+by a donkey loaded with a number of these skins. He transfers the sap to
+these bags, and returns with it to a department of his own, called the
+Tinecal. There he pours it into shallow vats of undressed skin, where it
+is allowed to ferment. Without describing the process farther in detail,
+in a fortnight it is ready for sale or for home consumption.
+
+[Illustration: THE TLACHIQUERO.]
+
+The pasture fields have their distinctive titles also. There were, for
+instance, San Gaetano, San Ysidro, and San Dionysio; and, again, the
+corrals of San Ricardo, San Gaetano, and Las Palmas, where cattle were
+enclosed at various times. Dairy-farming was the principal industry of
+the estate. Its neat cattle numbered seventeen hundred head. The pay-roll
+showed a total for the week of eight hundred and fifty men and boys.
+
+The living apartments of the dwelling were set along two sides of an
+arcaded court-yard, which had a dismantled fountain in the centre.
+Offices and store-rooms occupied the other two sides. A department
+for the butter and cheese making had a special court to itself in the
+rear. One of the store-rooms contained an ample supply of agricultural
+implements. Those of the slighter sort, I learned, such as ploughs,
+spades, picks, hammers, and the _coa_, a peculiar cutting-hoe, are made
+in the country, at Apulco, not far distant, where are also iron-works.
+An iron plough made at Apulco costs $7, while the imported American
+plough costs $10. There are wooden pitch-forks and spades among the
+implements. The wooden, or Egyptian, plough is much more in use than that
+of iron. It consists simply of a wooden beam shod with an iron point,
+and has an adjustable cross-piece for service in case the furrow needs
+to be made wider. The purpose to which it is most applied is that of
+turning shallow furrows between rows of corn, and for this it appears
+well enough adapted. At Pensacola, in the state of Puebla, such larger
+pieces of agricultural machinery as reapers, mowers, and separators are
+manufactured.
+
+
+II.
+
+We happened, among other accommodations, in our exploration of the
+corridors, upon a prison, described as for use in locking up the
+refractory peons when they will not work.
+
+“Can you do that? Have you, then, such an absolute power over them?” I
+asked our host, in some surprise.
+
+“Why, no,” he replied, in effect, deprecatingly, “I suppose not; but, you
+see, now and then it is the only way to manage them, and we have to. It
+is not civilizated, that people,” he continued, in an English which left
+something to be desired, “and we do the best what we can.”
+
+This seems something very like a feudal control on the part of the
+hacendado, but his numerous dependents do not seem to complain of it.
+Cases of protest before the magistrates are rarely known, and should they
+be made it is not likely, since the magistrates are friends of their
+masters, and of the same social station, that they would meet with any
+great attention.
+
+We found this laboring population living in squalid stone huts, often
+six and eight persons in a room. The floors were simply the dirt of the
+ground, and there was sometimes not even so much as the usual straw
+mat to sleep or sit upon. We were told here again that the peons are
+avaricious. They are believers in a general way, but not greatly given
+to religion. Few attend the services at the chapel, even on Sunday.
+They summon the priest when about to die, but not otherwise. But few of
+the children go to school. As a whole, they seemed about as wretched as
+the poor Irish, except for the advantage over the latter in climate. In
+every interior is seen a woman on her knees, rolling or spatting the
+interminable tortillas.
+
+The laborers on the pay-roll were of two classes: those employed by the
+week, and those employed by the year. The former “found themselves;” the
+latter were “found” by the estate, and paid a certain sum at the end of
+the year. Wages ran from six cents a day for the boys to thirty-seven for
+the best class of adults.
+
+
+III.
+
+The administrador was assisted, in the management of the hacienda, by
+the _mayor-domo_ and the _sobre-saliente_, who acted as his first and
+second lieutenants; a _caporal_, who had general charge of the stock;
+and a _pastero_, who had charge of the pastures. The _pastero_ it was
+who indicated the condition of the various areas of pasturage, that the
+animals might be moved to one after another of them in turn. These minor
+officers were of the native Indian race. They were dark, swarthy men,
+very bandit-looking when armed and mounted on horseback, but in reality,
+when you came to know them, as mild and amiable persons as need be wished
+for.
+
+One, “Don Daniel,” supervised the butter and cheese making interest. A
+book-keeper, “Don Angel,” kept an account of all the property of the
+estate—receipts, and disbursements, and an inventory of stock—upon a
+system which seemed a model of commercial accuracy. Every week a report
+was forwarded to the owners, at Mexico, upon a printed blank filled out
+in the most exhaustive detail, so that they could see at a glance how
+they stood.
+
+The administrador, Don Rafael, was a steady-going man of middle age, a
+native of San Luis Potosi. He had land and _casitas_, little houses, of
+his own, which he rented. He had also a house in the city of Tulancingo,
+near by, occupied by his family, whom he visited once a week. His salary
+reached about $1000 a year, and he could be called a person of substance.
+A conspicuous scar on his forehead led it to be supposed that he might
+have seen service in the field; but he spoke with contempt of the wars of
+his country when questioned about it, and said that he had got his scar
+in breaking a horse.
+
+“A sensible man can always find better occupation than fighting,” he
+said. “I have busied myself with regular industry. The North Americans,
+now, understand that. They have good ideas. There everybody works and
+gets a little ahead in the world. Without money in his pocket what is a
+man good for? He might as well take himself over to the cemetery yonder
+at once and have done with it.”
+
+Don Angel was young, mild, taciturn, painstaking, and a native of Old
+Spain. His handwriting was small and neat, and he had a great head for
+details. His salary was the sum of $400 a year. The revenues of the
+estate which it was his province to cast up amounted, I was told, to
+$20,000 a year.
+
+Don Daniel, the butter and cheese maker, was young also, but large,
+handsome, rosy, and had excellent teeth, with coal-black hair and beard.
+He was a model of robust health and lively spirits. He too had a wife at
+Tulancingo, whom he visited every Sunday, returning before daylight on
+Monday morning, to be in time for the milking. He was given to strumming
+on a guitar in the evening, and assembled around him in his room such
+convivial spirits as the hacienda afforded. Nonsensical refrains like
+
+    “Amarillo si, amarillo no,
+    Amarillo y verde, me ho pinto,”
+
+were heard proceeding from there long after more staid and decorous
+persons were in bed.
+
+Another member of the household was, let us say, “Manuel,” a boy of
+eighteen, looking younger, who had formerly been a cadet at the national
+military school. He was here learning the business of a hacienda, or, as
+some said, he was a young scapegrace whom it was designed to keep out of
+mischief. At any rate, he was an aide-de-camp to Don Rafael, and took his
+orders about on horseback. He dressed, like Don Rafael, in a substantial
+suit of buff leather. He was a very garrulous and communicative person,
+and, as our attendant and guide—in which capacity he offered himself,
+I think, somewhat as an excuse for escaping more onerous labors—he
+furnished us much useful information. His elders took a tone of raillery
+with him, representing him as a very callow youth, whose views were of no
+consequence, and who should be seen but not heard from. They ridiculed
+his French, which he had learned at the military school, even affecting
+not to believe that it was French at all. Our visit was the occasion for
+a strenuous effort on his part to set himself right on this point.
+
+“_N’ai-je pas bien dit?_” he cried to us, across the generous
+dining-table where we sat together, stretching at the same time a bony,
+school-boy arm for aid in putting the scoffers down.
+
+One day we mounted to go to a beautiful clear spring of water, which was
+admired even as early as by Humboldt in his travels. On others we visited
+the adjacent hamlets, or Tulancingo, from which, later, we were to take
+the diligence homeward. Again, we made our objective points the various
+crops, a dam undergoing repairs, or the remoter pastures and corrals.
+
+The herdsman and a boy-assistant at these corrals slept at night in
+their blankets under a mere pile of stones. The upper irrigating dams
+are discharged of their waters, when it is desired, by the primitive
+device of lifting up one cross-beam after another from a narrow gate in
+the centre. In some of the maize-fields are lookout boxes, aloft on high
+poles, as a device against crows and other marauders. The general surface
+over which we rode was the grassy plain, affording a delightful footing
+for the horses. It was of a fresh, soft green, and enamelled besides with
+flowers, like violets, the blue maravilla, and many varieties of a yellow
+flower resembling the dandelion, but prettier.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The room first entered from the main corridor in the house itself was
+devoted to the uses of a _despacho_, or office. Here was the department
+of Don Angel, and the master himself sometimes took his place behind the
+long, baize-covered table, strewn with matters of business detail, to
+hold audience with the peons of the estate, who came, with wide-brimmed
+hats humbly doffed, to make known various wants and complaints. In the
+corners stood rifles, spades, and the long branding-iron, which is heated
+in the month of August to brand the young cattle with the device of their
+owner.
+
+A fat dark peon enters, and proffers a request for an allowance to be
+made him for a baptism in his family.
+
+“A baptism?” says the master, briskly. “Well, now, come on! Speak up;
+don’t stand mumbling there! Let us see what your ideas are.”
+
+The man suggests, deferentially, to begin with, the sum of $3 for a
+_guajolote_, or turkey, as a _pièce de résistance_ for his feast.
+
+“You are always wanting a _guajolote_, you people. You don’t need
+anything of the kind. However, let us say $1.50—twelve reals—for the
+_guajolote_. What next?”
+
+“The _pulque_—about forty _cuartillas_ of _pulque_.”
+
+“Twenty _cuartillas_ of _pulque_,” says the master, ruthlessly cutting
+down the estimate by half. “Well, what next? Speak up!”
+
+The peasant, one of the laborers by the year, perseveres, in his humble,
+soft voice, regularly making his estimate for each article twice the
+real figure, and having it as regularly cut down. He caps the whole by
+demanding four reals for a sombrero, well knowing—and knowing perfectly
+well that his master knows also—that the kind of sombrero he would be
+likely to want costs but one real.
+
+We had proposed to witness the festivities of this christening, but
+unfortunately delayed too long at table on the evening of its occurrence,
+and lost it. But the sky was gloriously full of stars as we went out
+among the huts and barracks. A woman came out of one of the tenements
+and made a complaint of a neighbor with whom she had had a row, but got
+no great sympathy, and hardly seemed to expect any. They are admirably
+polite, these poor rustics—nobody can deny them that. As we sat by the
+road one day at Amatlan, sketching, some of the women called to us as
+they went by:
+
+“_Buenas dias, señores! Como han pasado, ustedes, la noche? Adios,
+señores!_”—“Good-day, sirs! How did you pass the night? Good-bye, sirs!”
+
+We had not in any way first addressed them, and they did not stop, but
+went swiftly onward, scarcely turning their heads to look. These and many
+more of the sort are but their ordinary salutations.
+
+The immediate family at the hacienda consisted of one of the several
+heirs, “Don Eduardo,” his wife, mother, and two small children, and their
+Indian nurses. They were in the habit of spending but a small portion
+of the year here, and, when they came, lived in quite informal style.
+Servants and employés, equally with her intimates, called the young
+mistress “Cholita,” a diminutive of her name Soledad. There was little
+or no receiving or paying of visits, owing to the great distances to be
+traversed and the scarcity of neighbors.
+
+
+V.
+
+Social life in the country is hardly known. We had piano music and
+singing in the evening in a stately, dimly-lighted _salon_ of the style
+of the First Empire. One day a large farm vehicle, gayly decorated with
+boughs, was brought around, all hands got into it, and we proceeded to
+the lake at Zupitlan for a picnic. The provisions were carried on a
+litter by a couple of men, and a guard on horseback, with his rifle,
+rode along-side for our protection. Such a precaution was not absolutely
+needed, perhaps, but there had been a time—before the Governor of Hidalgo
+had taken his summary measures—when the brigands would have swooped down
+from the adjacent hills and seized upon such a procession with little
+ceremony. After dining _al fresco_ we amused ourselves with shooting some
+of the ducks and cranes which abound on the lake.
+
+We had chocolate and buns on rising in the morning, and two over-liberal
+repasts, resembling each other in character, at noon and nine in the
+evening. The dogs swarmed in and out over the house, which presented the
+aspect of a generous farm rather than a villa.
+
+[Illustration: NURSE AND CHILDREN AT THE HACIENDA.]
+
+It was designed in its day for much greater state. The furniture, though
+battered and ruined now, was of the charming artistic pattern of the
+First Empire, and all the rooms were large and of fine proportions.
+In one of the two principal bedrooms the bed is raised upon a daïs,
+ascended by steps. In the other the corners are cut off by columns, so
+as to give it an octagon shape. In three of these corners the beds are
+regularly built in between the columns; the fourth is taken for a door.
+It so happened that I had not read Madame de la Barca before leaving
+home. Perhaps I had but a rather disparaging idea of a work descriptive
+of Mexico coming down no later than 1839. On taking it up after my return
+I had an opportunity to find how little the country had changed. She too
+visited this hacienda of Tepenacasco. She noted, among other items, a
+quaint wall-paper, of a Swiss pattern, on the octagon room. That very
+paper is there to this day.
+
+The proprietor was of quite a different sort in those times. He used
+to give bull-fights in the court before his portal, which is now a
+threshing-floor, and is said to have entertained half the population of
+Tulancingo at his table. He finally ruined himself by his extravagance.
+It is said, among other things, that if he took a sudden notion to go to
+Mexico, a hundred and twenty miles away, he rode his horses so hard that
+they sometimes dropped dead under him.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+_ON HORSEBACK AND MULEBACK TO ACAPULCO._
+
+
+I.
+
+The time came at length—all too soon—for my final Mexican journey—to
+the Pacific coast at Acapulco, where I was to take the steamer for San
+Francisco.
+
+I was advised not to go to Acapulco. There are always persons ready to
+advise you not to do perfectly feasible things. It was now August, and
+the rainy season had begun in town itself. It began one afternoon with
+a rush. I had been reading at the National Library, and, coming out at
+four o’clock, found the streets a couple of feet deep in water. The cabs,
+now at a premium, and some few men on horseback, who could give a friend
+a lift, served as impromptu gondolas upon these impromptu canals. There
+were also _cargadores_, who, for a medio, carried you on their backs
+from corner to corner. I was told that ladies in the balconies, watching
+the animated sight, now and then slyly held up a real, in consideration
+of which the _cargador_ dropped some gallant in the water, presenting a
+ridiculous sight. Such inundations last several hours before the sluggish
+sewers can carry off the surplus water, and they leave the ground-floor
+habitations of the poor in but a cheerless condition, as may be imagined.
+
+If this were to be added to the other embarrassments of life every
+afternoon, it was not interesting to think of remaining longer at the
+capital. And yet, with Macbeth, there seemed “nor flying hence, nor
+tarrying here.” The journey to Acapulco was represented as very difficult
+and dangerous. The route was a mere trail or foot-path, a _buen camino
+de pajaros_—a good road for birds. No wheeled vehicle ever had passed
+or ever could pass over it. All this was, indeed, the case. Three large
+rivers were to be crossed, and these unbridged.
+
+“Suppose,” said the advisers, putting the case in that bold and alarming
+way in which advisers delight, “that these should be swollen by the
+floods, as is naturally to be expected now in the rainy season. You would
+then be delayed so long on their banks as to miss your steamer, which
+touches at Acapulco only once a fortnight. Again, the road lies, for days
+at a time, in ravines and the beds of streams; but when the waters occupy
+their channels what room is there for travellers?”
+
+If to this were added the natural reflections of the novice on the score
+of danger to property and person in entering upon so wild a section, the
+prospect was not at all a pleasing one. Nevertheless it would be almost
+too much to expect that a person bound for California should come back to
+the United States again in order to go there, and I had a firm conviction
+that the Acapulco trip could be made.
+
+
+II.
+
+I had negotiated a little already with an _arriero_, or muleteer, named
+Vincente Lopez, in a street called Parque del Conde. He would furnish a
+horse to ride, and a mule to transport my baggage, each for $20—all other
+expenses to be defrayed personally along the way—which makes the three
+hundred miles come a good deal higher than so much railway travel. I had
+thus dallied with the idea, and my decision was precipitated by the
+sudden coming down of the rain. I hurried to Parque del Conde Street, and
+closed with Vincente Lopez. I was glad to learn from him that he had also
+another patron who was going, in the person of a colonel of the army.
+The journey, under the most favorable auspices, consumes ten days on
+horseback, besides the day occupied in going down by stage-coach to the
+provincial city of Cuernavaca, where the bridle-path begins. Considering
+all the circumstances as stated, there were many companions one would
+much less prefer to have than so presumably bold and well-informed a
+person as a Mexican regular officer.
+
+He proved to be a veritable military man, a colonel who had seen twenty
+years’ service in different wars of his country, and bore bullet-holes in
+his body as the result of them. He had begun in the War of the Reform,
+which overthrew the Church and aristocratic party; he had fought against
+the French and Maximilian in the second War of Independence; and, lastly,
+for the government of Lerdo against Porfirio Diaz. To the party of the
+latter he was, however, now reconciled, and he was going to take a
+command on the disturbed northern frontier. If more were needed, he had
+lately fought a duel, as he told me, in which the weapons were sabres,
+and had so slashed his opponent, a brother officer, that the latter was
+laid up in a grievous state at the hospital. A vacant barracks had been
+set apart, by the War Department, for this proceeding. Army duelling,
+as on the Continent, is connived at. The case seems to be that, if you
+fight, you are afterward reprimanded; but if you do not, you are likely
+to be cashiered as pusillanimous.
+
+Not that the colonel was in all respects the most agreeable of travelling
+companions. He was much wrapped up in his own affairs at first, and
+later displayed some traits of a certain childish selfishness.
+
+Vincente Lopez collected our baggage at the appointed time. He was a
+plausible person, and when he desired the full amount of his bill in
+advance I had well-nigh yielded to him. I submitted, however, as more
+equitable, that one-half should be paid down and the remainder on the
+completion of the journey according to contract.
+
+“That would be equitable, indeed, for ordinary _arrieros_,” said Vincente
+Lopez, “but I am one of especial probity. It is my habit to watch over
+the persons who confide themselves to my care with a tender solicitude,
+and in the present instance I have intended to multiply even my usual
+pains. I am one of those who have never known what it is to encounter on
+the way the slightest delay or annoyance.”
+
+He seemed wounded in his finest sensibilities by an appearance of
+mistrust, which was to him hitherto unknown. There were considerations in
+his favor. He said that the colonel, at another hotel, had paid the full
+sum in advance, and this proved true. Whatever money was to be taken,
+besides, must be in the heavy silver coinage of the country, $16 to the
+pound, and to be rid of the weight and jingling of even a part of it was
+desirable. Still, on the whole, the contract was drawn in my way, by the
+advice of the dark secretary of the Iturbide Hotel. Though it seemed
+almost cruel at the time to act in this formal manner with so good a man,
+the precaution proved in the sequel to be very useful.
+
+[Illustration: THE “DILIGENCIA.”]
+
+
+III.
+
+My colonel was accompanied down to Cuernavaca in the _diligencia_—in
+which we were all extremely jolted, dusty, and uncomfortable together—by
+two generals. They had apparently come to give him parting directions
+about his mission. One of them was a thick-set, black-bearded man, with a
+husky voice, and a conspicuous scar upon his face. I must not branch off
+too much into side issues, but the history of the scar was that, while
+commanding in Yucatan, he had ordered to be shot, on some of the ordinary
+revolutionary pretexts, a member of the powerful family of Gutierrez
+Estrada, a family with commercial houses in Paris, Mexico, and Merida,
+and noted, among other things, for the beauty and intelligence of its
+women. A brother of the victim came over from Paris as an avenger, sought
+out the general in question, met him in a duel, and left this mark,
+which, at the time of its infliction, brought the recipient to death’s
+door.
+
+The city of Mexico is some 7500 feet above the sea, and, having come
+up, we now followed a great downward slope. It abounds in bold points
+of view, from which the prospects spread vision-like at vast distances
+below. Cuernavaca presents one of the most thrilling of these. What is
+yonder singular detail in the valley? A hacienda set in the open side of
+an extinct volcanic crater, of which the whole interior has been brought
+under smiling cultivation. And yonder yellowish spot? The sugar-cane
+fields of the Duke of Monteleone. He is an Italian nobleman of Naples,
+who inherits, by right of descent, a part of the estates reserved here
+for himself by Cortez. The Conqueror was made “Marquis of the Valley,”
+with his port at Tehuantepec, and an estate comprising twenty large towns
+and villages, and 23,000 vassals.
+
+Nowhere is there a quainter group of old rococo churches than that in
+this solid little city. They have flying buttresses, of two arches in
+width, descending quite to the ground, domes, and other inlay in colored
+porcelain tiles; and they are all clustered together, with tombs and a
+battlemented wall about them. A student of architecture coming this way
+with his sketch-book in his hand could find material here for a month. I
+am not sure that the trip could not be made enjoyably, as it certainly
+could economically, on foot, with an attendant to carry a knapsack, as
+we met some German naturalists and prospectors making it farther on.
+Close by is a garden on a great scale—the Jardin Borda—to which one
+obtains admittance for a fee. It has a stone fish-pond as large as a
+lake, terraces, urns, and statues worthy of the most luxurious prince
+in Europe. I was told that it could be bought for $5000. I asked the
+custodian about the owner—what he had been remarkable for.
+
+“He had _altos pesos_,” replied the man, which is Spanish for “a pile
+of money.” Bushels of delicious mangoes were rotting untouched along
+the walks. From the outer terrace you look down into the barranca
+which Alvarado crossed by a fallen tree when sent by his indefatigable
+general against the disaffected Gonzalo Pizarro. Here are guava,
+mango, pine-apple, banana, and plenty of other fruits, but not yet the
+cocoa-nut, which only flourishes lower down.
+
+Behold us ready to set forth on the trail! Vincente Lopez is not present,
+strange to say, to cast about us the fostering care he has promised. On
+the contrary, he has quietly sold out his contract and gone back to the
+Parque del Conde with his profits. We are in the hands of a new muleteer,
+“Don Marcos,” who has never made the journey to Acapulco before, and a
+fourteen-year-old boy, “Vincente,” who is depended upon to find the way.
+Every cavalcade in Mexico is bizarre, and ours, ordinary enough there,
+would attract attention elsewhere. First, upon the mule “Venado” rides
+the colonel, a tall, spare man, in military boots, wide hat with silver
+braid, and a linen blouse, through which project the handles of huge
+revolvers. He is aiming, not at display, but comfort. Of myself I shall
+say nothing. It is a privilege of the narrator to let it be supposed that
+he is always gallant and imposing in appearance, and exactly adapted
+to the circumstances of the case. I rode the rather large bay horse
+“Pajaro.” Don Marcos, a deprecating, tricky person, with a purpose, soon
+evident, of making up from us his bad bargain, wore a crimson poncho and
+cotton drawers, and bestrode the small white horse “Palomito” (“Little
+Dove”). Thus appreciatively had he thought fit to name all the animals,
+though he had but on the instant come into possession of them. The
+trunks, first securely sewn up in cocoa-mats, were tied, the colonel’s
+upon the back of the mule “Niña,” and mine upon “Aceituna.” Vincente, the
+boy, ran barefoot most of the way to Acapulco behind the mules, crying,
+“_Eh! machos!_” and cracking at them with a combination whip and blinder.
+With this same blinder their eyes were covered while their loads were
+being put on and taken off, at morning, noon, and night.
+
+There was a bit of wagon-road at first, as there is outside of each of
+the more important places along the way. This soon merged in the trail,
+which was of increasing wildness. The huts and hamlets we fell in with
+were of cane, well thatched. There were fields of cane, trains of mules
+laden with sugar-loaves, and an occasional stately sugar hacienda. Now
+and then there were the remains of one ruined in the wars. At noon
+the mules were unpacked at some favorable point, and the expedition
+rested for several hours. It was the custom to take a siesta during the
+extreme heat of the day. At night there were occasional _mesons_, or
+rude inns, but generally our stopping-place was such accommodation as
+could be offered by the inhabitants of the villages. The baggage was
+piled up under a thatched pavilion. Beds, consisting of mats of stiff
+canes resting upon trestles, were arranged for us along-side, or in open
+piazzas. These, in the warm nights, were more agreeable than might be
+supposed. _À la guerre comme à la guerre!_ Sleeping almost under the
+_belle étoile_, you could study the constellations, the outlines of
+strange, dark hills, your own thoughts, and hear the dogs bark, down at
+remote Sacocoyuca, Rincon, and Dos Arroyos, and there was not a little
+pleasant novelty in the situation. At the gray of dawn we were off.
+
+The people, all of Aztec blood, were gentle with us, honest, and not much
+less comfortable in their circumstances than farmers newly established at
+the West. The predicted difficulties of the undertaking largely melted
+away. It rained chiefly at night; there were but one or two showers in
+the daytime, though of these one was very hard. The food obtained along
+the way was of rustic quality, and occasionally scanty, but, on the other
+hand, it was often excellent. Chickens were generally to be had, with
+fried bananas as the most frequent vegetable accompaniment. The national
+dish of _frijoles_ (black beans) was always palatable. There was milk in
+the morning, but not at night, the cows being milked but once a day. We
+foraged more or less for ourselves. The colonel would demand a couple of
+eggs under the off-hand formula of _un par de blanquillos_, which can
+hardly be translated, but is as much as to say, “A pair of little white
+’uns.” He declared it “a miserable population” where they were not to be
+had.
+
+On the very first day out Don Marcos came to say that he had no money
+with which to buy feed for the animals. It was with the reserve I had
+retained, doled out little by little, that this necessary purpose was
+thereafter accomplished, and the _arriero_ perhaps kept from leaving us
+in the lurch.
+
+It was _à propos_ of this incident that my first glimpse into the
+peculiar nature and inclinations of the colonel was obtained. It was
+now evident that it would have been better not to have paid the man in
+advance. But the colonel refused either to regret that he had done so or
+to regard it as a lesson for the future.
+
+“I am a philosopher,” he said. “The philosopher makes no account of such
+things.”
+
+These views he professed also on other occasions, and seemed, with a
+bravado of stoicism, almost to go in search of inconveniences.
+
+“But is it not rather philosophy,” I argued, “to avoid such
+inconveniences as one can by a little exercise of forethought, and then
+endure the inevitable with equanimity?”
+
+“No; that is the civilian’s, not the soldier’s, point of view,” he
+persisted, with obstinacy.
+
+
+IV.
+
+This route, probably no better, and certainly no worse, was travelled, as
+now, nearly a hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
+It was the sole highway between Acapulco, the only really excellent port
+on the Pacific Coast, and the capital. It has seen the transit of convoys
+of treasure, slaves, silks, and spices from the Indies, bound in part
+for Old Spain. A regular galleon used to sail from Acapulco for supplies
+of Oriental goods. It has seen the march of royalist troops, under the
+sixty-four viceroys, and of many a wild insurgent troop. Morelos operated
+here, with his bandit handkerchief round his head, and kept the district
+clear of Spaniards down to the sea at Acapulco. By one of the rivers
+still lies the massive stone-work for a bridge, the construction of which
+was abandoned in the War of Independence, seventy years ago.
+
+Most momentous of all the processions it has seen, however, must be
+counted that of Iturbide, who returned along it, with his new tri-colored
+flag of the three guarantees—Religion, Union, and Independence—to the
+capital, to make himself, for a brief season, Emperor. This brilliant
+figure, of such an ignominious end, is still greatly honored in Mexico,
+and there is something rather typical of Mexico, or of Spanish America
+generally, in his history. Taking the position which would have been
+that of a Tory here, he fought against the earlier insurrection of his
+country, from its outbreak, in 1808, till 1820. Sent in command of an
+army against the rebel chief Guerrero in the latter year, he united with
+instead of attacking him, seized a convoy of treasure to serve as sinews
+of war, and drew up at Iguala—a charming little city on the route—a plan
+of independence of his own. The Viceroy, in despair, tried to buy him
+back with promises of pardon, money, and higher command, but without
+success. He made a triumphal entry into the capital in September, 1821.
+In May of the following year a sedition, which he had without doubt
+artfully set on foot, roused him at his hotel at night, with a clamor
+that he should become Emperor. He appeared upon his balcony and affected
+to reluctantly consent to the popular will.
+
+He modelled himself after Napoleon, nearly his contemporary. There is a
+portrait of him at the National Palace, in the same gorgeous coronation
+robes affected by the latter, though in his own whiskered countenance he
+is more like the English Prince Regent of the same date. In August he
+imprisoned some Deputies, and in October, still following his illustrious
+prototype, put his troublesome Congress out-of-doors. But in October also
+the country rose against him, and he was obliged to leave it and take
+refuge in England. He returned again in July of the next year—another
+Napoleon from Elba; but, instead of sweeping the country with enthusiasm,
+he was seized upon landing, and ordered to prepare for death within two
+hours. Four days of grace were finally given him, and then he was shot.
+
+Iturbide was a person of a highly politic turn, as has been seen. A
+thorough devotee of expediency, he maintained (and there was not a little
+truth in this) that a people made up so largely of Indian serfs suddenly
+released from tyranny was not ready for self-government. He said that
+he had meant the Empire to be only temporary. He had shown no personal
+valor in the service of his country, as there had been no occasion for
+it; all his actual fighting had been against it. Yet he is commemorated
+in the national anthem,[3] and a certain hold, in the Napoleonic way,
+which he had upon the popular imagination, was relied upon by the French
+when they endeavored to establish Maximilian in Mexico. A grandson of
+Iturbide still lives who was adopted by Maximilian, in order to give his
+dynasty a more indigenous effect, and made heir to the succession. The
+boy’s mother, who at first acquiesced in the usurping order of things,
+later repented, and endeavored to get him away. This was finally effected
+through the mediations of Secretary Seward and Mr. John Bigelow, then
+Minister to France.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+_CONVERSATIONS BY THE WAY WITH A COLONEL._
+
+
+I.
+
+Iturbide was the subject of confab between the colonel and myself as
+we jogged along the way; and this led naturally up to Maximilian. My
+companion had served under Escobedo in the campaign in which Maximilian
+was overthrown, and had witnessed his execution at the tragic Cerro de
+las Campañas.
+
+“He died like a true soldier,” said the colonel. “He was not afraid;
+though he deserved his fate, and I would not have had it otherwise.”
+
+It seems to be the general verdict that this ill-starred ruler was not
+without the physical fortitude which is esteemed a part of the heritage
+of princes. But he was better fitted for many other things than the task
+of fastening a monarchy upon belligerent Mexico. I drew the conversation,
+when an opening appeared, to the present novel relations of Mexico with
+our own country.
+
+“Had I the authority,” said the colonel, frankly, “I would never have
+granted the railroad charters which are making this great bustle. I fear
+the aggressions of the Americans. The conservative Mexican policy is
+to grant you such privileges only when they are balanced by others to
+Europeans. This was the consistent policy of Juarez and Lerdo. It was
+Porfirio Diaz, during his presidency, who first broke it down and brought
+this invasion upon us.”
+
+“We, on the contrary, incline to make it one of his merits,” I said—“a
+proof of his superior enlightenment. He stepped over the boundaries of
+narrow prejudice and jealousy, and allowed a beginning to be made of
+developing the country by those who were ready to do it, without waiting
+farther for those who would not.”
+
+“His enemies say he was bought,” rejoined the colonel, who had evidently
+no great love for Porfirio. “He has not been wholly above corruption in
+his time. He made fabulous sums out of the liquidation of the military
+arrears, for instance. He paid a million dollars for his magnificent
+hacienda in the state of Oaxaca. Where did that come from? That is a
+great weakness among us for official corruption. There are too many
+examples of it. A defaulting person in a high place is rarely punished.
+When I see a case of that kind treated with severity I shall begin to
+conceive new hopes.”
+
+“But,” I argued, “the Americans certainly have no other designs than that
+of commercial profit. They do not want your country. What Americans have
+anything to gain by taking it? Who would put his hand in his pocket to
+pay the expenses of a war of annexation? We look out for ourselves as
+individuals, and we fail to see where the profit comes in. We are large
+enough now to gratify our own vanity on that score. Love of glory and
+territorial aggrandizement is not one of our national traits. Spoliation
+might rather be feared at the hands of some ambitious prince, if you had
+any such for a neighbor, who could turn it to personal account.”
+
+“You will not annex us with bayonets,” he returned; “you will annex us
+with dollars. I feel it; I know it. Your great commercial enterprises
+will insensibly get hold of the vitals of our country, and the rest will
+follow. Perhaps there may be disturbances, and your government called in
+to protect the property of investors. There will naturally be sympathy
+for them at home, and they will move heaven and earth rather than lose. A
+thousand times better that our country were not developed at all than at
+such a price.”
+
+As I still insisted upon the unreasonableness of this notion, the colonel
+continued: “Even granting that you are sincere in what you say of the
+wishes of your people, I feel that it is the manifest destiny of Mexico
+to be taken by the United States. In former times the Latin races ruled
+the world, but in this and the coming ages the Saxon race will do it.
+You are a strong, commercial people, and commerce is the breath of the
+nostrils of modern civilization. Look at what you have done in California
+since it ceased to be a Spanish province. I have been at San Francisco—a
+great, splendid city; I looked upon it with amazement. ‘This was once
+Mexican,’ I said to myself. ‘Ah, what a different genius from that of
+Mexico!’ Yes, you will get us. It will be the amelioration of many
+abuses, and our greater prosperity, without doubt; but I hope I shall
+never live to see the day. As a patriot, as a soldier, I would give my
+life fifty times over rather than consent to it.”
+
+“But, since you concede such benefits as probable,” I ventured to say,
+“what is this patriotism upon which you so strongly insist? We do not
+want you, and have no designs upon you, but—purely for the sake of
+argument, and talking as enlightened persons—is it not rather fantastic?
+Is a boundary-line such an object in itself? May not a good deal that
+has stood for patriotism in the past be a mere provincial narrowness?
+Supposing that Mexico, or Canada, without force, but in its own judgment
+of what was for the good of its people, should desire to become a part
+of the Union, maintaining its organization in states and its local
+self-government as now, and merely sending delegates to Washington to
+represent it in national affairs, would you, as a Mexican citizen, feel
+bound to resist, as if it were the consummation of something scandalous
+and recreant? Is not the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
+happiness to the greatest advantage, the object of a rational being? Is
+there any virtue in an essential Mexicanism, Americanism, or Anglicism,
+that it should be preserved at all hazards?”
+
+And, having asked many such-like questions, I endeavored, farther, to
+explain a view that we may be all approaching a great cosmopolitan
+period, when we shall be members of a republic of nations, and
+foreigners, as such, shall nowhere any longer be either dreaded or
+despised.
+
+“That is all very well,” said the colonel, stubbornly, “since the
+advantage is to fall on your side; but I tell you I would give my heart’s
+blood rather than see it.”
+
+As to the value of his prognostication I have no opinion; but this
+seriousness of conviction about the plans of the Americans from such
+a source was full of interest. It is held by the bulk of the Mexican
+people, and it means trouble ahead for the enterprises, since it must
+increase with their very success.
+
+“Has any party ever been heard of, with you, in favor of annexation?” I
+went on to ask.
+
+“There is no such party,” he replied. “There are none who could favor
+it—unless, singularly enough, it might be the Church party. Protestant
+country though you are, with you they could enjoy a greater freedom than
+here. Since their suppression under the War of the Reform there can be
+no convents, religious orders, nor monastic schools; but in the United
+States, I understand, they could have as many as they wished.”
+
+The colonel was rather fond, as stated, of dwelling upon the soldier’s
+point of view. One day, when he had been writing, as he said, to his
+mother, he declared, in a gloomy mood, not without its pathos: “That is
+the only tie that binds me to life. At forty-four, as you see me, I have
+passed through many disappointments and chagrins. I have little pleasure
+in the present and no great hopes for the future. Well, that is a proper
+state of mind for the soldier.
+
+“The soldier,” he went on to say, “should be one who either sets little
+value upon life, and looks to death as a release, or one having a supreme
+sense of honor, of pride in his profession, and duty to his government.
+He makes a contract, as it were, with authority. He is well paid and
+highly considered; in return, he must be ready to spill his blood
+whenever his employer demands it.”
+
+
+II.
+
+The display of childish selfishness on my companion’s part to which I
+have adverted consisted in getting up one morning and riding off on my
+horse, without saying so much as “By your leave.” He had cast eyes on it
+as we went along, judged it to be on the whole preferable to his mule,
+and in this direct way took possession. The matter was adjusted, but not
+till it had assumed at one time an almost international aspect. It was in
+the coolness resulting from this incident that I rode on alone and first
+saw Iguala.
+
+The expedition had stopped, after its usual day’s march, before sunset,
+at the tropical hamlet of Platanillo. I was anxious, however, to pass
+the night instead in the notable city named. The twilight shuts down
+very rapidly here, and from the estimates of casual informants I had
+miscalculated the distance. “_Adelantito, señor_,” they said, after
+the inaccurate way of such informants—“Just a little way ahead;” “_Aca
+bajito, no mas_”—“Right down there; a mere trifle, that is all.” I had
+a distant glimpse or two of it from the pass, while the sun glowed like
+a beacon-fire on the crests of vast mountains encompassing its little
+valley. A small lake sparkled in its vicinity, and plantations of cane
+near it showed a brighter green. Of the town itself, which might have
+been a mammoth hacienda, only a dome and a few white spots appeared out
+of the midst of a quadrangle of foliage marked off on all sides to an
+even line. Then night came on, a dark and cloudy one, though without
+rain. My horse slipped with me on the steep over rolling stones. It was
+no longer safe to ride after that, and I led him most of the way, picking
+out the path in the dark. The view had been very deceptive, and we had
+many miles to go.
+
+Lonely gulches, brooks, and bits of wood were passed. Cows had gone to
+sleep in upland pastures, and one occasionally loomed up, a mysterious
+shape, in the path and took herself out of the way. The rays of a clouded
+moon gleamed now and then on a white patch of the lake, but the city
+seemed to have vanished out of existence. At last, however, a dim light
+in a dome, then a barking of dogs, and audible human voices. All this
+time there had been neither house nor hut. It was after nine o’clock. I
+came close up to one of the formal lines of trees, opened a gate in it,
+and was in the midst of Iguala.
+
+[Illustration: OUR CAVALCADE AT IGUALA.]
+
+I do not know whether the place has quite advantages enough to offset so
+much discomfort. What there is to be seen could easily have been taken in
+the next day on the march. There is no other vestige of Iturbide yielded
+to inquiry than the house in which the Plan of Iguala is said to have
+been signed—the oldest, as it is one of the shabbiest, in the place. It
+is of one story, like most provincial Mexican houses, with the whitewash
+badly rubbed off its adobes, and is now a poor _fonda_, or restaurant,
+without so much as a sign.
+
+But Iguala is charming. A row of clean, white colonnades, made up of
+square pillars of masonry, supporting red-tiled roofs, extends around a
+central plaza. The windows of the better residences are closed, not with
+glass, but projecting wooden gratings of turned posts, painted green.
+The market, a little paved plaza, opening from the other, consists of
+a series of double colonnades, light, commodious, and very attractive.
+The church, of a noble, massive form, made gay by an azure belfry and
+clock, stands in a grassy enclosure surrounded by posts and chains.
+Across the way is the zocalo, with brick benches, deep, grateful shade
+of _tamarindos_, as large as elms, and arbors draped with sweet-peas
+in blossom. Such a park, such a church, and such a market could be
+conscientiously recommended as worthy of any populace in the world. The
+heads of palm-trees star the heavier, Northern-looking foliage. Grass
+sprouts plentifully between the cobble-stones, and gives a rural air. A
+band played in the zocalo in the evening, though there was but a small
+scattering of persons to hear it.
+
+As I was making a sketch of the zocalo from a portal some very
+well-dressed young men and a professor came out. It proved that this
+house was a school, and a pleasant one it seemed.
+
+“_Amigo_”—friend—they said, in a rather patronizing tone, “what is your
+interest in this place? What is your picturing designed for?”
+
+Three days farther on is Chilpancingo, to which also complimentary
+terms—in a lesser measure than Iguala—may be applied. It is the capital
+of this rugged Guerrero, a state named after the patriot general, who was
+once, like our own Marcos and Vincente Lopez, a muleteer. It contains an
+ornate Government-house, a zocalo with a music-stand; and we met here a
+colonel of the detachment of cavalry guarding the country, gotten up in
+such dapper civilian riding-dress as if for a promenade in Central Park.
+Population—but populations are hard to get at in Mexico. I should say, at
+random, for either place, about three thousand people.
+
+At Chilpancingo you see the place in which the original Declaration of
+Independence of Mexico was proclaimed, in 1813. It had to be fought for
+many a long year till the day of Iturbide. This is merely a white house
+with a tablet, and not of farther interest. It was a wild and problematic
+cause, truly, when remote Chilpancingo was resorted to by the first
+constituent Congress, assembled by Padre Morelos, to throw off the yoke
+of Spain.
+
+But how has all this been done? These little bits of ornate civilization
+are like enchanted places which we happen upon in penetrating the
+fastnesses of the mountains. Perhaps we had better take out at once some
+such commission as that of the Adelantado of the Seven Cities; and yet
+greater discoveries may await us, never before heard of by man. Each
+lies in its miniature valley, smiling and fertile, with wagon-roads for
+a little space around; but their inhabitants can hardly be conceived as
+going over the wild trail to supply themselves with the fashions and
+comforts they possess.
+
+Candid judges from without would pronounce it impassable, and think it
+a practical joke that they were asked to consider it a road. We crossed
+and recrossed swift, small streams, the water reaching to the animals’
+shoulders. The colonel had a way of dangling his military boots on such
+occasions in the water, to let me see how excellently they were made; but
+one night, I observed, he could not get them off, and the next morning
+he could not get them on. All of one day we traversed the _cañada_, or
+gorge, of Cholitea, over a sandy bed of which the flood had not yet taken
+possession; another day, the Cañada del Zopilote. Our old friend of
+the North, the ailanthus, was common where other natural features were
+dreariest, and often filled the air insufferably with its odor. The three
+rivers crossing our way were swollen indeed, as had been predicted. When
+we came down to the wide Mescala it was opaque with red soil, and tearing
+past at twenty miles an hour. We were transported across it in a flat
+skiff guided by an oar. There was no plank to aid in the embarking of
+the horses, and one of them fell into such a panic as caused a terrific
+combat of well-nigh half an hour. He was finally thrown on board, more
+dead than alive, with lassoed legs.
+
+“Ah, what a soul you have!” (_Ah, que alma tienes!_) cried Marcos
+fervently to his animal, which had well-nigh kicked us all into the
+river; and losing all policy in his rage, he begged to borrow my
+revolver, that he might despatch such a brute, of the ownership of which
+he was ashamed.
+
+The Papagallo River succeeding, we crossed in a dug-out, and the animals
+swam. I asked the colonel, in my simplicity, if this were not more or
+less like war, meaning the manner of travel, our foraging, half open-air
+way of sleeping, and the like. He smiled in disdain, and gave me a sketch
+of his campaigns in the day of the French usurpation. The rightful
+government had had at one time so little foothold in the country that it
+was called the Government of Paso del Norte, from the farthest town on
+the northern frontier, to which it was driven. Eating and sleeping seem
+hardly to have been the custom at all till, by an unremitting guerilla
+warfare, the tide was turned.
+
+When we came to “the Cajones,” however, he admitted that this
+was a little like war. We slipped and slid all one day down the
+Cajones—natural, or rather most wofully unnatural, steps in the solid
+rock, in the midst of a dark forest. The perpendiculars are three and
+four feet at a time, and often there are mud-holes at the bottom; and
+besides, there are vines that aim to take you under the chin. The
+sagacious steadiness of the pack-mules, picking their steps unaided in
+the most critical situations, was wonderful to see.
+
+We met peons, in white cotton, coming up with barrels of ardent spirits
+on their shoulders, and we came to a full stop to allow the passage
+of jingling mule-trains of goods. The water ran in the path with us,
+courteously sharing its right of way. At one place it increased and
+converged from every side, and the wood was full of its murmurs, as if
+another universal deluge were coming to overwhelm us. It was full, also,
+of patches of pale-green light upon moss-covered stones, and limpid
+pools, and delicate ferns, like snow crystals turned vegetable. Now and
+then some white cascade stood out of the semi-obscurity like a beckoning
+Undine.
+
+Among vegetable growths on the way was the gum-copal, not unlike our
+white birch. There was a tree, the _cuahuete_—if I may trust the
+pronunciation of Marcos—smooth, bronze-colored, and often of a repulsive
+red, as if full of blood. We saw a good many charming red-and-yellow
+flowers on a high bush, like butterflies alighted, and once or twice a
+sprig of heliotrope and a calla-lily. The _amape_, found in the villages,
+and somewhat like the chestnut, was the finest shade-tree. There was
+a notable absence throughout the journey of what we are accustomed to
+deem the essentially tropical features. Very often one might have been
+riding in the woods of Connecticut. There was not even a rank luxuriance
+of growth, just as there were no serpents nor the swarms of pestiferous
+insects (other than a few gnats) to have been expected. We saw once a
+couple of coyote wolves trotting demurely along, and, again, a large
+_iguana_, a harmless reptile, one of which I also noted later, gliding
+around an old bronze gun at the fort of Acapulco.
+
+Birds I hardly recollect at all, except a white heron or two, charmingly
+reflected in an upland pool one early morning, and the _tecuses_, a kind
+of black-bird. Vincente pelted at these latter with small stones, by way
+of trying his aim. The organ-cactus, however, should be exempted from
+the complaint of a want of tropicality. It abounds thickly about the
+gorges and on the mountain slopes. Rising twenty-five feet and more in
+height, the plants are like seven-branched candlesticks of the Mosaic
+law, or spears of the gods hurled down and yet quivering in the earth.
+The fan-palm, too, must be excepted. It crops out on the bleak hill-sides
+as common as mullein-stalks with us. I can never respect it, in the
+conservatories, again. To see it thus was a kind of shock: it was like
+seeing some exotic belle of society masquerading as a kitchen wench. For
+one day before reaching the coast we had the cocoa-nut-palms. Nobody in
+the hamlets would get the fruit down for us except on a wholesale order,
+for munificent prices, which brought the cost above what it is in New
+York. There was often a shortage of the other fruits and commodities, as
+sugar, in the same way, in or near the very places where they grew.
+
+Toward the concluding stages of the march we fell in with another
+travelling-companion, an officer in the Customs service. When he learned
+that the colonel was going to the frontier, with a view, among other
+things, to suppress the extensive smuggling carried on there, he said,
+“You had better make your little $20,000 or $30,000 by protecting it.
+That will be much less trouble. The smugglers will buy up your soldiers,
+anyway; so it amounts to the same thing.”
+
+I must not represent that the colonel was always of an oppressively
+serious carriage. On the contrary, he developed a vein of humor, the
+more amusing from the simple good-faith of those at whose expense it was
+generally exercised.
+
+“Do you charge no more than this to persons of our consideration, my
+good woman?” he said to a peasant, whose bill was modest, though but in
+keeping with the primitive nature of the accommodations. “It is a species
+of affront, as one might say. Do you comprehend that I am a colonel in
+the army, and this gentleman a learned traveller, noting down the manners
+and customs of foreign lands? When strangers of our position come this
+way again understand that double what you have demanded is the least that
+you should take.”
+
+The woman, abashed, received double her fee, and replied that she would
+bear the lesson in mind for the benefit of future comers.
+
+Again, meeting three honest-faced Indian maids, with pitchers on their
+heads, going to the spring, he said, “Good-day, Marias!” and turning to
+me, in an aside, “Not that I know, from Adam, whether one of them is
+Maria or not.”
+
+He praised glaringly, to her face, as of exceeding comeliness, a
+servant-maid who wore gold ear-rings and necklace, and was, perhaps, not
+of more than average dumpiness and plainness. She waited on us at table
+at Tierra Colorada. The colonel desired to know her name.
+
+“Victoria.”
+
+“Well are you named Victoria!” he cried, in simulated enthusiasm. “_Que
+cara simpatica!_” (“What a sympathetic face!”) he repeated at intervals.
+
+Meekly, and with no suspicion of raillery, she replied, each time, “_Mil
+gracias_ (“A thousand thanks”), _señor_.”
+
+“Give thanks rather to Heaven, which made you so, and not us, who do but
+recognize it,” rejoined the colonel, piously.
+
+At La Venta de Peregrino the night was hot, and it still rained, after
+having rained all day. A garden of bananas twenty feet tall grew next
+the basket-like house of canes where we stopped. We hung up our wet
+garments and properties on the poles of the thatched porch, or pavilion,
+till it resembled one of those very numerous national establishments,
+the _empeños_, or pawn-shops. Dogs, cats, donkeys, horses, pigs and
+fowls—“shooed” out, when they became too familiar, with an emphatic
+_Ooch-t!_—gathered under the same shelter, as if it had been a Noah’s
+ark. We supped on pepper-sauce, tough chicken, frijoles, tortillas,
+cream-cheese, and coffee without milk, spread out upon a mat on the
+ground. The proprietor in person—a man in an embroidered shirt and cotton
+drawers, whose talk was not of the wisest sort—held pitch-pine splints to
+light the feast.
+
+“Now, how does it happen, hombre,” inquired the colonel, as if in a
+speculative way, “that a person of your fine appearance; a person of
+manners, intelligence, education, hospitality; a statesman, as one might
+say, who goes to Dos Arroyos to see who is going to be elected mayor”
+(the man had been there that day, as he told us), “with a fine house like
+this—how does it happen, I say, that you have not a table of any sort to
+serve two travellers a supper upon?”
+
+“_Pos bien_,” said the illiterate host, both pleased and flustered,
+scratching his head. “Tables? Yes, tables, now, to be sure. All that you
+say is very true, but there is a great scarcity of carpenters in this
+part of the country. _Si, escasen muncho_ (Yes, they are mighty scarce),
+I can tell you.”
+
+
+III.
+
+Two days after this we came down to Acapulco. It is a town for the most
+part of straggling huts, with a straggling thirty-five hundred of people.
+It has no vestiges of its antiquity but an old Spanish fort, after
+the order of Morro Castle, dismantled by Maximilian’s French on their
+abandonment of the place.
+
+Near the fort lay a couple of rusted rails in position on a bit of
+washed-out embankment, the beginning of a railroad inaugurated here with
+a flourish on the 5th of May, 1881. Having passed over the line, one
+would judge that it might be much more than dread of American aggressions
+which would prevent its speedy completion.
+
+There was no small pleasure in discovering at last, like another Balboa,
+the Pacific Ocean, in boarding the fine steamer of the Pacific Mail
+Company, the _City of Grenada_, which had come her long jaunt from Panama
+northward, and re-establishing connection with the outer world.
+
+With this, too, began an acquaintance with the western ports of Mexico.
+One of the semi-monthly steamers, rightly chosen, each month puts into
+them all. An idea of the country can thus be got which would not be
+possible otherwise without much greater fatigue and expense, but it is
+not at all as favorable as that presented by the interior.
+
+Neither of the three lower ports is of great size. Acapulco has the most
+complete and charming harbor. Manzanillo is a small strip of a place, on
+the beach, built of wood, with quite an American look. The volcano of
+Colima appears inland, with a light cloud of smoke above it.
+
+[Illustration: THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS.]
+
+San Blas is larger, but still hardly more than an extensive thatched
+village. On the bluff beside it exist the ruins of an ancient,
+substantial San Blas, shaken to pieces by an earthquake. Some old bronze
+bells from its church have been brought down and set up on some rude
+wooden trestles, on the ground in front of the poor chapel, without a
+belfry, which now fills the ecclesiastical needs of the place. This
+arrangement is sometimes referred to satirically as _la torre de San
+Blas_—the steeple of San Blas. My slight sketch of these bells, made
+on a fly-leaf of my note-book in the first instance, came to have an
+importance far beyond its own merits. I have the gratification of knowing
+that it proved to be the source of nothing less than the last inspiration
+of Longfellow. The great and good poet died on the 24th of March, 1882.
+In his portfolio was found his final work, “The Bells of San Blas,”
+dated March 15, which afterward appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_. His
+memorandum-book contained a reference, as a suggestion for a poem, to the
+number and page of _Harper’s Magazine_ of the same month, in which the
+sketch was published.
+
+At Mazatlan we are in a bustling harbor, and a well and handsomely built
+little city, with improvements and shops of the better sort, which other
+countries than Mexico might be satisfied with. It seems surprising, until
+we comprehend the extensive back country which is tributary to it, how a
+city of but fourteen thousand people can be justified in maintaining so
+elaborate a stock of goods.
+
+We steam finally across the Gulf of California and up the coast of that
+peninsula which seems one of the remotest points of the globe. The
+days are calm and blue; the bold outlines of the shores offer constant
+novelty. An arbitrary line is passed: we have lost Mexico, but gained
+California—the richest and most marvellous of her provinces.
+
+It is remarkable now to recall that, upon the accession of the Emperor
+Iturbide, Mexico boasted of being, with the exception of Russia and
+China, the most extensive empire in the world.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE LOST PROVINCES.
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST PROVINCES.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+_SAN FRANCISCO._
+
+
+I.
+
+It is the way of sea-coasts, as observed from the water, to maintain a
+close reserve. If they allow us a cliff or two, a suggestion of green
+forests, or a mountain in the background, it is as much as they do. All
+their natural projections, from a steamer’s deck, retire into a straight
+line. “You have chosen your element,” they seem to say, “and you shall
+not enjoy at once the pleasures of both. If you can do without me, so can
+I without you, and until you take the pains to disembark you shall know
+nothing of the attractions I purposely keep out of sight just over the
+surf-whitened margin.”
+
+The coast of California seems of even an especial moroseness in this
+respect. You pass some few islands, inlets at San Diego and Wilmington,
+the Santa Barbara Channel, and the bays of Santa Monica, San Luis, and
+Monterey; but for the most part the coast of the land of gold stretches
+on unbroken, low, brown, and bare. Search is vain for any suggestion of
+orange-grove or palm. It is foreign-looking to one who arrives from the
+east of the United States. Lions might come prowling down such slopes. It
+might be Morocco, and we, on our travels, some new Crusoe escaped in the
+long-boat, with Xury, from the Rover of Sallee, and afraid to land for
+the howlings of wild creatures.
+
+If, in our Pacific Mail steamer, we were discovering the country for the
+first time—as every traveller does discover a new country for the first
+time, no matter what accounts he may have heard of it—we should try along
+without finding a single good harbor for four hundred and fifty miles,
+from San Diego, at the Mexican frontier, to San Francisco.
+
+Then all at once comes an opening through bold Coast Range at the
+water’s edge, and we are in the far-famed “Golden Gate.” It is a mere
+eyelet—a strait, giving access to a wide expanse of bay. So happy is the
+opening, and commodious the shelter afforded, that the reversal of the
+churlishness prevailing up to this point seems miraculous.
+
+There is no doubt, when once the site is understood, as to why San
+Francisco is located just where it is. It has the only natural harbor
+between Astoria, Oregon, to the north, and San Diego, to the south. It
+bears, besides, with this advantage, such a relation to the resources of
+the back country, that it could not escape a destiny of greatness.
+
+It is not simply a bay upon which we have entered, but an inland sea,
+with a great commerce of its own. Immediately in front rise round-backed
+Goat Island and Angel Island, resembling monsters asleep; and terraced
+Alcatraz, with its citadel, as picturesque as a bit of Malta. Vistas
+open beyond on many sides, with gleams of light falling on white cities
+under lowering atmospheres of smoke. San Francisco, close at hand,
+piles up impressively on steep hills, its bristling structures covering
+their undulations sharply from numerous hills. The water-front is full
+of shipping. French and Russian and British frigates, and a Mexican
+gun-boat, are lying at anchor. Craft of all shapes and sizes cross one
+another’s wakes in the harbor. The lateen-sails of Genoese and Maltese
+fishermen and the junks of Chinese shrimp-catchers are among them. Large
+ferry-boats, superior, as a rule, to those we are familiar with at the
+East, ply to Oakland, the Brooklyn of the scene—a city already of fifty
+thousand people; Alameda, with its esplanade of bathing pavilions;
+Berkeley, with its handsome university and institution for blind, deaf,
+and dumb; San Quentin, with its prison; and rustic Saucelito and San
+Rafael, under the dark shadow of Mount Tamalpais.
+
+[Illustration: ALCATRAZ ISLAND.]
+
+From Oakland projects an interminable pier, built by the Central Pacific
+Railway. A mile in length as it is, it was to have gone on to a junction
+with vacant Goat Island, which would then have been made a city also, and
+become the terminus of all transcontinental journeys. This project was
+stopped by violent opposition from property-holders on shore.
+
+Patches of yellow, under the Presidio, are taken by our novices on the
+steamer for the “Sand-lots,” famous in the Kearneyite agitations. The
+Presidio is a barracks, which was a fort and mission in the time of the
+first settlement by the Spaniards—to what slight extent they ever settled
+the place—in the year 1776. The man who has “been here before” plants
+himself squarely on the deck, pulls down a silk cap over his eyes, and
+explains that the Sand-lots are not the Presidio, but nothing less than
+the large yard of the new, unfinished City-hall, in the centre of town.
+But Kearneyism is dead and buried, he says—as the case proved—and there
+will be no chance to see one of these traditional assemblages.
+
+He names for us the various hills, and points out the Palace Hotel,
+the Market Street shot-tower, and the homes of some of the great
+millionnaires who have made such a stir in their day and generation.
+Three or four of these latter top California, or “Nob,” Hill, with a
+prominence in keeping with their owners’ station. They are those of the
+railroad kings, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins—the mining kings having up
+to this time expended their principal building efforts in the country.
+“Nob” Hill is three hundred feet high, plebeian Telegraph Hill nearly as
+much, and Russian Hill, to the west—the latest precinct taken into favor
+for fine residences—three hundred and sixty. Murray Hill, New York, be
+it noted, is but seventy-eight. The riff-raff of Telegraph Hill climb,
+as is seen, by a multitude of wooden stairways; but how in the world
+do the Crœsuses get up to their habitations, which cut the sky-line so
+imposingly? We shall see.
+
+[Illustration: “NOB” HILL, FROM THE BAY.]
+
+The city does not begin directly at the ocean, but a mile or two within.
+It follows the inner shore of a long, narrow peninsula which comes from
+the south to meet one coming from the north, and forms with it the strait
+and bay.
+
+It is, indeed, an inland sea, this bay. You go southward upon it thirty
+miles, northward as far, and thirty miles north-eastward to the Straits
+of Carquinez—which has Benicia on one side, and Martinez, the point of
+departure for ascent of the peak of Mount Diablo, on the other. Through
+these straits you pass, again, into Suisun Bay, which receives the waters
+of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and is itself some twenty miles
+in extent.
+
+
+II.
+
+You are struck, on coming ashore from Mexico, with the excessive thinness
+of everything American. Our belongings seem all of a piece with our
+light-running machinery, with the spider lines of yon American buggy
+waiting for its owner. We evade Nature by a deft trick, and do not
+obstinately oppose her. There the old walls were as solid yet as the
+everlasting hills; here we seemed to be living in flying-machines.
+
+How strange, arriving from the other side of the world, to find people
+lining the dock dressed in the common way, and chattering the common
+speech, even to the latest bits of slang! A China steamer, however,
+had come in along-side just before us, and supplied a novel element of
+foreignness. Almond-eyed Celestials, in blue blouses, swarmed her decks
+and poured down her sides. Groups were loaded into express-wagons, and
+driven away uptown in charge of friends come down to meet them. Others
+trudged stoutly on foot, with their effects deposited in a pair of wicker
+baskets, at the ends of a long bamboo on their shoulders. This way of
+carrying burdens is constantly met with. The vegetable dealers hawk thus
+their wares from house to house, and present the aspect of the figures in
+cuts of the tea-fields. It is poor travelling when the curiosity alone
+and not the imagination is gratified, and San Francisco promises ample
+material for both.
+
+Had we come in the gold days of ’49 we should have landed some half-dozen
+blocks farther inland than to-day. By so much has the water-front
+since been extended and built into a solid commercial quarter. The
+’Forty-niners found but a scanty strip of sand at the base of the steep
+hills.
+
+Why, then, did they stop here, and build their city at such infinite
+pains and expense, instead of seeking a more convenient site elsewhere?
+There is, or was, some even more serious objection to all other
+locations. At Oakland, insufficient depth of water; at Saucelito, where
+whalers, Russian and other, had been accustomed to refit, Tamalpais,
+2700 feet high, as against Telegraph Hill, but 300. Distant Benicia and
+Vallejo—the latter now the naval station of the Pacific Coast, and once
+briefly the capital of the State—were much too far away. Steam was little
+in use. The greater part of the ships came under sail, and there were no
+tugs to pull them. They must be able to get in and out with all greatest
+attainable expedition.
+
+Such ships as these were, according to the accounts we have of them!
+The most antiquated and dangerous hulks were furbished up once more for
+this last voyage. The eager humanity they carried took little heed of
+perils and discomforts so they were but on the way to the goal to which
+all adventurous spirits turned. When the port was still but a beggarly
+scattering of huts and tents it could muster two hundred sail, good and
+bad, at once. Many of them never got out again. It was not on account of
+nautical difficulties, but partly because they had no return cargoes,
+and principally because their crews ran away from them to the mines the
+moment foot touched shore. Certain craft were beached and converted into
+dwellings; others, utilized for a time as warehouses, rotted at their
+moorings, and to-day form “made ground.” The remarkable city to which
+they came, which had eight hundred and fifty souls in 1848, and twenty
+thousand in ’49, has now, in an existence of thirty-four years, three
+hundred thousand.
+
+The buildings on the level made ground stand generally on foundations of
+piling. The practice prevails, too, of tying them well together with iron
+rods, against the jar of the occasional earthquake, which is among San
+Francisco’s idiosyncrasies. It is proposed to improve the water-front
+with a continuous, massive sea-wall, and a portion of this is already
+built. Extensive yards of attractive redwood lumber, which resembles
+cedar, and warehouses for grain, are seen. The elevator system, owing
+to lack of ships for properly carrying grain in bulk, is nowhere in use
+throughout California.
+
+We reach next an area given up to heavy traffic in the fruits and produce
+of the country. Battery and Sansome streets succeeding are lined with
+large wholesale dry-goods houses similar to those in the greater Eastern
+cities. Montgomery Street shows stately office buildings, exchanges,
+and hotels. Kearney Street has been hitherto the chief site of the more
+elegant retail trade. Its prestige is passing, however, to Market Street,
+a wide thoroughfare which recalls State Street, Chicago. Having unlimited
+room for extension in the north and south direction of the peninsula,
+whereas the others named are contracted, Market Street is to be San
+Francisco’s Broadway of the future.
+
+The financial centre is contained in the area of two blocks, between
+California and Bush, Sansome and Montgomery Streets. Here are those
+institutions whose great transactions and singular history are unknown
+now to but few parts of the world.
+
+The Nevada Bank, financial lever of the Bonanza kings, and point from
+which has been supposed to emanate all the weightiest influences
+connected with mining matters, is a four-story and Mansard iron building,
+with the usual classic “orders.” The Bank of California, whence the
+brilliant Ralston rushed forth from his troubles to drown himself in
+the bay, is two stories, of “blue stone,” of a pleasant color, and
+exceedingly sharp, agreeable cutting. The Merchants’ Exchange, erected so
+long ago as 1867, is a very ornate, town-hall-looking building, of iron
+and stone, dark-colored, with a clock-tower in the centre. It is adjoined
+by the Safe Deposit Company, in a similar style, in the basement of which
+a glimpse is to be had of a splendid steel treasure-chamber, with a dozen
+life-size men in armor, gilded.
+
+[Illustration: CALIFORNIA STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.]
+
+The large and agreeably proportioned Stock Exchange, on Pine Street, is
+of gray granite, with numerous polished columns. The board-room within
+is an amphitheatre, and a bronze railing protects the circle of seats.
+With its agreeable illumination and neat furniture, including Axminster
+rugs, it presents a much more home-like aspect than is the rule with such
+places. Mining stocks exclusively are dealt in.
+
+It is quiet enough now. We have fallen upon evil days. Capitalists have
+withdrawn their millions to the East; ships come only in ballast, for
+grain, instead of with valuable exchange cargoes, and charge rates almost
+prohibitory; there is not one “turn-out” now on the Cliff House road
+where there were formerly a dozen; and real estate has shrunk fifty per
+cent.—if in some places it have any value at all.
+
+This board was once the theatre of a speculative movement which took hold
+upon the community like madness. The aggregate value of the mining stocks
+on the list, at the period of highest prices, in the year 1875, was, in
+round numbers, $282,000,000. The aggregate value of the same stocks in
+the summer of 1881 was but $17,000,000. There had occurred a shrinkage of
+$265,000,000, or more than fifteen times the total value surviving.
+
+What had happened? The “bottom had dropped out” of the famous
+“Comstocks,” perhaps the richest mines known to history. “Consolidated
+Virginia,” valued at $75,000,000, was now worth less than $1,000,000.
+“Sierra Nevada” fell from $27,000,000 to $825,000. But the greatest
+shrinkage of all was in “California.” This unhappy stock shrank from
+$84,000,000 to $351,000.
+
+These figures explain a depression the vestiges of which, though the
+ruinous crisis has long passed, still remain. The stock-gambling mania
+possessed the community without distinction of station, and hardly of age
+or sex, and when the bubble broke there was reason enough for gloom with
+all who had laid up their treasure in such unstable form.
+
+Some of the earlier buildings, now flat, thin, and unornamental, were
+obtained at expense quite out of proportion. The stone for the old City
+Hall was brought expressly from Australia; that of the Wells-Fargo
+building, and the Union Club, from China. The granite of the Branch Mint,
+a fine, classic design, was dressed in Oregon. The newer structures
+exhibit all the varieties of form and color in which the modern
+decorative taste delights. The material for most is procured in the State
+itself.
+
+The idea of being in a remote part of the world is kept before you in
+many ways. Here is a sign of the “New Zealand Insurance Company.” Fancy
+New Zealand, where a cannibal population was lately eating missionaries,
+sending us over its insurance companies! Here is the Alaska Commercial
+Company, the Bank of British Columbia; and here, its inscription gilded
+in Chinese as well as English, the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking
+Company. An occasional building is without the usual entrance-doors, its
+staircase, in the comparative mildness of the climate, left as open as
+the street.
+
+A system of alleys passes among the colossal structures, and these abound
+in refreshment resorts—“The Dividend Saloon,” “Our Jacob,” “The Comstock
+Exchange,” and “The New Idea”—to which the hastening business men repair
+in intervals of their labors. The San Francisco boot-blacks, a model to
+their class, are neatly uniformed men instead of ragged urchins. Favored
+by the climate, they establish their rows of easy-chairs on platforms
+under a canvas awning, have a newspaper and the gossip for you while you
+wait, and somewhat usurp the place so long sacred to the barber.
+
+[Illustration: LONE MOUNTAIN.]
+
+The corner of California and Montgomery Streets may be considered one of
+two focal points in San Francisco; the “Lotta Fountain” is the other.
+
+The Lotta Fountain—a tawdry, little, cast-iron affair, presented to the
+city by the actress after whom it is named—has been given a place of
+distinguished honor. Five important streets radiate from it. Its pedestal
+is a place where the timid seek refuge when entangled in the throng of
+vehicles. Market Street extends to the Oakland Ferry one way, and past
+the Mechanics’ Institute and pleasure resort of Woodward’s Garden to
+the distant Mission Hills in the other. Geary Street takes you, by a
+“cable road,” westward to Lone Mountain, around which all the cemeteries
+are grouped, and Golden Gate Park, stretching to the ocean. On the top
+of Lone Mountain stands up to view from far and wide a dark cross,
+which weirdly recalls that of Calvary. Third Street, a thoroughfare of
+working-people, abounding in small restaurants, markets, and “tin-type”
+galleries, leads to the water at a different angle from Market. Finally,
+Kearney Street debouches also at the Lotta Fountain, and Montgomery
+terminates but a few steps below.
+
+The Palace Hotel, vast, drab-colored, of iron and stuccoed brick,
+looms up nine stories in height on Market Street, and closes the vista
+from Montgomery. Studded with bay-windows, it has the air of a mammoth
+bird-cage. The San Franciscan, wherever met with, never fails to boast
+of it as the most stupendous thing of its kind in the world. With the
+conviction that size is not always the particular in which our hotels,
+like some of our communities, most need improvement, I should say that
+perfection had hardly yet been reached.
+
+Within it is more satisfactory. At night an electric light strikes upon
+many tiers of columns, as white as paint can make them, in a large
+glass-roofed court, with an effect quite fairy-like and Parisian.
+Twice a week a band plays there, and the guests promenade up and down
+their galleries or look over the balustrade. In the bottom there are
+flowers, people sitting in chairs, and carriages stand in a circular,
+asphalt-paved driveway.
+
+Though the resident of San Francisco feels called upon to complain of
+its present stagnation, the bare existence of such a place strikes the
+new-comer with amazement.
+
+Its air is not ephemeral, but of a fine, massive gravity. Its shops are
+filled with costly goods, its streets with comely, beautifully dressed
+women. It has an art and literature. Private galleries contain foreign
+modern pictures of the best class. Some local artists have made for
+themselves a more than local reputation. There is a well-attended “School
+of Design,” which has already graduated several pupils whose talent has
+been recognized abroad. The “Mercantile Library” is the most handsome and
+complete in its appointments of any American city.
+
+San Francisco “society,” though a trifle bizarre in the use of its newly
+acquired wealth, has an under-stratum of unexceptionable refinement. Its
+most bizarre side, too, is certainly approved of in Europe, where its
+magnates entertain kings and give their daughters in marriage to lofty
+titles.
+
+The European traveller who visits “the land of Barnum” and “of
+Washington” with literary intent must be cruelly broken up by what
+he will find here. Such a place should be a vast, motley camp, as it
+is known to European travellers that most American cities should be.
+With its thirty-three years, and its heterogeneous elements, it should
+exhibit a combination of squalor and mushroom splendor. The wretched
+shanty should elbow the vulgar palace, a democratic boorishness of
+manners, blazing in diamonds, the faint, refined natures that by any
+chance have ventured into such a Babel. But, alas! we live in an age of
+expedition, of labor-saving inventions. With unlimited means, such as
+here enjoyed, the work of years is condensed into months. Camp there is
+none, but a luxurious city, presenting all the ordinary characteristics
+of civilization.
+
+An association comprising in a genial way most of the best elements of
+San Francisco is the Bohemian Club. It is found taking a very creditable
+interest in literature and the arts—it numbering the professionals and
+amateurs in these branches in its membership—and entertains and welcomes
+distinguished strangers. A monthly entertainment of a light, composite
+character is held, known as a “Jinks.” The grand festival of the year,
+however, is a “High Jinks,” which takes the form of an excursion into the
+country. The principal ceremonial of the High Jinks has sometimes been
+held at night, in masquerade costume, among the Big Trees, the enormous
+redwoods of Sonoma County, to the northward. It may well be believed that
+the doings on these occasions are as fantastic and amusing as the merry
+inventions of a couple of hundred bright social spirits can make them.
+
+
+III.
+
+A population of three hundred thousand souls is not extraordinary now,
+as populations go, but there are certain things which make San Francisco
+cosmopolitan beyond its actual size. An entirely new commercial situation
+gives rise to a new _milieu_. San Francisco faces toward Asia, the great
+English-speaking colonies of Oceanica, and the islands of the sea, as New
+York faces Europe. It enjoys already a trade with the Orient amounting
+to ten millions per annum in imports and eight millions in exports. The
+possibilities of this trade, extended among the teeming populations
+in the cradle of the human race, seem almost limitless. A way will be
+found sooner or later out of the imbroglio into which our inexperience
+has plunged us on the Chinese question, and communication will flow
+unimpeded. In countries separated by water, and demanding each other’s
+productions, cities arise at the places of transfer, and proportioned to
+its volume; and for all this San Francisco has one of the most remarkable
+of situations.
+
+[Illustration: “HIGH JINKS” OF THE BOHEMIAN CLUB AMONG THE BIG TREES.]
+
+The Oriental trade is but a small item in the total. It has ships,
+besides those bound for the Eastern and European ports, going out to the
+British and Russian possessions in the North, Mexico, Central and South
+America, Tahiti, Feejee, Manila, the Sandwich and Friendly Islands—to all
+those far-off points in the South Pacific which now in their turn promise
+to shine with the light of civilization and become powers of the earth.
+
+Coals are burned at firesides—not of the most desirable quality, it must
+be confessed—which come from the coast once characterized by the poet in
+the line—
+
+    “The wolf’s long howl on Oonalaska’s shore.”
+
+Seventy millions pounds of sugar a year are brought from those Sandwich
+Islands which slew Captain Cook, now a civilized, modern state. But it
+is particularly Australasia, and our coming relations with it, that
+awaken admiring speculations. Melbourne, Australia, has already more
+than 280,000 people, Sydney 225,000, while along the coasts of that once
+cannibal New Zealand, now sending us its insurance companies, scatter
+also a line of flourishing cities: Dunedin, with its 43,000 people;
+Auckland, with 40,000; Christchurch, 32,000; Wellington, 22,000; and I
+know not how many others.
+
+Astoria and Portland, in Oregon, San Diego, and, no doubt, ports to be
+created in time along the Mexican shores, will receive a share of these
+new influences in the world, but at San Francisco they touch us first and
+nearest.
+
+There is a definite fascination in coming to the “jumping-off place,”
+the final verge of the latest of the continents. An excellent situation
+in which to feel it is to lie on the brown heather at the point above
+the Golden Gate—though it is a raw and gusty place in which to lie too
+long—or to look down from the parapeted road or piazza of the Cliff House.
+
+Here practically nothing intervenes between you and Japan, except we make
+mention of the clump of Seal Rocks, upon which the grouty sea-lions are
+floundering and roaring, down there in the surf in front.
+
+“Ah! when a man has travelled,” says Thoreau, “when he has robbed the
+horizon of his native fields of its mystery, tarnished the blue of
+distant mountains with his feet, he may begin to think of another world.”
+
+Very well. Perhaps it may do a man no harm to think of another world now
+and then, if not upon one pretext, on another. At evening the Golden Gate
+is the way to the sunset. The orb of day settles into the sea at the end
+of the gleaming strait, precisely in that East where we always figure
+it to ourselves as rising in the morning. The great circle is at last
+complete; and, as the extremes of every kind, even of love and hate, are
+said to be identical, the old, quiescent East has become the bound of the
+new, impetuous West.
+
+“What is a world to do,” you idly ask, “when it has no longer a West? How
+is it to get on without that vague open region on its borders, always the
+safety-valve and outlet for surplus population and uneasy spirits?”
+
+“But when the race has quite arrived at this farther shore, will it stop
+here? or will it possibly start round the world again? Will it go on
+yet many times more, always beginning with the highest perfection yet
+attained, weaker types dying out in front to make room, till it shall
+become in its march a dazzling army of light? Is a millennium, perchance,
+to be reached in this cumulative way, as the power of a magnet is
+increased by the number of turns of the helix?”
+
+[Illustration: GOLDEN GATE, FROM GOAT ISLAND.]
+
+“The sentiment of gain,” I say, continuing these wise speculations,
+“has been the leading factor in drawing the nations around the globe.
+Gold has been dangled as a bait: first, the hope of it by conquest;
+later, in mines of the precious metals. It has danced, Ariel-like,
+will-o’-the-wisp-like, before them. Tantalized, disappointed, after
+floundering on a ways, they have paused to develop the lands upon which
+they found themselves.
+
+“But now at length, when the vacant spaces are full, and the need of
+subterfuge exhausted, the bait is cast down, to be gorged upon by those
+who find it. Never before, till ’49, were its followers rewarded with
+such unstinted liberality. The treasure of the earth seemed piled up in
+the fastnesses of the far Pacific.”
+
+I recall that their yield since the year 1848 has reached the sum of
+$2,100,000,000, and is still going on at $80,000,000 a year. Gold,
+scattered at first in the very sands, was later washed out of the
+gravel-banks, by the hydraulic process, and later yet got by crushing the
+quartz rock. When gold began to diminish it was followed by silver. The
+great “Bonanza” mines of Nevada were discovered. “Consolidated Virginia”
+alone produced $65,000,000 in seven years.
+
+
+IV.
+
+What fabulous sums besides—to go back to town—the managers made by the
+ingenious process of “milking the market” I do not undertake to compute.
+The prices of this celebrated stock at successive dates, not far apart,
+were: first, $17 a share; then $1; $110; $42; $700; and then, in the
+final collapse, in 1875, little or nothing at all.
+
+I have seen a poor saloon called the “Auction Lunch,” on Washington
+Street, near the Post-office, said to have been kept by the once
+barkeepers, Flood and O’Brien, who attained such a splendid prosperity.
+There is no historic tablet over the door, but one naturally looks with
+reverence at the place where the beginning of such things could be. The
+proprietors of the “Auction Lunch” were in the habit of taking gold-dust
+occasionally in a friendly way from miners, for safe-keeping while the
+owners were enjoying themselves about town. It was from such persons that
+they obtained the “points” which resulted in their getting possession
+first of “Hale and Norcross,” and then of the greater part of the
+properties of the Comstock lode.
+
+I fell in with a professed friend of theirs of early times, whose
+fortunes had not mended at all at the same pace. He descanted on the
+inequalities of fate, and what he termed “bull-dog” luck.
+
+He could prove that Flood and O’Brien were not even good business
+men—“though Jimmy Flood does go about with a wise air,” he said, “and
+Billy O’Brien left, at his death, half a million dollars to each of eight
+or ten nieces.”
+
+There is hardly a limit to the exceptional characters and exceptional
+doings to be heard of in San Francisco. Though the city affect—or has
+been driven into—a quiescent air now, it has hardly ever done anything
+like any other place. It began with the wild Argonauts of ’49, whom Bret
+Harte has so strikingly portrayed. It had had six great fires, which
+destroyed property to the amount of $23,000,000, when yet less than three
+years of age. It was ruled for months, in the year 1856, by a vigilance
+committee, which rid it of eight hundred evil-doers of one sort and
+another, the worst by summary execution, the rest by banishment.
+
+The politics of the State before the war were Democratic, with a rather
+strong Southern bias. There was a long feud between the two great
+Senatorial paladins, Broderick and Gwin, which resulted in the death
+of Broderick by the duelling-pistol of one of the partisans of the
+latter. There was the long fight and a final deliverance from an incubus
+of forged Spanish land titles, the manufacture of which “had become
+a business and a trade,” and which covered the area of the city many
+times over. Then came the war, and the peculiarities growing out of the
+retention of a solid currency, while the rest of the country was deluged
+with a depreciated paper.
+
+The brilliant period, later, when the Bonanza mines were pouring out
+their floods of riches, and the favorite stocks were running delightfully
+up and down the gamut from $1 to $700 a share, was followed, as I
+have said, by a depression of the deepest dye. In the unbearable
+disappointment of their losses, and the stagnation of trade, a part of
+the community snatched at a theory held out to them by demagogues, that
+it was their political institutions which were somehow to blame. Upon
+this basis a singular new party, wild and half-communistic in character,
+arose, and met with a brief success. The truckman, Denis Kearney, was
+its Caius Gracchus or Watt Tyler, and set it in motion with blasphemous
+mouthings from an improvised tribune in the Sand-lots. It elected a mayor
+who was at the same time a Baptist preacher. This mayor’s son—preacher,
+too—rode up one day and assassinated at his own door an editor who had
+passed strictures on their course. The party voted a new constitution,
+which was thought to be a prelude to universal confiscation, and
+capitalists fled before it in alarm.
+
+And, finally, this remarkable city, having become the recipient of a
+Chinese immigration which has given to a part of it the aspect of a
+portion of the Flowery Kingdom, has been agitated by fears of complete
+subversion under Orientalism, and has originated new problems for
+political economy and international law.
+
+After but a tithe of such violent and novel experiences any city would
+be glad to rest awhile. San Francisco seems entering upon a new period,
+and likely to do things henceforth more in the normal way. There has been
+a time of contemplation, and the lessons of the past have struck in. As
+things have slowly improved the gloom of the reaction has disappeared
+after the unhealthy inflation that gave it birth. The new political craze
+was of but short duration. I never saw anywhere so quietly conducted an
+election as that of the last autumn, which dismissed the Kearney-Kalloch
+faction from power. A special provision prevents the approach of any
+person but the voter immediately engaged within one hundred feet of a
+polling-place. I had rather expected to see dead and maimed Chinamen
+lying at every corner, or fleeing before infuriated crowds. But though
+San Franciscans entertain beliefs of their own as to the undesirability
+of a great Chinese immigration, during a long stay I neither saw nor
+heard of an attempt to molest any individual on account of it.
+
+The new constitution itself proved a harmless bugaboo. It is a gratifying
+tribute, in fact, to native common-sense and Anglo-Saxon ideas that this
+instrument, produced in a time of great excitement, and, as was charged,
+with the most subversive intentions, should not only contain so little
+that is dangerous, but so much in a high degree commendable. It does
+not harm property. Frightened capital may return with entire safety. I
+profess myself so far a person of incendiary opinions as to hold that an
+honest directness of purpose in this new constitution, its effort to
+simplify legislation and sweep away embarrassments, often maintained much
+more in the interest of legislator and lawyer than the public good, is
+well worthy of imitation elsewhere.
+
+Physical and commercial conditions are also changing. Life hereafter
+will depend less upon spasmodic “finds,” and more on the humdrum and
+legitimate industries. Mining, though the supply of treasure, with
+improved machinery, still holds out in a uniform way, takes a lesser
+rank. Agriculture and manufactures come every day more to the front.
+California produces an annual wheat crop of $50,000,000, a wool crop of
+$10,000,000, wines to the amount of $4,000,000, and fruits worth as much
+more, though these last two branches are but in their infancy. Of the
+greater part of all this San Francisco is the _entrepôt_.
+
+The smoke of the soft coals of Alaska, Oregon, and Australia too may
+be allowed to thicken the air to some purpose, since it produces
+manufactures to the amount of $75,000,000 per annum.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+_SAN FRANCISCO (Continued)._
+
+
+I.
+
+Kearney Street (sharing its distinction now with Market Street) is, in
+sunshiny weather, the promenade of all the leisurely and well-dressed.
+It abounds in jewellers, who often combine the business of pawnbroking
+with the other, and are fond of prefixing “Uncle” to their names. Thus,
+“Uncle Johnson,” “Uncle Jackson,” or “Uncle Thompson,” all along the way,
+make a genial proffer of their hospitable service. There are shops of
+Chinese and Japanese goods, though this is not the regular quarter, and
+“Assiamull and Wassiamull” invite us to inspect the goods of the East
+Indies.
+
+Perhaps European foreigners of distinction—English lords, M.P.’s, and
+younger sons, German barons and Russian princes—on their way round
+the world, are not more numerous than in New York, but they seem more
+numerous in proportion. The books of the Palace Hotel are seldom free of
+them, and they are detected, at a glance, strolling on the streets or
+gazing at the large photographs of the Yosemite Valley and the Big Trees
+which hang at prominent corners.
+
+There is a genial feeling about Kearney Street, which arises, I think,
+from its being level—at the foot of the steep hills. The temptation is
+to linger there as long as possible. The instant you leave it for the
+residence portion of town you have to begin a back-breaking climb. The
+ascent is like going up-stairs, and nothing less.
+
+The San Francisco householder of means is “like the herald Mercury
+new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.” How in the world, I have asked,
+does he get up there? Well, by the Cable road. I consider the Cable
+road one of the very foremost in the list of curiosities, though I have
+refrained from bringing it forward till now. It is a peculiar kind
+of tramway, useful also on a level, but invented for the purpose of
+overcoming steep elevations.
+
+Two cars, coupled, are seen moving, at a high rate of speed, without jar
+and in perfect safety, up and down all these extraordinary undulations
+of ground. There is no horse, no steam, no vestige of machinery, no
+ostensible means of locomotion of any kind. The astonished comment of
+the Chinaman, observing this marvel for the first time, may be worth
+repeating once more, old as it is:
+
+“Melican man’s wagon, no pushee, no pullee; go top-side hill like
+flashee.”
+
+The solution of the mystery is an endless wire cable hidden in a box in
+the road-bed, and turning over a great wheel in an engine-house at the
+top of the hill. The foremost of the two cars is provided with a grip, or
+pincers, running underneath in a continuous crevice in the box with the
+cable. When the conductor wishes to go on he clutches with his grip the
+cable; when he wishes to stop he lets go and puts on a brake. There is
+no snow and ice to clog the central crevice, which, by the necessities
+of the case, must be open. The system has been applied, however, with
+emendations, in Chicago, and is about to be on the great Brooklyn Bridge,
+at New York.
+
+The great houses on the hill, like almost all the residences of the city,
+are of wood. It seems a pity, considering the money spent, that this
+should be so. It is attributed to the superior warmth and dryness of
+wood in so moist and cool a climate, and also to its security against the
+shock of earthquakes. Whatever be the reason, the San Francisco Crœsuses
+have reared for themselves palaces which might be swept off at a breath
+and leave no trace of their existence. Their architecture has nothing
+to commend it to favor. They are large, rather over-ornate, and of no
+particular style.
+
+The Hopkins residence—a costly Gothic château, carried out also in
+wood—may be excepted from this description. The basement stories,
+however, are of stone, and there is enough work in these and foundations
+to build many a first-class Eastern mansion. To prepare sites for
+habitations on the steep hills has been an enormous labor and expense.
+The part played by retaining-walls, terraces, and staircases is
+extraordinary. The merest wooden cottage is often prefaced by works which
+outweigh its own importance a dozen to one.
+
+When a peerage is drawn up for San Francisco, the grader will follow in
+rank the railroad-builder and the miner. To hardly anybody else has such
+an amount of lucrative employment been open. What a cutting and filling!
+what gravelling and paving!
+
+Striking freaks of surface and arrangement result. The city might
+have been terraced up, like Genoa, or Naples above the Chiaja. It is
+picturesque still, in the thin, American way, through the absolute force
+of circumstances. You enter the retaining-walls of stone or plank through
+door-ways or grated archways like the postern-gates of castles. You pass
+up stone steps in tunnels or vine-covered arbors within these; or zigzag
+from landing to landing of long, wooden stairways, without. Odd little
+terrace streets and “places,” as Charles Place, with bits of gardens, are
+found sandwiched between the regular formation. A wide thoroughfare,
+Second Street—cut through Rincon Hill, the Nob Hill of a former day, to
+afford access to water for vehicles—has been the occasion of leaving
+isolated, high and dry, some few old houses, with cypress-trees about
+them, approached by wooden staircases almost interminable. Dark at sunset
+against a red sky, for instance, they present effects to delight the
+heart of an etcher.
+
+[Illustration: HIGH-GRADE RESIDENCES.]
+
+In this line, however, nothing is equal to Telegraph Hill, which bristles
+with the make-shift contrivances of a much humbler population. Bret Harte
+lived there at one time, and asserts that the goats used to browse on
+his pots of geranium in the second-story windows. They also pranced on
+the roof at night in such a way that a new-comer thought there had been
+a fine thunder-storm. Elsewhere, instead of precipices, you meet with
+chasms. Looking down from the roadway, you will see some poor figure
+of a woman sewing in a bay-window which was once filled with air and
+sunshine, but now commands only a patch of mildewed wall.
+
+The views from the hills are of no common order. As you rise on the Cable
+road you hang in the air above the body of the city, and above the harbor
+and its environment. The Clay Street road, one of the steepest, passes
+through the Chinese quarter. Half-way up an ensign, of a blue-and-crimson
+dragon on an orange field, on the Chinese Consulate-general, flies, a
+bright bit of color in the foreground. The bay, far below the eye, has an
+opaque look. On some rare days it is very blue in color, but oftener it
+is of slate or greenish gray. Passing vessels criss-cross their wakes in
+white upon the green like pencils on a slate.
+
+The atmosphere above it is rarely clear. Some lurking wisp of fog at best
+is generally stealing in at the Golden Gate, or under dark Tamalpais,
+watching to rush over and seize upon the city. An obscurity, part of fog
+and part of smoke, hovers in areas, now enveloping only the town, again
+the prospect, so that nothing can be seen, though the town itself be
+free. Now it lifts momentarily from the horizon for glimpses of distant
+islands and cities, and the peak of Mount Diablo, thirty miles away, and
+shuts down as suddenly as if these were but figments of a vision.
+
+The view down upon the lights at night is particularly striking. Set in
+constellations, or radiating in formal lines, they are like the bivouac
+of a great army. It might be the hosts of Armageddon were encamped round
+about awaiting the dawn. For several days, from California Street Hill,
+there was the spectacle of a devastating fire in the woods of Mount
+Tamalpais. Its dark smoke rendered the sunsets lurid and ominous, and
+at night the burning mountain, reflected in the bay, was a more terrible
+Vesuvius or Hecla.
+
+
+II.
+
+One is hardly supposed to “travel” as yet in America as in Europe. We
+make our journeys here for definite objects, chiefly on business. No
+doubt, if we could bring ourselves to the same receptive frame of mind,
+the same readiness to be amused by odds-and-ends of experience, a good
+deal the same kind of pleasure could be got out of it as there. San
+Francisco at least appears to afford a few of exactly the same details
+which receive the attention of the leisurely abroad.
+
+Italian fishermen eat macaroni, and drink red wine, and wait upon the
+tides, about the vicinity of Broadway and Front Streets. The Italian
+colony, for the rest, is pretty numerous. The part that remains on shore
+is chiefly composed of grocers, butchers, and restaurateurs. Chinese
+shrimp-catchers are found in the cove at Potrero, behind the large new
+manufacturing buildings of that quarter, and again at San Bruno Point,
+twelve miles down the bay. Their boats and junks are not on a large
+scale, but display the usual peculiarities of their nautical architecture.
+
+The French colony is also numerous, and the language heard continually on
+the street. Taking advantage of the variety and excellence of supplies in
+the markets, French restaurants furnish repasts—including a half-bottle
+of wine of the country—of extraordinary cheapness. A considerable
+Mexican and Spanish contingent mingles also with the Italians, along
+Upper Dupont, Vallejo, and Green Streets. Shops with such titles as
+_La Sorpresa_ and the _Tienda Mexicana_ adjoin the _Unità d’Italia_
+and the _Roma_ saloon. A Mexican militia company turns out, under the
+green, white, and red tricolor, on every anniversary of the national
+independence, the 16th of September. During the Carnival season a form
+of entertainment known as “Cascarone parties” prevails among the Spanish
+residents. The participants pelt one another with egg-shells filled
+with gilt and colored papers. Sometimes a canvas fort is erected in
+the street, and attacked and defended by means of these missiles and
+handfuls of flour. Such Spanish life as there is can hardly be said to
+have remained from the early days, since the Spanish settlement at best
+was infinitesimal. It has been attracted here in the mean time like other
+immigration. A dusky mother, smoking a cigarette, in a hammock, in a
+palm-thatched hut, on the Acapulco trail, told me of a son who had gone
+to San Francisco twenty years before and become a carpenter there. He had
+forgotten now, she heard, even how to speak his native language.
+
+The Latin race seems to have been especially attracted to the country
+of a mild climate and original traditions like their own. But German
+and Scandinavian names too on the sign-boards—Russian Ivanovich and
+Abramovich, and Hungarian Haraszthy—show that no one blood or influence
+has exclusive sway. There appears to be an unusually free intermingling
+and giving in marriage among these various components. They are less
+clannish than with us. Lady Wortley Montagu remarked, at Constantinople,
+some hundred years ago, a similar fusion, and believed it a reason for
+a debased and mongrel race. But a very different class of blood mingles
+here from that of Orientals at Constantinople. Our much more cheerful
+theory is, that we are to combine the best qualities, the hardihood and
+good looks of all, while eliminating their defects. Certainly the bright,
+intelligent aspect of the children of San Francisco does nothing as yet
+to discredit such a theory.
+
+[Illustration: CHINESE FISHING-BOATS IN THE BAY.]
+
+Such vestiges of ’49 as yet remain are extremely few. I confess to
+surprise as well at the slightness of the historic records at the Pioneer
+Society. I make little doubt that they could be easily paralleled in many
+other libraries of the country. “North Beach,” under Telegraph Hill, may
+be visited both for its memories and present aspect of picturesque ruin.
+It is where the pioneer ships landed. Hence, also, the ill-fated Ralston
+swam out into the bay, and here are the remains of “Harry Meigs’s Wharf.”
+Harry Meigs was a famous prototype of Ralston’s in the Fifties. Defeated
+in brilliant financial schemes, and having endeavored to save his defeat
+by forgery, he was obliged to take flight. He chartered a schooner to
+take him to the South Sea Islands, which lay off the wharf for him at
+midnight.
+
+“This is hell,” he is reported to have said as he stepped on board,
+expressing thus his Lucifer-like sense of humiliation and downfall.
+
+He did not remain long at the South Sea Islands, but sailed for Peru.
+There he began the world again, built all the railways of that republic,
+became a great millionnaire, sent back and paid all his debts, and was
+divested, by act of Legislature, so far as legislation could do it, of
+the stigma of his crimes. His story is by no means a good one to hold
+up to the emulation of youth, but it is romantic, and in some sense
+characteristic of California.
+
+The blackened old pier is a dumping-place for city refuse now, and swarms
+of _chiffoniers_ gather around it to pick out such scraps of value as
+they may before they are washed away by the daily tides.
+
+The leading streets of San Francisco commemorate the pioneers of State or
+place. A newer series adopts the names of the States of the Union, and
+simple numbers, which are carried already to Forty-fifth, for avenues,
+and Thirtieth for streets. The fast-growing, tough, fragrant, but
+scrawny, eucalyptus is much in use as a shade-tree. In the door-yards
+grow cypresses, the Spanish-bayonet, and the ordinary flowers, needing a
+great deal of sprinkling to keep them in good order.
+
+The San Francisco school of writers, developed in the successful days
+of the _Overland Monthly_, have not made much use of the city itself in
+their literature. Bret Harte confined his local range to the doings of
+certain small boys, some “Sidewalkings,” and the disagreeable features
+of the climate, in “Neighborhoods I Have Moved From.” It was from Folsom
+Street that the adventurous Master Charles Summerton, aged five, set out
+for his great expedition to Van Dieman’s Land, by way of the Second and
+Market Street cars. I had occasion to visit Folsom Street sometimes, and
+even this slight incident—such is the potency of the literary touch—has
+given it a genial interest which many others, as good in appearance,
+and even stately Van Ness Avenue, on the other side of town—very much
+better—by no means share.
+
+
+III.
+
+San Francisco offers, in my view, the advantage of saving a trip around
+the world. Whoever, having seen Europe, shrinks from farther wanderings
+may derive here from a compact Chinese city of 30,000 souls such an idea
+of the life and doings of the Celestial Empire as may appease curiosity
+and take the place of a voyage to the Orient.
+
+The Chinese immigrants, it is true, rarely erect buildings of their own,
+but fit themselves to what they find. They fit themselves in with all
+their peculiar industries, their smells of tobacco and cooking-oil, their
+red and yellow signs and hand-bills, opium pipes, high-soled slippers,
+sticks of India ink, silver pins, and packets of face-powder, their
+fruits and fish, their curious groceries and more curious butcher’s
+meat—they have fitted all this into the Yankee buildings, and taken such
+absolute possession that we are no longer in America, but Shanghai or
+Hong-Kong. The restaurants make the nearest approach to the national
+façades, but this is brought about by adding highly-decorated balconies,
+lanterns, and inscriptions, and not building outright.
+
+I had the curiosity to try one of the best of the restaurants—quite a
+gorgeous affair, at the head of Commercial Street—and found the fare both
+neatly served and palatable. There was a certain monotony in the bill,
+which I ascribed to a desire to give us dishes as near the American style
+as possible. We had chicken-soup, with flour paste resembling macaroni;
+a very tender chicken, sliced, through bones and all, in a bowl; a bowl
+of duck; a pewter chafing-dish of quail with spinach. All the food is
+set out in bowls, and each helps himself, with ebony chopsticks, to such
+morsels as he desires. The chopsticks, held in the fingers of the right
+hand, somewhat after the manner of castanets, are about as convenient to
+the novice as a pair of lead-pencils. We drank _saki_, or rice brandy, in
+infinitesimal cups, during the dinner, and at dessert very fine tea.
+
+The upper story of these places is reserved for guests of the better
+class. Those of slender purses are accommodated below. To these is served
+a second drawing of the same tea which has been used, and such meats as
+remain in a tolerable state. The upper story is decorated with carved
+work, painted scarlet, and heavily gilded, and screens, lanterns, and
+teak-wood tables and stools; while below pine-wood tables are deemed good
+enough.
+
+[Illustration: CHINESE QUARTER, SAN FRANCISCO.]
+
+Dropping in late one evening for a cup of tea, I had the fortune to
+witness a supper-party—a novel, _genre_ picture, glowing with color.
+There were a dozen dignified-looking men, dressed in handsome silk
+clothing—black, blue, and purple. With them were as many women—young,
+slender, and pretty, of their type, while the women seen walking about
+the streets are very coarse and clumsy. Their black hair was carefully
+smoothed, and looped up with silver pins, and their complexions were
+daintily made of pink and white and vermilion, realizing exactly the
+heads painted on their silken fans. The most interesting girl was of
+Fellah or Hebrew aspect, and was probably not without an admixture of
+other blood in her veins. The men occupied carved teak-wood stools about
+a large table, spread with a white cloth, and covered with charming
+china. The women stood by and served them. Now and then one of the latter
+rested momentarily on a corner of a stool, in a laughing way, and took
+a morsel also. The whole was a bit of bright _Chinoiserie_ worth a long
+journey to witness.
+
+[Illustration: A BALCONY IN THE CHINESE QUARTER.]
+
+They were very merry, and played, among other amusements, a game like the
+Italian _mora_. In this one would hold up fingers in rapid succession,
+while the others shouted the probable number at the tops of their voices.
+What with this, their laughter, drumming on the table, and general
+hubbub, besides an orchestra of their peculiar music adding its din
+from behind a screen, they were not very unlike a party of Parisian
+_canotiers_ and _grisettes_ supping at Bougival.
+
+The temple and the theatre of the Chinese emigrant have an identical
+character wherever he goes. I found here the same scenes in both I
+had witnessed in Havana at the beginning of my journey. The temple,
+economically set up in some upper rear room, abounds in gaudy signs and
+some good bronzes, but is little frequented. The theatre is far more
+popular. The dresses used here are rich and interesting. The performers
+are continually marching, fighting, spinning about, pretending to be
+dead and jumping up again, and singing in high, cracked voices like
+the whine of a bagpipe. A doughty warrior, who may be Gengis Khan or
+Timour the Tartar, and bear himself with the “most haughty stride and
+withering pride,” will sing you his lines in this same puny, whining
+voice, and no other. The slightness of the means of illusion is a naïve
+feature of interest in the Chinese drama. As one of the simple rustics
+in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ holds up an arm to represent a wall,
+across which Pyramus and Thisbe are supposed to talk, so here, if it
+be designed, for instance, to represent the march of an army through
+the woods, a screen is put up at one side of the stage, bearing an
+inscription which no doubt says “Woods,” and around this the military
+betake themselves.
+
+[Illustration: IN A CHINESE THEATRE.]
+
+The cemetery is more curious even than the theatre of Chinadom in San
+Francisco. I came upon it in the course of a long stroll one afternoon,
+and was almost the only spectator of some peculiar ceremonial rites in
+propitiation of the dead. It is not grouped in the general Golgotha at
+Lone Mountain, but adjoins that devoted to the city paupers, out among
+the melancholy sand-dunes by the ocean. It is parcelled off by white
+fences into a large number of enclosures for separate burial guilds, or
+_tongs_. These have large signs upon them—“Fook Yam Tong,” “Tung Sen
+Tong,” “Ye On Tong,” etc. One has almost difficulty to persuade himself
+that he is awake witnessing such doings as here take place in the broad
+sunlight of Yankee-land.
+
+It is the practice to convey the bones of their dead to China, but
+there are preliminary funerals in regular form. All the “hacks” in San
+Francisco are often engaged. The bones are left in the ground a year or
+more before removal.
+
+Toward three in the afternoon a number of express-wagons of the common
+sort drove up with freights of Chinamen and Chinawomen, and curiously
+assorted provisions. The “hoodlum” drivers conducted themselves
+peaceably enough, but seemed to have a certain sardonic air at the
+idea of having to draw their profits from patrons of such a class. The
+provisions were unloaded, taken up and laid on small wooden altars, of
+which there is one at the front of each _tong_. Most conspicuous were
+whole roast pigs, decorated with ribbons and colored papers. There were
+next roast fowls, rice, salads, sweetmeats, fruits, cigars, and rice
+brandy. The participants set to work to fire revolvers, bombs, and
+crackers, kindle packages of colored paper, make profound genuflections
+before the graves, and scatter libations upon them of food and liquors.
+Only the roast pigs were reserved and taken home again; all the rest was
+scattered about. The din and smoke increased apace; the strange-garbed
+figures pranced about like sorcerers, and the decorated pigs loomed out
+with a goblin air. It seemed a veritable witches’ Sabbath. Some of the
+fruits and cigars were hospitably offered to me as I looked on; and I
+will say that parsimony does not seem a vice of the Chinaman, though he
+lives upon so little, and is content with moderate returns.
+
+Coming back the same way in the evening, I noted prowling figures of
+white men among the graves, gathering up the fragments cast down by the
+improvident heathen.
+
+I am glad, on the whole, not to have the mooted Chinese question to
+settle in person. On the one hand, a great law of political economy—the
+natural right of man to seek happiness where he will; on the other, a
+view that the best good of a community does not necessarily consist in
+mere size and value of “improvements.” The reflective mind will find it
+rather in the greatest average distribution of comfort. I should say that
+there have been no evils of consequence experienced from the presence of
+the Chinese population as yet. Without them the railroads could not have
+been built, nor the agricultural nor mining interests developed. With all
+the complaint, too, of competition, the wages of white labor are better
+here than at the East, and the cost of living is certainly not more.
+
+A proper male costume for San Francisco is humorously said to be a
+linen duster with a fur collar. The variability of the climate within
+brief spaces of time is thus indicated. It varies largely, in fact,
+in different parts of the same day, though the mean for the year is
+remarkably even. The mean for January—the coldest month—is but fifty
+degrees, and for September—the warmest—fifty-eight. It is a famous
+climate for work, but the average temperature, as is seen, is pretty low
+for comfort. People go away for warmth in the summer quite as much as for
+coolness. The rainy season—the winter—is really the pleasantest of the
+year. The air is clearer then, while the prospects are verdant and best
+worthy to be seen. At other times fogs prevail, or bleak winds arise in
+the afternoon, and blow dust, in a dreary way, into the eyes of all whose
+misfortune calls them to be then in the streets.
+
+We return to town from our Chinese ceremony along wide Point Lobos
+Avenue, the drive to the Cliff House. It is skirted on one side by the
+public pleasure-ground, Golden Gate Park, an area of half a mile by three
+miles and a half, which is being redeemed from an original condition of
+drifting sand in a wonderful way. All the outer tract near the ocean is
+as desert and yellow as Sahara. A few scattered dwellings appear in the
+sands, each with its water-tank and wind-mill, a yucca-plant or two, and
+some knots of tough grass about it. The city appears on the edge of the
+steep, as if it were looking over in surprise.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+_THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS._
+
+
+I.
+
+I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.
+
+It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California
+should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the
+mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features
+in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate
+climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding
+pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. One of
+the most important districts for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and
+Marysville, north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five miles
+north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees in California. It is
+safe to assume, however, that all this will be found in the greater
+perfection as the low latitudes are approached.
+
+San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and Southern
+California may conveniently be taken as all that part south of the
+seaport and metropolis. It was upon the area just below, around the
+Bay, that the Rev. Starr King lavished his most polished eulogies,
+describing the “flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile,” which
+he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José, fifty miles
+down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should live to be old, and note
+his faculties failing) to retire in order to renew his youth. And but
+seventy-five miles farther south are the summer resorts—and winter
+resorts as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.
+
+I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs, when the products
+of an agricultural country should be seen to particular advantage. There
+was held at San José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara and
+Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective point.
+
+There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land except to the
+southward, the long, narrow peninsula on which it lies being surrounded
+on all other sides by water. One may cross, however, by ferry to
+Oakland—the Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the
+place—and go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches San
+José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County, which raises nearly
+a million bushels of wheat a year from a single township, together with
+tons of sugar-beets, and more hay than any other county in the State. It
+comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical pretensions of
+its own, making an exhibit of orange and lemon trees in certain favored
+nooks. But the more direct way is the coast division of the Southern
+Pacific Railway, down the peninsula.
+
+Let us glance at topography a moment. California is fenced off into
+valleys by two long north and south ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely
+high, and the lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north at
+Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one. They enclose between
+them the vast central space known in its upper portion as the Sacramento
+Valley, and its lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers
+by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas contain the peaks of
+from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet elevation which have obtained
+an extensive fame in the world. The Coast Range, of softer materials,
+averages only from two to six thousand feet.
+
+[Illustration: RAILWAY ROUTE: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA.]
+
+The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength, but the Coast
+Range throws out frequent spurs parallel to itself. These take separate
+names, as Sierra Morena, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and
+form numerous long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between
+themselves and the Pacific Ocean.
+
+Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed in this way in the
+midst of a diversified region, our first excursion takes us.
+
+By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the immediate environs
+of all American cities are passed we find ourselves running through a
+tract of small vegetable gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in
+white enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like Mexican
+haciendas, are “institutions” of various sorts. A long arm of San
+Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty miles south, and is seen gleaming to
+the left, with a wide stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on
+piles, at intervals along the water’s edge, are guard-houses, keeping
+watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has never yet been
+either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate with the pretensions
+of everything else about it.
+
+The conception that has gone out about Southern California is that it is
+an earthly Paradise. I will say at once that it is very charming, even
+in the dry season, but it is an earthly Paradise very different from the
+best idea of it one has been able to get by previous investigation. I
+found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and most writers have
+spoken of it only as viewed in the season of rains and verdure.
+
+The guide-book promises, “after a few minutes’ ride, orchards, vineyards,
+elegant farm-houses, prospects to charm all who love the beauties of
+nature.” But, really—one rubs his eyes—where are they? The ground is
+mournfully bare and brown. Hardly a tree or a bush is seen; not a green
+blade of grass. At length some small trees, a variety of scrub-oaks, at a
+little distance resembling the olive! Farm-houses are few, and not at all
+“elegant.” The hills are of the color of camel’s hide, and not unlike the
+camel’s humps.
+
+At Millbrae, finally, there is a glimpse of the wooden towers, in the
+American style, of a villa, and a large dairy barn. At Belmont the low
+hills are close at hand. At Menlo Park a charming flower-bed is cared
+for, by the track, as at foreign railway-stations. We are in the chosen
+site for villa residences of the San Francisco millionnaires. The surface
+is flat, and with its growth of oaks recalls the outskirts of Chicago, as
+at Hyde Park or Riverside.
+
+The valley widens till the hills are distant and veiled in blue, with
+tawny grain-fields between; but still no verdure! And where are the wild
+flowers? One hardly expects them now “by the acre and by the square
+mile,” it is true, since it is autumn; but of all the primroses, the
+larkspur, the lupin, the poppies of tradition, not one! Not a narcissus!
+not a chrysanthemum! Oh, my predecessors! what shall I think of you?
+
+In the spring the flowers bloom and carpet the earth as grass carpets it
+elsewhere. Speaking of the spring the eulogists do not say a word too
+much. But it is my originality to have seen Southern California in the
+autumn and winter—as it is for seven months of every year, and as it may
+be, in exceptional seasons, the whole year through.
+
+Not to make a great deal of this bareness and dryness would be to neglect
+a most essential feature. The annual rains begin in December, January, or
+February, and continue till June, diminishing in May, which is sometimes
+itself a dry month. In the autumn the leaves fall—what comparatively few
+there are to fall—as elsewhere, and are not renewed.
+
+“But you set up to be a land of perpetual summer, you know,” one argues
+with the Californian, in the first state of surprise.
+
+“So we are,” he replies; “but that does not necessarily mean perpetual
+verdure. Look at the thermometer! look at the fertility of the land! You
+have but to run water on it by irrigation, and it will do whatever you
+please. Contrast this brown season with your own white one. The land is
+dry and easy to get about on, and the sky above is uniformly pleasant. Do
+you prefer your fields of sheeted snow, under the howling blasts? your
+quagmires of mud and slush, alternately freezing and thawing?”
+
+“Very true,” I admit, accepting this different point of view.
+
+Then, perhaps, by way of finishing touch, he adds, rising to a dignity
+well justified by the facts, “California sets up to be a land of
+relations, commercial, agricultural, mineral, and social, which have
+made it a power in the world. It has revolutionized values, struck the
+key-note of new social conditions, and begun a new commercial era.
+California has arrived at a point where she takes her place in the Union
+on the ordinary terms. We no longer depend upon a repute for astounding
+beauties and eccentricities—though of these, too, there is no lack, as
+you will find.”
+
+
+II.
+
+San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests with Sacramento
+the honor of being third in importance in the State. You alight there
+at the small station. In the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a
+blacksmith’s shop, and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These
+have a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a romantic
+Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended to come in search of
+the elixir of life. And so have the small picket-fences an American look,
+and the comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind them, with
+scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas. With the exception of an unusual
+number of French and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large,
+clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native wines, it is as
+downright a little Yankee town as ever was. There is much shade in the
+streets, and in a public green, but the trees are yet too small and low.
+
+It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural
+district. It has excellent schools and all the other conveniences of
+life. A good deal of money has been spent on the principal business
+buildings. As in most other provincial towns throughout the State, they
+are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be described as the San
+Francisco style of architecture. An iron trestle-work tower was going up
+at the intersection of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two
+hundred feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the town. The
+white Court-house, in the classic style, though not large, is agreeably
+proportioned, and quite a model of its kind.
+
+The week’s doings at the Fair Grounds resolved themselves chiefly
+into trotting-matches. I was told that the combined display of the two
+counties was poorer this year than either was in the habit of making
+alone. There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by young
+women, and those who took premiums were girls of but fourteen and
+sixteen. Another popular feature of these county fairs was “firemen’s
+tournaments,” in which different companies held contests of speed,
+equipped with all their paraphernalia.
+
+There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and little or no fruit.
+The two-hundred-pound squash, the twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five
+feet in length and a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with
+these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did not much regret
+their absence. I have a lurking suspicion that there is a standard of
+the vegetable as of the human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General
+Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure from it than
+those of the other.
+
+The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not simply of abnormal
+size, but fine quality—excepting the apple, which requires extremes of
+heat and cold, and remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested
+to need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair than the daily
+display of fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco market? The regular
+season for any and all of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast
+at corresponding latitudes.
+
+I traversed the much-eulogized “Alameda,” an avenue of willows and
+poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799, by Spanish friars. These
+founded a mission among the Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the
+avenue extends. There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the mission,
+with its adobe walls, five feet thick, and flat wooden ceiling, rudely
+painted. It is now a part of a flourishing collegiate institution. Across
+the way is a clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date; but we
+are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since we are going presently
+to Monterey, which has, as it were, a grand specialty of all that kind of
+thing.
+
+The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate showing for their
+age, and can hardly be rated equal to New Haven elms, for instance.
+Behind them, along both sides of the road, are houses of a _bourgeois_
+comfort, as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth and
+leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder of their days
+in peace. The Coast Mountains, they say, cut off the fogs and winds of
+the ocean, and a higher range on the other side bars out the heats of
+the country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior refinement
+of taste and sentiment, the abodes of these particular ones. It is a
+pleasant conception, that of coming here to live for the pure physical
+delight in living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters
+will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled with their air
+of superior distinction, as if they, for their part, had not quite so
+willingly consented to abandon a world of larger opportunities. But we
+do not succeed. Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who
+have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah; and, after all, the
+desire to live a life of physical contentment does not imply taste in
+architecture and landscape gardening.
+
+
+III.
+
+One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness from these
+towns, of romantic “San” and “Santa,” and “Los” and “Del,” and feels
+rather aggrieved not to get so much of it. Its absence is explained
+in part by the fact that there were rarely original settlements
+corresponding to the present names. These are taken rather from ranches,
+springs, or mines in the neighborhood. On the arrival of the Americans
+in California there were but thirteen thousand Spanish, or Mexicans, all
+told, while the territory was as large as New York, Pennsylvania, and the
+six New England States put together.
+
+Let us believe that the pleasing designations will act as a stimulus,
+and these communities will live up to their names in time, as they never
+could have done were they simply Smithville and Jonesville.
+
+The impressions at San José, and in the country at large, resulting
+from a second visit a month later, were more agreeable. Something like
+the proper point of view had then been attained. The face of nature
+was to be parched, and the towns rather commonplace; but the continued
+cloudlessness of the sky, and quality of the air, were more, and the
+peculiar form of pleasure was settled where it belonged.
+
+The district of villa residences of the millionnaires, when penetrated,
+gained much in attractiveness. There are white-oaks and chestnut-oaks, as
+well as scrub-oaks, in groups of a park-like appearance, and live-oaks,
+with long, gray Spanish moss depending from them. If there are no wild
+flowers, there are plenty of the cultivated sort, with lawns kept green
+by fountains and hose. Where there is water, the winter, or brown season,
+need never extend.
+
+As a rule, long stretches of white picket-fence surround the places, and
+the houses themselves are white.
+
+The bonanza kings have been invested with a greater air of magnificence
+than really belongs to them. Their places cost them immense sums, it
+is true, but a reduction should be made to Eastern standards. The
+outpouring of untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every
+commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained for the
+money than an equal expenditure would have procured here. The Menlo Park
+district is inferior to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others,
+in the neighborhood of New York.
+
+The builders have struck out a kind of style of their own, perhaps in
+too great haste to wait for imported ideas. The houses are chiefly of
+wood. Flood, of Flood & O’Brien, and “Consolidated Virginia” when the
+great bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size, on an
+estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There was a terrace, with
+a fine bronze fountain. The main steps were of polished marble with
+bronze sphinxes, and bronze dragons studded the ornate stables—the whole
+glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the noise of a brass
+band.
+
+There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling the tone
+of rural life at the East. Such a one is that of ex-Governor Leland
+Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here is a breeding farm for horses, one of the
+most complete of the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one
+hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks, which, at
+the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make a small city by themselves. It
+is inhabited by a population of nearly five hundred animals, who return
+hither from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks, and
+have two hundred persons employed in their domestic service. The spacious
+stables are uniformly floored and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the
+freshest straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable drawing-room.
+
+Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred and trotting
+strains in the country, are an important influence in improving
+the breed of horses throughout the Pacific slope. It was here that
+the curious experiments were conducted, at the expense of Governor
+Stanford, for arriving at a better understanding of the speed of horses
+by photographing them in motion. The photographer, Muybridge, of San
+Francisco, succeeded, by an ingenious arrangement of electrical wires,
+communicating with cameras, in securing twelve distinct views of a single
+stride. The attitudes are of the most unexpected sort, and some of them
+even comic.
+
+[Illustration: PALO ALTO.]
+
+From the time of foaling the colts are gently handled, and made as
+familiar with the touch of harness as with that of human hands. As a
+consequence they are tame, gentle, and even affectionate, and never need
+formal breaking. The effect of the system of training has been apparent
+in some notable records of speed. On the Bay District Association track,
+at San Francisco, in 1880, the two-year-old Fred Crocker lowered the
+record for a one-mile trot to 2′ 25¼″. Last year Bonita, a two-year-old
+filly, cut it down to 2′ 24½″. At the same trotting exhibition
+Wildflower, another two-year-old, made the mile in 2′ 21″; and Hinda
+Rose, a yearling filly, added to the fame of the farm by cutting down the
+yearling record to 2′ 36½″.
+
+The interiors of these fine villas are, as a rule, better than the
+exteriors. The Mills house, at Millbrae, residence of a banking and
+railway magnate, now of New York, is a notable collection of _portières_
+and Oriental rugs, and bed-chambers done in the finest woods, with a
+picture-gallery of works of Gérôme, Detaille, and Bouguereau, while from
+all the windows are vistas of fan-palms, flower-beds, greensward, and
+bronzes.
+
+Ralston’s old house, at Belmont, now the property of Senator Sharon, is
+of those of the greatest interest, through interest in the remarkable
+man who built it. Starting from humble origin, he rose to be a great
+capitalist and the promoter of brilliant schemes of improvement, both
+public and private. He conducted to success a hundred projects which
+in other hands would have been folly, and arrived thus at such an
+unbounded confidence in his star that he thought he could not fail. He
+was entangled at last, however, in schemes beyond his control. Strong
+and athletic, and in the prime of life, he went down to “Harry Meigs’s”
+wharf, in San Francisco—almost the very point from which his great
+prototype sailed away to Peru—and swam out half a mile into the bay. It
+was for refreshment in his troubles, as some say, but, as the general
+opinion is, with the purpose of suicide. At any rate he was never seen
+alive again.
+
+The house that was his is notched into the hill-side, in a rolling
+country, much pleasanter than the plain at Menlo Park. A pretty gorge
+behind it is dammed to furnish a water-supply. There are gas-works, a
+bowling-alley, and an elaborate Turkish bath among the out-buildings,
+and a grange-like barn of solid stone, ivy-grown, which cost $80,000.
+The immense house is wood, white, in the usual fashion, and, with its
+numerous stories and windows, is not unlike a large country hotel. A
+peculiar arrangement and great spaciousness give it a palatial air
+within. The principal rooms open into one another by glass partitions,
+which can be rolled away, so that in large gatherings there need be no
+crowding through door-ways. There is an arcade above, around a grand
+staircase, with tribunes projecting, in which young women in colors,
+at an evening party, for instance, would look particularly houri-like.
+What in another house would be the ordinary veranda is here a delightful
+promenade, glazed in, and provided with easy furniture and a parquetry
+floor. Behind a row of such main apartments as drawing-room and library
+comes a parallel row, of which one is a great ball-room, entirely faced
+with mirrors. Pianos, mantels, and stair-posts are of California laurel—a
+new industry encouraged by the owner among many others.
+
+[Illustration: RALSTON’S COUNTRY HOUSE.]
+
+We drove from Belmont back through a succession of cup-like dells in
+the lower mountains, a number of them dammed to form pretty lakes, the
+sources of supply for the Spring Valley Water Company—a corporation of
+great prominence at San Francisco. The slopes at first were tawny with
+grain stubble; then scattered with the thick bush known as chaparral;
+then bare. We passed an occasional lonely farm known as a “milk ranch,”
+or “chicken ranch.” There are no farms in California; no matter how small
+the tract is, it is always a ranch.
+
+In the strong, warm sunshine chance objects on the bare slopes cast
+intense, purplish shadows. That of a distant tree is as dark as if a
+pit had been dug under it. That of a bird, flying low, is followed as
+distinctly as the bird itself. You are reconciled at last to the brown
+tone. It is like Algeria. White stands out in brilliant relief against
+it. One would rather like it to be a different white, however, than that
+of the little wooden houses. The falconers of Fromentin might career or
+the rival Arab chiefs of Pasini hold conferences among such hills.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+_THE VINTAGE SEASON, AND MONTEREY._
+
+
+I.
+
+It was the pleasant vintage season at San José. Santa Clara County, of
+which San José is the capital, boasts of a number of acres of grape-vines
+under cultivation (over eleven thousand) second only to Sonoma County.
+Napa, however, to the north, and Los Angeles, to the south, greatly
+surpass it in gallons of wine and brandy produced.
+
+I visited, among others, the Le Franc vineyard, which dates from 1851,
+and is the pioneer in making wine-growing a regular industry. Here are
+about a hundred and seventy-five thousand vines, set out a thousand,
+perhaps, to the acre. The large, cheerful farm buildings are upon a
+gentle rise of ground above the area of vines, which is nearly level.
+An Alsacian foreman showed us through the wine-cellars. A servant-maid
+bustling about the yard was a thorough French peasant, only lacking the
+wooden shoes. The long tables, set for the forty hands employed in the
+vintage-time, were spread with viands in the French fashion. Scarcely a
+word of English was spoken.
+
+At other places the surroundings are as exclusively Italian or
+Portuguese. One feels very much abroad in such scenes on American soil.
+The foreigners from Southern Europe take naturally to wine-making and go
+into it, from the few hundred gallons of red wine made by the Portuguese
+and Italian laborers for their own families, to the manufacture of an
+American champagne on a large scale by the Hungarian, Arpad Haraszthy, at
+San Francisco. The Americans, who have not acquired the habit of looking
+upon wine as a necessity in the family, are not yet, as a rule, very
+active in its production.
+
+A certain romantic interest attaches to this ancient industry. The great
+tuns in the wine-cellars and all the processes were very clean. It was
+re-assuring to see the pure juice of the grape poured out in such floods,
+and to feel that here was no need—founded on scarcity, at least—for
+adulteration.
+
+Teeming loads of the purple fruit were driven up, and across a weighing
+scale. The contents are lifted to an upper story, put into a hopper,
+where the stems come off, and the grapes fall through to a crusher. They
+are lightly crushed at first. It is something of a discovery that the
+earliest product of grapes of every hue is white wine. The red wine gets
+its hue from the coloring matter in the skins, which are utilized in a
+subsequent ruder squeezing.
+
+I shall not enter upon all the various processes—the racking off,
+clarifying, and the like—though, so much in the company of those who
+spoke with authority and were continually holding up little glasses to
+the light with a gusto, like figures in popular chromos, I consider
+myself to yield in knowledge of such abstruse matters to none. Immense
+upright casks, containing a warm, audibly fermenting mass, and others
+lying down, neatly varnished, with concave ends, are the most salient
+features in the dimly lighted wine-cellars.
+
+[Illustration: BOTTLING CHAMPAGNE AT SAN FRANCISCO.]
+
+They are not cellars, properly so called, either, since they are wholly
+above-ground. The casks rest on wooden sills upheld by short brick
+posts. In the cellars of General Naglee, a successful maker of brandy on
+a large scale, the cobwebs have been allowed to increase and hang like
+tattered banners. Through these the light penetrates dimly from above,
+or with a white glare from a latticed window, upon which the patterns
+of vine-leaves without are defined. The buildings are brown, gray, and
+vine-clad, with quaint, Dutch-pavilion-looking roofs, and dove-cotes
+attached. A lofty water-tank, with a wind-mill—a feature of every
+California rural homestead—here is more tower-like than usual.
+
+Round about extend long avenues of eucalyptus, pine, tamarind, with
+its black, dry pods; the pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries; large
+clumps of the _nopal_ cactus, and an occasional maguey, or century-plant.
+All is glowing now with the tints of autumn. Poplar and cottonwood are
+yellow. The peach and almond, the Lawton blackberry, and the vineyards
+themselves, touched by frost, supply the scarlet and crimson. The country
+seems bathed in a fixed sunshine, or in hues of its own wines.
+
+The vines, themselves short and stout, and needing no support, yield each
+an incredible number of purple clusters, all growing from the top. They
+quaintly suggest the uncouth little men of Hendrik Hudson who stagger
+up the mountain, in “Rip Van Winkle,” with kegs of spirits on their
+shoulders.
+
+No especial attention is given to the frosts now, but those of the
+early spring are the object of many precautions. The most effectual
+is to kindle smudge-fires about the vineyard toward four o’clock in
+the morning, the smoke of which envelops it and keeps it in a warmer
+atmosphere of its own till the sun be well risen.
+
+[Illustration: A BRANDY CELLAR, SAN JOSÉ.]
+
+Three to four tons of grapes to the acre are counted upon; while farther
+south, where irrigation is used, they expect from eight to twelve. But
+it is claimed, in the standing controversy on the subject, that the
+irrigated grapes are watery, while those of lesser yield excel them in
+quality. The best results, we were told, are got from such vines as the
+Mataro, Carignane, and Grenache, imported cuttings from the French slope
+of the Pyrenees. There were at Le Franc’s not less than sixty varieties,
+under probation, many of which will, no doubt, give an excellent account
+of themselves. They are assembled from Greece, Italy, Palestine, and the
+Canary Islands, so that we have all the chances of the development of
+something suited to our peculiar conditions.
+
+
+II.
+
+I left San José to drive along the dry, shallow bed of the Guadalupe
+River to the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine, a more remote and less visited
+companion of well-known New Almaden. The mine is in a lovely little vale,
+with a settlement of Mexican and Chinese boarding-houses clustered around
+it. Some bold ledges of rock jut out above, and a superintendent’s house
+surrounded by flowers hangs upon the hill-side. A weird-looking flume
+conveys the sulphurous acid from the calcining furnaces to a hill-top,
+upon which every trace of vegetation has been blasted by its poisonous
+exhalations.
+
+Then I made a little tour by rail southward through the immense “Murphy”
+and “Miller and Lux” ranches, comprising a grain country as flat as a
+floor.
+
+We turned west through the fertile little Pajaro Valley, the emporium of
+which for produce, and fine redwood lumber, cut in great quantities on
+the adjoining Santa Cruz Mountains, is the thriving town of Watsonville.
+We ran along a rugged coast, past wooded gorges and white sea-side
+cottages, at Aptos and Soquel, to the much-frequented resort of Santa
+Cruz. Santa Cruz has bold variations of level, the usual commonplace
+buildings, a noble drive along cliffs eaten into a hundred fantastic
+shapes by the waves, and shops for the sale of shells, and its summer
+boarders, who become, with change of seasons, winter boarders in turn.
+Thence finally to the long-anticipated Monterey.
+
+[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD MONTEREY.]
+
+Here at last was something to commend from the point of view of the
+picturesque without reservation. Monterey has a population which still,
+in considerable part, speaks Spanish only. It retains the impress of
+the Spanish domination, and little else. When you are told in your own
+country that somebody does not speak English, you naturally infer that
+it is brokenly, or only a little. But at Monterey it means absolutely
+not a word. There are Spanish signs on the shops, and even Spanish
+advertisements, as, for instance, the _Wheeler & Wilson Maquinas á
+Coser_, on the fences.
+
+My Mexican experience was a liberal education for Monterey, and I made
+the most of it. I was taken to call upon an ancient _señorita_, in whose
+history there was some romance.
+
+“_Las rosas son muy secas_”—(“The roses are very dry”) she said,
+apologetically, as we entered her little garden, laid out in regular
+parallelograms, behind an adobe wall topped with red tiles. Large yellow
+and red roses were blowing to pieces in the wind before her long, low
+adobe house.
+
+_She_ was one of those who spoke no English. It seems as if there were
+some wilful perversity in it, after having been since 1846 a part of the
+most bustling State of the most active country in the world. It seems as
+if it must be some lingering hatred of the American. But the _señorita_
+is far too gentle for that. There is, perhaps, no reason beyond a general
+mental inertness by virtue of which the Mexican survivors have suffered
+all their other interests as well as this to go by the board.
+
+The _señorita_ is a little, thin old lady of fifty. Her romance was with
+an American officer, it is said, thirty years ago, and she has never
+since married, but has withered, like her roses, at Monterey.
+
+As seen from a distance, scattered loosely and white on the
+forest-crested slope of the fine bay, the little city, which has now
+perhaps two thousand inhabitants, does not show its unlikeness to other
+places. But when entered it consists almost exclusively of whitewashed
+adobe houses, and the straggling, mud-colored walls of enclosures, for
+animals, known as “corrals.” Many of them are vacant. At frequent
+intervals is encountered too some abandoned old adobe barracks, or
+government house, or military prison of historic fame, with its whitewash
+gone, holes in its walls, and bits of broken grating and balcony hanging
+aimlessly on, waiting only the first opportunity to let go.
+
+[Illustration: LOOKOUT STATION.]
+
+The travellers of my youth had a fashion of talking glibly of adobe,
+without explaining what adobe was. Let me not be guilty of the same
+error. Adobe is bricks made of about twice the usual size, and dried in
+the sun instead of being baked. Walls are made of great thickness, in
+order that, though outside and inside crumble off, there may be a good
+deal left. Like a number of other things, it stands very well while not
+assailed; and in this climate it is rarely assailed by violent extremes
+of temperature.
+
+The typical adobe house of the best class is stuccoed and whitewashed. It
+is large on the ground, two stories in height, and has verandas. Again,
+it is of but one story, with an interior court-yard. It has green doors
+and shutters, and green, turned posts, in what we now call the “Queen
+Anne style,” and it is comfortable and home-like to look at.
+
+One of them contains the first piano ever introduced into California,
+and the owners are people who made haste to sell out their all at San
+Francisco and invest it here, in order to reap the greater prosperity
+which was thought to be waiting upon Monterey. Two old iron guns stand
+planted as posts at the corners of the dwelling. In front of others are
+some walks neatly made of the vertebræ of whales, taken by the Monterey
+Whaling Company. The company is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men,
+chiefly Portuguese, of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the
+hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They pursue their
+avocation from the shore in boats, with plenty of adventure and no small
+profit.
+
+Monterey, which is now not even a county seat, was the Spanish capital of
+the province from the time it was thought necessary to have a capital.
+The missionary father, Junipero Serra, came here from Mexico in the year
+1770. It was next a Mexican capital under eleven successive governors.
+Then it became the American capital, the first port of entry, the scene
+of the first Constitutional Convention of the State, and an outfitting
+point for the southern mines. Money in those early days was so plenty, I
+have heard tell, that store-keepers hardly stopped to count it, but threw
+it under the counter in bushelfuls.
+
+[Illustration: CUTTING UP THE WHALE.]
+
+A secret belief in the ultimate revival of Monterey seems always to
+survive in certain quarters, like that in the reappearance of Barbarossa
+from the Kylfhäuser Berg, or the restoration of the Jews. Breakwaters
+have been ambitiously talked of, and it is said that the bay could be
+made a harbor and shipping-point and the rival of San Francisco.
+
+The only step toward such revival as yet is a fine hotel, built by the
+Southern Pacific railroad, which may make it, instead of Santa Cruz,
+across the Bay, the leading sea-side resort. Though not so grandiose a
+direction as some others, this is really the one in which the peculiar
+conditions of the old capital are most likely to tell. The summer boarder
+can get a tangible pleasure out of its historic remains and traditions of
+greatness, though they be good for nothing else. The Hotel del Monte is a
+beautiful edifice, not surpassed by that of any American watering-place,
+and unequalled in the charming groves of live-oak and pine and profusion
+of cultivated flowers by which it is surrounded, and the air of comfort
+combined with its elegant arrangements.
+
+This is the way with our friends of the Pacific coast. If they do not
+always stop to follow Eastern ideas and patterns, when they really
+attempt something in the same line, they are as likely as not to do it a
+great deal better.
+
+The climate at Monterey, according to statistical tables, is remarkably
+even. The mean temperature is 52° in January and 58° in July. This
+strikes one as rather cool for bathing, but the mode is to bathe in
+the tanks of a large bath-house, to which sea-water is introduced,
+artificially warmed, instead of in the sea itself.
+
+[Illustration: THE HOTEL DEL MONTE, MONTEREY.]
+
+In other respects the place seems nearly as desirable at one time of the
+year as another. The quaint town is always there; and the wild rocks,
+with their gossiping gulls and pelicans; and the drives through the
+extensive forests. There are varieties of pine and cypress—the latter
+like the Italian stone-pine—peculiar to Monterey. The more venerable
+trees, hoary with age and hanging moss, are contorted into all the
+fantastic shapes of Doré’s “Inferno.” They grow by preference on the most
+savage points of rock, and the wild breakers toss handfuls of spray up to
+them high in the air, in amity and greeting.
+
+[Illustration: CLIFFS AND FOREST AT MONTEREY.]
+
+Along the beach on this far-away point of the Pacific Ocean we find a
+Chinese fishing settlement. Veritable Celestials, without a word of
+English among them, have pasted the usual crimson papers of hieroglyphics
+on shanty residences. They burn tapers before their gods on the quay, and
+fish for a living in just such junks and small boats as may be seen at
+Hong-Kong and Canton. They prepare avallonia meat and avallonia shells
+for their home market. One had rather thought of the Chinese element as
+confined to San Francisco alone, but it is a feature of quaint interest
+throughout all of Southern California.
+
+At Monterey is found an old mission of the delightfully ruinous sort. It
+is in the little Carmel Valley, which is bare and brown again, after the
+green woods are passed, four miles from the town. The mission fathers
+once had here ninety thousand cattle, and other things to correspond.
+There are now only some vestiges, resembling earth-works, of their
+extensive adobe walls, and, on a rise overlooking the sea, the yellowish,
+low, _rococo_ church of San Carlos.
+
+[Illustration: CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE.]
+
+[Illustration: SAN CARLOS’S-DAY AT THE OLD MISSION.]
+
+The Mexican traditions in design and proportion accompanied them here,
+but the workmanship as they went farther from home became curiously
+rude, and speaks of the disadvantages under which it was done. A dome
+of concrete on the bell-tower is unequally bulged; a star window in
+the front has very irregular points. The interior does not yield, as a
+picture of sentimental ruin, to Muckross Abbey or any broken temple of
+the Roman Campagna. The roof, open now to the sky, with grasses and wild
+mustard growing from its crevices, was of stone arches, supplemented with
+timber-work tied with raw-hides. The whole body of the church—pilasters,
+capitals, frieze, and all—is set on a curve springing from the floor—a
+peculiarity I have never seen elsewhere. There are grasses growing
+within, sculptured stones tumbled down, vestiges of a tile pavement,
+tombs, bits of fresco, and over all the autograph scribblings of a myriad
+of A. B. Smiths and J. B. Joneses, visitors here in their time like
+ourselves.
+
+[Illustration: DRYING FISH AT CHINESE VILLAGE.]
+
+Once a year, on St. Charles’s-day, in early November, a memorial service
+is held, attended by all the shabby Spanish-Indian life remaining in
+the country round about. The place is unique. It seems even more lonely
+than ruins of the same kind in the mother country, through standing amid
+surroundings of such a different class. Nothing is more conducive to
+pensiveness of a pleasant kind than, lying within this ruined enclosure,
+to watch the waving in the wind of the long grasses on its walls and
+listen to the plash of the sea on the shore, but a few steps distant.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+_A WONDROUS VALLEY, AND A DESERT THAT BLOSSOMS LIKE THE ROSE._
+
+
+I.
+
+The Yosemite, currently spoken of as the “Valley,” is comprised in the
+belt formed by drawing lines across the State from San Francisco and
+Monterey respectively. It is a wild, strange nook among the Sierras,
+one of the few places not only not disappointing, but worthy of far
+more praise than has ever been bestowed upon it. It is like one of
+those mysterious regions on the outskirts of the fairy-land of the
+story-books—a standing resource of adventure to all the characters who
+enter it, and it is proper enough that our earthly Paradise of Southern
+California should have such a region of enchantment also adjoining it.
+
+I reached it by stage-ride of sixty miles, from the Southern Pacific
+Railroad, at Madera, to Clark’s Station, and thence by stage and
+horseback of twenty-five miles to the Valley. The autumn days were lovely
+there. The foliage, turned by a local climate quite as severe as that of
+New England, glowed with a vivid richness. The Merced River, a gentle
+stream, pursuing a devious way in the bottom, which is as level as a
+floor, reflected the color from many a mirror-like pool and sudden bend.
+Walls of rock rise on either hand to an elevation of three-quarters of
+a mile, varying from one-half to one-eighth of a mile in width. It is
+rather a chasm than a valley. At night the radiance of a full yellow
+moon invested all its wonders with an added enchantment. The cliffs are
+exactly what we think cliffs ought to be, but what they seldom are. They
+are of the hardest granite, pleasantly gray in color, and terminate in
+castle and dome like forms. The precipices are sheer and unbroken to
+the base, with almost none of those slopes of _débris_ that detract
+from precipices in general. It is a little valley suitable, without a
+hair’s-breadth alteration, to the purposes of any giant, enchanter, or
+yellow dwarf of them all. It is such scenery as Doré has imagined for the
+“Idyls of the King.” One half feels himself a Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain,
+riding along this lovely and majestic mountain trail; and as if he should
+wear chain-armor, a winged helmet, and a sword upon which he had sworn to
+do deeds of redoubtable valor.
+
+It was the coast valleys and some coast towns that we took on our first
+journey. This time we have come down the main line of the Southern
+Pacific Railway through the central plain of the State. The railway is
+traced along the great central valley known as the San Joaquin, on a line
+nearly midway between the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast Range.
+
+The road is still comparatively new, and the settlements have attained no
+great dimensions. It did not as a rule touch at the older towns existing,
+but pursued a direct course through a country where all had to be opened
+up. As some of the places passed by were of considerable size no little
+dissatisfaction ensued, and the mutterings are still heard. Frequent
+mention of this grievance is heard by the traveller through Southern
+California. Some of the neglected places even maintain that they would
+have been better without any railroad at all. References are thrown out
+to former glories of a dazzling sort which it is sometimes difficult to
+credit, though a railroad naturally effects great innovations in trade.
+To the ordinary observer it would appear that the introduction of a
+splendidly equipped railway, even if it distribute its blessings a little
+unequally at first, and its tariff be high, must be a great and permanent
+advantage to everything remote as well as near. For the first time an
+adequate means has been afforded for the transport of immigrants and
+supplies through the whole length of the State.
+
+The Southern Pacific Railway has completed connections which give it a
+transcontinental route from San Francisco, across Arizona, New Mexico,
+and Texas, to New Orleans. Immigrants are to be brought in by steamer
+from Liverpool to New Orleans, and thence by rail at a rate not to exceed
+that to the central West. The fares to California heretofore have been
+almost prohibitive, which is one of the reasons why so rich a country
+contains as yet less than a million of people. The languid movement
+hither of the valuable class of immigration which pours into the West,
+though ascribed by some alarmists to the presence of the Chinese, is
+due to the cost of travel and the lack of cheap lands for settlement.
+The Chinese are certainly not rivals in the matter of land, since they
+acquire little or none of it.
+
+The new opportunities opened to transportation, the depression of the
+mining interest, and rapid increase of the Chinese, have awakened of late
+an exceptional interest in white immigration. A committee of some of the
+most prominent persons in the State has opened an inquiry into the most
+effectual means of promoting it. It will no doubt set forth more clearly
+than has ever been done before an account of such territory as is open to
+settlers, whether offered by the government, the railroads, or the great
+ranches, its advantages and the methods of reaching it.
+
+It seems a little singular at first that lack of suitable lands can be
+adduced as a reason for lack of population in so vast a region, with
+the climate and other natural advantages of which so much has been
+said. It can only be understood by taking into account the unusual
+atmospheric dryness, and the important part played by water, which
+has to be brought upon the soil by costly contrivances; The locations
+where there is sufficient natural moisture for the maturing of crops
+are of small extent. They were among the first taken up. In much of
+the central and southern portions of the State the annual rain-fall is
+almost infinitesimal in quantity. At Bakersville, the capital of Kern
+County—whither our journey presently leads us—it is no more than from
+two to four inches. Light crops of grain and pasturage for stock may
+occasionally be got even under these conditions, but the only certain
+reliance is irrigation.
+
+The springs and small streams were early appreciated at their value,
+and seized upon by persons who controlled with them great tracts of
+surrounding country, valueless except as watered from these sources.
+These tributary tracts are used chiefly as cattle and sheep ranges. A
+person owning five thousand acres will often have for his stock the free
+run of twenty thousand more. Cultivation is confined to the springs and
+water-courses, and becomes a succession of charming oases in a desert the
+superficial sterility of which is phenomenal.
+
+The tenure of land by thousands of acres under a single ownership is a
+tradition from the Spanish and Mexican times. It has been much decried,
+as a great evil, and it is said that the State would be much more
+prosperous in a series of small farms. This is probably true, and the
+system as it exists may be ascribed in part to the greed of individuals,
+but it arises principally out of the natural features of the country.
+The wealth of the large holders alone enables them to undertake works of
+improvement, such as canal-making, drainage, and tree-planting, on an
+effectual scale. Perhaps the State will have to lend its assistance, and
+establish a public system of irrigation and drainage, before the land can
+be fully prepared for the small settler.
+
+Water! water! water! How to slake the thirst of this parched, brown
+country, and turn it over to honest toil and thrift, is the great
+problem as we go southward, and the processes of irrigation are the most
+distinctive marks upon the landscape wherever it is improved.
+
+
+II.
+
+It is in early November that we begin to traverse the long San Joaquin
+Valley from Lathrop Junction, just below Stockton, southward. The side
+tracks of the railroad are crowded with platform-cars laden with wheat
+for the sea-board. The “elevator” system is not yet in use, and the grain
+is contained in sacks for convenient handling.
+
+Hereabouts are some of the most famous wheat ranches. A man will plough
+but a single furrow a day on his farm, but this may be twenty miles long.
+There is sufficient rain-fall for the cereals, but not for the more
+exacting crops. The land gives but few bushels to the acre under the
+easy system of farming, but it must be remembered that there are a great
+many acres. The stubble of the grain-fields is whitened with wild-fowl.
+At a way-station a small rustic in an immense pair of boots goes over to
+a pool and blazes away with a shot-gun. Presently he returns, dragging
+by the necks an immense pair of wild-geese, almost beyond his strength
+to pull. The tawny color of the fields, and the great formal stacks of
+straw piled up in them, recall some aspects of the central table-land of
+Mexico. Many or spacious buildings are not necessary in the mild, dry
+climate of California. The prosperous ranches have, in consequence, a
+somewhat thin, unfurnished appearance compared with Eastern farms.
+
+The most prominent object at each station is a long, low warehouse of
+the company, for the accommodation of grain. Like the station buildings
+generally it is painted Indian red, in “metallic” paint. The station
+of Merced is one of the two principal points of departure for the
+Yosemite Valley, Madera the other. At Merced an immense wooden hotel,
+for travellers bound to the Valley, overshadows the rest of the town. It
+rises beside the track, and the town is scattered back on the plain.
+
+At Madera appears the end of a V-shaped wooden aqueduct, or flume,
+for rafting down lumber from the mountains fifty miles away to a
+planing-mill. Some of the hands also occasionally come down the flume
+in temporary boats. As the speed is prodigious these voyages abound in
+excitement and peril. The structure, supported on trestles, according to
+the formation of the ground, stretches away in interminable perspective
+to the mountains, which are rose-pink and purple at sunset. The scene is
+suggestive of the Roman Campagna, with this slight, essentially American
+work as a parody of the broken aqueducts and temples of the classic
+ancients. The lumber flume, however, is a bold and costly enterprise,
+though we be prone to smile at it.
+
+By degrees we draw away from the wheat ranches, more and more on the
+uncultivated plain. The town of Fresno, two hundred miles below San
+Francisco, and about midway between two important streams, the San
+Joaquin and Kings Rivers, is in the midst of a particularly desolate
+tract, known, up to a very recent period, as the San Joaquin Desert. One
+should alight here. There is no better place for examining the marvellous
+capabilities of a soil which appears at first sight inhospitable to
+the last degree. Fresno is in the hands of enterprising persons, who
+push and advertise it very actively. We heard at San Francisco of the
+Fresno Colony, the Central Colony, American Colony, Scandinavian Colony,
+Temperance Colony, Washington Colony, and others of similar names
+clustered around Fresno. It is advertised as one of those genial places,
+alluring to the imagination of most of us, where one can sit down under
+his own vine and fig-tree, secure from the vicissitudes of climate, and
+find a profitable occupation open to him in the cultivation of the soil,
+and all at a moderate cost.
+
+The aspect of things on alighting is very different from what had been
+expected, but all the substantial advantages claimed seemed realized, and
+the process of founding a home may be witnessed in all its stages.
+
+The town has a population of two thousand, most of which it has gained
+in the past five years. It is set down on the east side of the railroad
+highway, with a thin scattering of foliage slightly veiling the formality
+of its lines. It consists of a few streets of two-story wooden and brick
+buildings. The streets cross one another at right angles, and have
+planked sidewalks. A slight eminence above the general level is the site
+of the County Court-house, which somewhat resembles an Italian villa in
+design, and has Italian cypresses in front. The court-houses of half a
+dozen counties down the line, from Modesto, the capital of Stanislaus, to
+Bakersfield, capital of Kern, are identical in pattern, so that it is
+both typical of its kind and evidence of an economical spirit.
+
+[Illustration: COURT-HOUSE AT FRESNO.]
+
+A sharp distinctness of outline is characteristic of these cities of the
+plain. Separated from the main part of Fresno by the railroad, as by a
+wide boulevard, is a row of low wooden houses and shops, as clearly cut
+out against the desert as bathing-houses on a beach. This is the Chinese
+quarter. It tells at a glance the story of the peculiar people who tenant
+it: the social ostracism on the one hand, and their own indomitable
+clannishness on the other.
+
+There is now hardly any hamlet so insignificant, even in the wastes
+of Arizona, that the Chinese have not penetrated it, in search of
+labor and opportunities. Every settlement of the Pacific slope has its
+Chinese quarter, as mediæval towns had their Ghetto for the Jews. It
+is not always without the place, as at Fresno; but, wherever it be, it
+constitutes a close corporation and a separate unit. In dress, language,
+and habits of life it adheres to Oriental tradition with all the
+persistence the new conditions will admit.
+
+The Celestials do not introduce their own architecture, and they build
+little but shanties. They adapt what they find to their own purposes, as
+has been said, distinguishing them with such devices that the character
+of the dwellers within cannot be mistaken.
+
+A great incongruity is felt between the little Yankee wooden dwellings
+and the tasselled lanterns, gilded signs, and hieroglyphics upon red and
+yellow papers with which they are profusely overspread. Here Ah Coon
+and Sam Sing keep laundries like the Chinese laundry the world over.
+Yuen Wa advertises himself as a contractor for laborers. Hop Ling, Sing
+Chong, and a dozen others have miscellaneous stores. In their windows are
+junk-shaped slippers, opium pipes, bottles of _saki_, rice-brandy, dried
+fish, goose livers, gold and silver jewelry, and packets of face-powder
+and hair ornaments for the women. The pig-tailed merchants themselves sit
+within, on odd-looking chests and budgets, and gossip in animated cackle
+with customers, or figure up their profits gravely in brown-paper books,
+with a brush for a pen. Women—much more numerous in proportion to the
+men than is commonly supposed—occasionally waddle by. Their black hair
+is very smoothly greased, and kept in place by long silver pins. They
+wear wide jackets and pantaloons of a cheap black “paper cambric,” which
+increase the natural awkwardness of their short and ungainly figures.
+
+Up-stairs, in unpainted, cobwebby, second stories, are the joss-houses.
+Here hideous but decorative idols grin as serenely as if in the centre of
+their native Tartary, and as if there were no spires of little Baptist
+and Methodist meeting-houses rising indignantly across the way. Pastilles
+burn before the idols, and crimson banners are draped about; and there
+are usually a few pieces of antique bronze upon which the eye of the
+connoisseur rests enviously.
+
+Other interiors are cabarets, which recall those of the French
+working-classes. A boisterous animation reigns within. The air is thick
+with tobacco-smoke of the peculiar Chinese odor. Games of dominoes are
+played with magpie-like chatter by excited groups around long, wooden
+tables. Most of those present wear the customary blue cotton blouse and
+queer little black soft hat, and all have queues, which either dangle
+behind or are coiled up like the hair of women. Some, however—teamsters,
+perhaps here only temporarily—are dressed in the slop clothing and
+cowhide boots of ordinary white laborers.
+
+The Chinamen are servants in the camps, the ranches, and the houses
+of the better class, track-layers and section hands on the railroad,
+and laborers in the factories and fields. What Southern California, or
+California generally, could do without them it is difficult to see. They
+seem, for the most part, capable, industrious, honest, and neat. One
+divests himself rapidly of the prejudice against them with which he may
+have started. Let us hope that laborers of the better class, by whom they
+are to be succeeded, may at least have as many praiseworthy traits.
+
+The town of Fresno is as yet chiefly a supply and market point for the
+numerous colonies by which it is environed. These colonies straggle out
+in various directions, beginning within a mile or two of the town. The
+intervening land still lies in its natural condition for settlement. It
+is difficult to convey an idea of its seemingly hopeless barrenness.
+Instead of complaining of dry grass here one would be grateful for
+a blade of grass of any kind. The surface is as arid as that of a
+gravelled school-yard. It is even worse, for it is undermined with holes
+of gophers, owls, jack-rabbits, and squirrels. To ride at any speed is
+certain to bring one to grief through the entangling of his horse’s legs
+in these pitfalls. As the traveller passes there is a scampering on all
+sides. The gray squirrels speed for their holes with flying leaps, the
+jack-rabbits with kangaroo-like bounds. They run toward us, if they
+chance to have been absent from home in an opposite direction. Not one
+considers himself safe from our clearly malicious designs till he has
+dived headlong into his own proper tenement.
+
+Here and there are tracts white with alkali. Flakes of this substance,
+at once bitter and salt to the taste, can be taken up in an almost pure
+condition. Elsewhere we pass through tracts of wild sunflower—a tall
+weed, charming in flower, but now thoroughly desiccated, and rattling
+together like dry bones.
+
+This description applies, for the greater part of the year, not only to
+Fresno, but in an almost equal degree to Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and
+nearly the whole of Southern California. Without it the wonders which
+have been produced by human agency could not be understood. The face of
+nature in all this district was a blank sheet of paper. The cultivator
+had absolutely everything to do. He discovered on trial that he had a
+soil of remarkable capacity, and, with the aid of water and the genial
+climate, he could draw from it whatever he pleased.
+
+Water is the salvation of the waste places, and makes the desert blossom
+like the rose. One’s respect for this pleasant element is, if possible,
+increased upon seeing what it is here capable of. It seems that, if used
+with sufficient art, it might almost draw a crop from cast-iron. The
+vegetation of Southern California is thoroughly artificial. It consists
+of a series of scattered plantations created by the use of water. In
+these the traveller finds his flowers, palms, vineyards, and orange
+groves, and, burying himself among them, like the ostrich with its head
+in the sand, he may refuse briefly to recognize that there is anything
+else; but, as a matter of fact, only a small beginning has been made.
+What has been done, however, is an earnest of what can be done. It is
+found that, as irrigation is practised, the land stores up part of the
+water, and less is needed each year. In wells, too, the water is found
+nearer the surface, proving that the soil acts as a natural reservoir.
+As time goes on, and canals and vegetation increase, no doubt important
+climatic changes may be looked for. In the end Southern California may be
+as different from what it is at present as can be imagined.
+
+The several Fresno colonies for the most part join one another, and form
+a continuous belt of cultivation. On entering their confines the change
+is most agreeable. Close along-side the desert, the home of the gopher
+and jack-rabbit, only separated from it by a narrow ditch of running
+water, are lovely vineyards, orchards of choice fruits, ornamental
+flowers and shrubs, avenues of shade-trees, fields of corn, and green
+pastures of the alfalfa, a tall and strong clover, which gives half
+a dozen crops a year. Embowered among these are the homes of happy
+families, larger establishments for the drying of fruits and converting
+the munificent crops of grapes into wine. Many of the homes are as yet
+but modest wooden cottages. Others, of a better class, are of adobe,
+treated in an ornamental way, with piazzas and Gothic gables.
+
+The most important residence is that of a late member of the San
+Francisco Stock Board, who has gone into the cultivation of grapes here
+on a large scale. It is a handsome villa that would do credit to any
+town. The improvements of the Barton place were in but an incipient
+state at the time of our visit. A great array of young vines brightened
+the recently sterile soil, but timidly and as if not quite certain of
+approval. Young orange and lemon trees in the door-yard were muffled
+in straw till they should have gained a greater hardihood to withstand
+the frosts. Elsewhere water was being run out from irrigating ditches
+over fields in preparation for the first time. It is the custom to soak
+them, in order that they may be perfectly levelled. Knolls or any other
+inequalities must not be left to hinder the equal distribution of water
+to the crop. A wide canal stretched back from the numerous out-buildings
+toward the horizon. On the verge of the wide plain showed the blue
+Sierras, veiled by a slight chronic dustiness of the atmosphere.
+
+[Illustration: PRIVATE RESIDENCE AT FRESNO.]
+
+In the more established portions of the colonies some charming bits
+of landscape are found. The Chinese farm-hand wears a blue blouse and
+a wide basket-hat which he calls _mow_. He pronounces this hat “heap
+good” if complimented upon it. He prunes the vines or collects the
+generous clusters of grapes; or else he digs a vegetable garden by the
+side of a canal, in which himself, his vegetables, his cabin, a row of
+poplar-trees, and the blue sky overhead are all reflected together.
+Poplars, willows, and cottonwoods are planted along the canals to
+strengthen their banks. At Eisen’s wine-making place, for a considerable
+distance, oleanders in flower are seen spaced between the trees. The
+water runs clear and swift. At Eisen’s it turns a mill. No doubt devices
+for bathing in it might also be contrived if desired.
+
+The long, symmetrical lines of trees have a foreign, or at least
+un-American, air. It is not difficult to recall to mind the mulberries
+and elms that bend over the irrigating canals of Northern Italy and drop
+their yellow leaves upon them in autumn like these. It might be Lombardy
+again, and the glimpses of distant blue the Alps instead of the Sierras.
+The locks and gates for the water are of an ephemeral structure as yet,
+made of planking instead of substantial brick and stone. The smaller
+ditches are often stopped with mere bits of board let down into grooves,
+instead of gates with handles. It is urged, however, that handles offer
+inducement to idlers to lift them up out of pure mischief, and waste the
+water.
+
+The colonies are not quite colonies in the usual sense; that is to say,
+they were not founded by persons who combined together and came at one
+and the same time. The lands they occupy were distributed into parcels by
+an original owner, and, after being provided with water facilities by an
+irrigation company, put upon the market at the disposal of whoever would
+buy. No doubt a certain general consistency rules them in keeping with
+the names respectively set up, but it is not rigorous. Probably nothing
+need prevent a native American from joining the Scandinavian Colony, or a
+Scandinavian the American Colony, should he desire to do so.
+
+As to the Temperance Colony, it must be sorely tried in a locality the
+most liberal and profitable yield of which is the wine grape. It seems
+hardly a propitious place to have chosen. Scoffers say that in some
+instances while settlers will not make wine themselves they will sell
+their grapes to the wine-making establishments. This I merely note as
+“important, if true.”
+
+The standard twenty-acre lot, as prepared for market at Fresno, has its
+main irrigating ditch, of perhaps four feet in width, connecting with
+the general irrigating system. For twelve and a half dollars a year it
+receives a water-right entitling it to the use of whatever water it may
+need. The buyer must make his own minor ditches, and prepare his ground
+from this point. He usually aims to establish in his fields a number of
+slightly differing levels, that the water may be led to one after the
+other. For ground in the preliminary condition described about fifty
+dollars per acre is demanded. Most of the earlier settlers bought for
+less, and the price named strikes one as high, considering the newness
+of the country, and the excellent farming land to be had in the older
+parts of the country for less. Prices are less here, however, than at Los
+Angeles, Riverside, or San Diego, farther south.
+
+It is argued in answer to objectors that though land be not nominally it
+is really cheap, in consideration of its extraordinary productiveness.
+It is held that an investment here gives better returns than anywhere,
+and at the same time that the climate and other conditions promise a more
+pleasurable existence than could be enjoyed elsewhere. This Fresno land,
+for instance, yields four and five crops of alfalfa a year. Vineyards
+planted but two and a half years are shown which produce five tons of
+grapes to the acre. Five years is the period required for the vines to
+come into full bearing. It is estimated that an acre of vines in that
+condition will have cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars, allowing
+fifty dollars as the price of the ground, and it is then counted upon
+for an annual yield of ten tons of grapes, at twenty dollars a ton. The
+rate of growth in vegetation is one of the things to note. Fruit-trees
+are said to advance as far in three years as in seven on the Eastern
+sea-board.
+
+The personal stories of the colonists are often interesting. They have
+generally had some previous hard experience of the world. Such a man,
+working sturdily in the field preparing the ground around a new cottage
+of his own, lost a fortune in the San Francisco Stock Board. The funds
+for his present enterprise were provided by his wife, who had turned to
+keeping boarders, and sent him her small profits monthly until he should
+have made ready a place for their joint occupancy. Instances were heard
+of where nice properties had been secured with no other original capital
+than a pair of brawny hands. These, however, were exceptional. The
+country appears to be one where it is most desirable for the new-comer to
+have a small capital.
+
+In the Central Colony a comfortable estate was owned by four spinster
+school-teachers of San Francisco. They had combined to purchase eighty
+acres. One of them lived on the place and managed it. The others
+contributed from their earnings until it had reached a paying basis,
+passed only their vacations there at present, but looked forward to
+making it their ultimate retreat.
+
+The idea seems both a praiseworthy new departure in the direction of
+female emancipation and charming in itself. I had the pleasure of
+making the acquaintance of the resident manager of the experiment. Her
+experiences, written out, would, I think, be interesting and instructive.
+There was an open piano in the pleasant cottage interior, and late books
+and magazines were scattered about. It was a bit of refined civilization
+dropped down in the midst of the desert.
+
+This lady had come, she said, for rest. She took pleasure, too, in
+the country, and in seeing things grow. She had made mistakes in her
+management at first, mainly through trusting too much to others, but now
+had things in good control. Four farm-hands—Chinamen—were employed. The
+eighty acres were distributed into vineyard, orchard, and alfalfa, about
+one-half devoted to the vineyard. Its product was turned, not into wine,
+but raisins. Apricots and nectarines had been found up to this time the
+most profitable orchard fruits. Almonds were less so, owing to the loss
+of time in husking them for market. There was among other crops a field
+of Egyptian corn, a variety which grows tall and slender, and runs up to
+a bushy head instead of forming ears. The sight of it carried one back to
+the Biblical story of Joseph and his brethren, and the picture-writing in
+the Pyramids.
+
+The grapes for raisin-making are of the sweet Muscat variety. There
+was a “raisin-house” piled full of the flat boxes in which raisins are
+traditionally packed. The process of raisin-making is very simple. The
+bunches of grapes are cut from the vines, and laid in trays in the open
+fields. They are left there, properly turned at intervals, for a matter
+of a fortnight. There are neither rains nor dews to dampen them and
+delay the curing. Then they are removed to an airy building known as a
+“sweat-house,” where they remain possibly a month, till the last vestiges
+of moisture are gone. Hence they go to be packed and shipped to market.
+
+One must walk rather gingerly at present not to discern through the young
+and scattering plantations the bareness beyond, but in another ten years
+the scene can hardly fail to be one of rich luxuriance. The site is flat
+and prairie-like, and I should prefer, for my part, to locate my earthly
+Paradise nearer the hills. Still, the taste of the time runs to earthly
+Paradises which are at the same time shrewd commercial ventures, and the
+cultivation of the plain is much easier than that of the slopes.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+_VISALIA, BAKERSFIELD, AND LIFE ON A SPACIOUS RANCH._
+
+
+I.
+
+Visalia, capital of Tulare County, thirty-four miles south of Fresno, is
+one of the older towns left aside by the railroad. I put it in the most
+obvious way, but a patriotic Visalian, on the other hand, said to me with
+warmth, “Left by the railroad! Visalia left by the railroad! I guess not.
+It is the railroad that is left by Visalia, as it will find out.”
+
+Visalia is reached, from the junction of Goshen, by a short branch-road
+of its own. It is larger than Fresno, but less animated. It has perhaps
+twenty-five hundred people, a court-house of the pattern described, and a
+United States land-office.
+
+When the epithet “old” is used of any California town not of Spanish
+origin it simply means an approximation to the year 1849. The building
+of most hoary antiquity in Visalia dates only from the year 1852. It has
+been government-house, jail, and store in turn, and is now decorated
+with the legend “Mooney’s Brewery.” The town was founded by one Vise,
+an erratic person, who came across the plains from Texas, and had
+followed in his life such various professions, besides that of pioneer,
+as preacher, trader, gambler, foot-racer, and jockey. It happened that
+the quarter section of land upon which he settled was at the time
+unsurveyed, and not legally open to pre-emption. This irregularity was
+not discovered till years later, when the town had grown up on the site.
+It was brought to light by an employé of the land-office, who thereupon
+ingeniously undertook to pre-empt the ground for himself.
+
+[Illustration: FIRST BUILDING IN VISALIA.]
+
+“And what came of this bold attempt upon vested interests?”
+
+“The party was promptly fired out of town,” was the reply.
+
+Visalia is rather prolific in stories, if an “old-timer” of the right
+sort can be happened up to tell them. Cattle kings, whose herds once
+filled the San Joaquin Valley, have retired hither. You may hear how
+Cattle King “Pat Murray” won his wife. She was a fascinating person
+in her youth, the daughter of a landlady with whom Pat Murray, then
+struggling and impecunious, boarded, in company with numerous mates.
+There was great aspiration and rivalry for her hand. Pat Murray stole a
+march in this wise. As they were setting off in company on an expedition
+he said, “The trip is a rough and dangerous one, boys. I propose that we
+leave our money and valuables with the old lady for safe-keeping.” The
+rest agreed, and handed over to him their property to deliver to her. The
+shrewd Pat Murray represented it all as his own, and obtained in this
+way such consideration in her eyes—as a person exceptionally well-to-do
+in the world—that she advised her daughter to “set her cap” at him, and
+all was happily accomplished before the _ruse_ was discovered.
+
+On another occasion—whether in this same courtship or not the chronicles
+do not say—Pat Murray disposed of rivals, who visited in the evenings
+a comely damsel of the general acquaintance, by soft-soaping the log
+serving as approach to her cabin across a small stream. Having thus
+arranged, he sat calmly enjoying the fair one’s society, and listening
+with appreciative ear to the splash of the successive victims as they
+slid off into the water.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD-TIMER.]
+
+Stories are told of Spanish bandits and treasure of precious metals in
+the mountains, and of the wild administration of justice in early times,
+when offenders were occasionally executed first and sentenced afterward.
+
+The first treasurer of the county is said to have carried the records
+of his office in his hat, and, being a person given to travel and of an
+absent mind, he scattered these documents far and wide behind him, even
+to the confines of Utah and Arizona.
+
+At Visalia I first observed “Spanishtown,” a community which begins to
+appear regularly along-side of “Chinatown” as we go southward. It is
+composed of persons of Mexican blood, poor, shiftless, and not always of
+the most reputable character.
+
+Charming views of the high Sierras, now powdered with the first snows of
+winter, are had. The surface is more rolling than at Fresno, and strewn
+with fine clumps of chestnut-oaks. There are big trees back in the great
+mountains equalling in size those of the Yosemite. Lumbermen at work
+there cut down numbers which, though insignificant as compared to the
+very largest, are monstrous in themselves.
+
+The water for the irrigation of this district is drawn out of Kings,
+Tule, and Kaweah rivers by companies, who give to their principal canals
+such names as the People’s Ditch, the Last Chance Ditch, the Mussel
+Slough Ditch, and the Lower Kings River Ditch. The main ditches or canals
+range from twelve to forty feet in width. Wing dams confine and direct
+into them such portions as are desired of the wide, meandering rivers.
+
+A California river of the south is something of a curiosity.
+Extravagantly wide, it is in compensation preposterously shallow. Only
+a few last over the dry season at all; the most evaporate and wholly
+disappear. Their dry beds, variegated by a few islets studded with
+sycamores, are more like wagon-roads than the beds of rivers. Sometimes
+these exhausted water-courses differ in color from the surrounding soil,
+and are seen stretching as rivers of gray or silvery sand through the
+general yellow of the desert.
+
+[Illustration: LOGGING, BACK OF VISALIA.]
+
+Though irrigation be yet in its infancy its belongings have attained
+great dimensions. There are three hundred miles of canals of the
+requisite size in Tulare County, and more than three thousand miles in
+California all together. One main canal, that of the San Joaquin and
+Kings River, has a length of seventy-four miles and a width of nearly
+seventy feet.
+
+
+II.
+
+A branch-road westward from Goshen, a continuation of that from Visalia,
+conveys the traveller to the bustling, fast-growing little towns of
+Hanford and Lemoore, in the Mussel Slough country. This district,
+adjoining Tulare Lake, was recently part desert and part swamp. It
+has been redeemed so as to rank now among the best farming land in
+California. Its chief product is wheat. The inhabitants raise hardly the
+vegetables needed for their own use. Malaria is rather prevalent, but it
+is said to arise, as in many other irrigated districts, from the careless
+use of water rather than the fundamental situation. The water, instead
+of being carefully drained off, is too often allowed to lie in stagnant
+pools.
+
+The Mussel Slough was the scene, in the month of May, 1880, of a bloody
+conflict between the settlers and railroad authorities which has become
+celebrated. Officers of the law, acting for new claimants, attempted
+to take possession of the land under a railroad title. Legally in the
+wrong, though perhaps morally in the right, the settlers organized to
+resist, put out stirring manifestoes, which read like the declarations
+of oppressed people struggling for their liberty, and called on gods and
+men to witness the justice of their cause. In the fight that ensued five
+settlers lost their lives, all at the hands of a single man—one Crowe, a
+United States marshal, who displayed a prowess and coolness under fire
+never surpassed in any of the narratives of sensational literature. Crowe
+himself was despatched. A number of the survivors were tried for their
+part in the affair, condemned to eight months’ imprisonment, and served
+out their term in Santa Clara jail. They had but just been released, say
+a month before our arrival. Their brethren and well-wishers had received
+them on their return with an ovation, the noise of which hardly yet
+ceased to ring in the air.
+
+
+III.
+
+Bakersfield, capital of Kern County, seventy-five miles farther south,
+somewhat smaller than Visalia, boasted at one time the distinction of
+a malady peculiar to itself. The Bakersfield form of malarial fever,
+whatever the fine difference that distinguished it from others, had a
+position apart in the medical works. The sanitary condition of the place,
+however, has been greatly improved by the extension of drainage and
+irrigation works, and can, no doubt, be made all that could be desired.
+
+Of the three lakes, Tulare, Buena Vista, and Kern, which make so large
+a showing on the map, the latter two, with their surrounding marshes,
+have been dried up, and the former is on its way to extinction also.
+These lakes had for me, on the map, a mysterious and important air. I
+seized the first opportunity to penetrate their mystery, by riding down
+to Tulare Lake on horseback. You cannot reach the margin, for fear of
+miring. Nor is the approach on foot much easier. The tules, or rushes,
+rise high above your head, and are infested with a dangerous breed of
+wild hogs, descended from vagrant deserters from the ranches. In such
+fragmentary glimpses as are had between and over the tules an expanse of
+dreary surface appears which may be either water or the alkali-whitened
+bed from which the water has receded. The vicinity swarms with wild fowl.
+Their multitudinous chatter has a kind of metallic clang in it. Now
+white, now dark, as they are before or against the sunlight, they flutter
+above the reeds and stubble-fields like autumn leaves blown by the wind.
+
+The drying up of the lakes is occasioned by the diversion of the surplus
+waters of the Kern River for the redemption of desert lands. This gave
+rise to a controversy, lately settled by a legal decision which is a
+step in the crystallization into shape of a system of water jurisdiction
+for California. The great firm of real-estate men and ranchmen, Miller &
+Lux, owned the lands below; the almost equally great firm of Haggin, Carr
+& Tevis, those, for the improvement of which the water was taken out,
+above. The first-named complained of the diversion of the waters as a
+detriment to them, and an infringement of their riparian rights. Riparian
+right, it will be remembered, in the English common law, gives to the
+resident on a stream the right to have it flow as it was wont through his
+grounds without diminution or alteration.
+
+The contest at first promised to be one of physical force. Miller & Lux
+endeavored to close the sluices at which the water was taken out. Just,
+as in Scripture, the herdsmen of Gerara strove against the herdsmen of
+Isaac, saying, “It is our water,” the hardy _vaqueros_ of Haggin, Carr
+& Tevis were mustered in opposition to them, with orders to lasso and
+throw into the canal anybody who should interfere with the sluices. This
+determined show of resistance prevented a conflict, and the case went to
+the civil courts.
+
+The decision spoken of holds that the doctrine which prevails
+in California is not that of riparian right, but that of “prior
+appropriation for beneficial uses.”
+
+That is to say, the greatest good of the greatest number is consulted.
+The point had been raised before in controversies about the diversion
+of water for mining purposes. In these cases the ruling was, that the
+doctrine of riparian right is “inapplicable, or applicable only in a very
+limited extent, to the necessity of miners, and inadequate for their
+protection.” It was farthermore held that all of the English common
+law is not in force in California, but only such portions of it as are
+adapted to the peculiar conditions of the State. The agricultural and
+mining interests, therefore, are now put, in this respect, on the same
+footing.
+
+Bakersfield takes its tone essentially from live stock. It has special
+resorts for drovers and sheep-herders. Its streets are generally full
+of horses, caparisoned in the Spanish style, tied to hitching-posts and
+awaiting their owners before the stores and taverns. The sheep-herders, a
+lonely race, become morose and melancholy in their long wanderings with
+their flocks apart from the habitations of men and human speech. They are
+far removed from the shepherds of Boucher and Watteau. Some are said to
+go insane through the monotony of their lives; and it is an occupation
+taken up only as a last resort, and unfitting him who pursues it for any
+other. Strangely enough, there is a rather English tone among them. Young
+prodigals of good family are found who, after trying their fortunes in
+Australia, India, and elsewhere, are eating the husks of repentance here
+in true Scriptural fashion.
+
+The shops in Bakersfield, as throughout our travels, are kept principally
+by the Jews, who are great pioneers. No people are growing up more
+ardently with the new West; and where they are found business is pretty
+sure to be good.
+
+The Chinatown is a district of compact little streets, of an extent that
+indicates a population almost equal to that of the rest of the place.
+An irrigating ditch surrounds it like a moat. The cabins along this,
+picturesquely reflected in it, are gray and weather-beaten, varied with
+patches of bright Orientalism, and shaded by a line of tall poplar-trees.
+The Spanishtown, close by, is a cluster of dance-houses and corrals,
+between which swarthy Josés and Juanitas are seen passing.
+
+As if this were not foreignness enough already, we stumble upon a camp
+of strolling gypsies, their tents pitched on the borders of Spanishtown.
+They are English, and have come from Australia, dropping their “h’s” all
+along the way, no doubt, as liberally as here. They are like types of
+Cruikshank and Dickens. An apple-faced Mrs. Jarley appears in a large
+velvet bonnet with plumes. A very tightly-dressed, slender individual,
+with a weed on his hat, might pass for Sam Weller. He is a horse-tamer
+and jockey. At his heels follows a belligerent bull-dog. Behind one of
+the tents a child of nine, Cassie by name, with fine, dark eyes, is
+making a toilet before a bit of cracked mirror. She pastes down her wet
+hair into a semblance of the “water-waves” of fashionable society. When
+interrupted with a compliment on the arrangement she affects displeasure,
+and tosses it all abroad again with a native coquetry.
+
+The Mrs.-Jarley-looking woman is the fortune-teller. She declares that
+there are persons whose fortunes she would not tell for twenty—no, not
+for fifty dollars.
+
+[Illustration: CHINATOWN, BAKERSFIELD.]
+
+Mine, however, through an especial liking she affects to have taken to
+me, and the dulness of trade, she promises to tell, in the most effective
+manner, for two dollars only.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The possessions of some of the great land-owners are prodigious. It is
+a favorite story that certain ones can drive a herd of cattle from the
+northern counties of the State to San Diego, its southern limit, and
+quarter them every night on their own ground. Haggin, Carr & Tevis, whose
+property I was privileged to examine in detail, have at Bakersfield four
+hundred thousand acres nearly in one body. Much of this was secured for a
+trifle in the condition of desert land, and has been redeemed.
+
+One ranchman who had acquired a great estate of this kind chiefly while
+surveyor-general of the United States was the occasion of drawing forth
+one of the best _bon mots_ of Lincoln.
+
+“I congratulate you,” said our martyred President. “You have become
+monarch of about all you have surveyed.”
+
+[Illustration: GYPSY CAMP AT BAKERSFIELD.]
+
+The owners do not often live upon their estates; they leave them in
+the hands of managers, and draw the revenues. The Haggin, Carr & Tevis
+property is divided into a number of separate ranches, each with its
+resident superintendent. The “Bellevue Ranch” is the centre and focus
+of authority. Here are the residence and office of the general manager,
+and a force of book-keepers, engineers, and mechanics, who keep the
+accounts, map, plan, supervise, construct, repair, and give to the whole
+the clock-work regularity of a great commercial enterprise. The numerous
+buildings constitute a considerable settlement. There is a “store” of
+general merchandise and supplies. A dormitory and a dining-hall have been
+erected for the laboring hands. A tower-like water-tank, surmounted by a
+wind-mill, and accommodating a milk-room below, rises at one side. There
+are shops for the mechanics, capacious barns, and long sheds filled with
+an interminable array of agricultural implements. It is worth while to
+take a walk past this collection of reapers, threshers, sulky-ploughs,
+and rakes, and study out their uses. The immense “header and separator”
+rises from the rest like a leviathan. A whole department is devoted to
+“road-scrapers,” “buck-scrapers,” and ploughs of various sorts used in
+the construction and dredging of the irrigating ditches. The soil is,
+fortunately, free from stones, and the work, for the most part, easy. One
+enormous plough is seen which was designed to be drawn by sixty yoke of
+oxen, and to cut at once a furrow five feet wide by four deep. Like the
+famous _Great Eastern_, it has defeated itself by its own mass, and its
+use has been abandoned.
+
+More than $500,000 has been expended in the item of fencing alone. An
+average of four hundred laborers is employed, and, in the harvest season,
+seven hundred. The rate of wages is from two and a half to three dollars
+per day for mechanics, and a dollar per day for common hands. This seems
+low as compared with information from other sources, and the chronic
+complaints of the scarcity of farm labor, in the California papers.
+
+No great portion of this domain appears to be in the market for settlers
+of small means, though the intention is avowed of offering some of it
+in this way when thoroughly reclaimed. Tracts, however, are occupied on
+favorable terms by “renters,” who take from 120 to 600 acres. Very many
+of these are Portuguese and Italians. They are usually unmarried, and
+work in companies of from six to fifteen persons. You see them, dark and
+swarthy, going about in the traditional Garibaldi shirt, with hardly a
+word of English among them.
+
+The renter is provided with a house, artesian well, credit to a moderate
+amount at the store, and the use of some cows. He has the milk of these,
+but must give their increase to the estate. His lease runs three years,
+and he pays in rent one-third of his crop. Instances of large profits
+are frequent among these persons, and the same opportunities are open to
+others who wish to follow their example.
+
+The superintendents and upper employés on the place are largely Southern
+men. California, was a favorite point for Southern immigration at one
+time, so much that the course of the State in the war, influenced by the
+historic Judge Terry and Senator Gwin, was considered problematical.
+These that I speak of, however, are gentlemen who have come here to
+repair their fortunes at a later period. They have for the most part
+titles from the service of the extinct Confederacy, and the gentle voices
+and friendly courtesy characteristic of the Southern type.
+
+A typical ranch-house, that, for instance, of our hospitable friend Major
+McClung, on his section of the subdivided property, is a long, two-story
+dwelling, painted in the Indian-red so popular throughout the country.
+It is raised on posts considerably above the ground, to allow of a free
+circulation of air underneath. There is an open hall through the centre
+for the same purpose. An irrigating ditch resembling a moat passes in
+front, crossed by a little rustic bridge.
+
+[Illustration: A TYPICAL RANCH-HOUSE.]
+
+Traces of alkali yet show white in the soil of orchard and garden, but do
+not prevent a plentiful growth of oleanders, roses, pear, peach, cherry,
+almond, and apricot trees. The young orange-trees were, as at Fresno,
+put up in mufflings of straw for the winter. The weather is very hot at
+noon-day, but so cool at morning and evening that wood-fires are burned.
+The chill in the air is of a penetrating kind, felt the more by contrast
+with the heat of the day, and fire is a necessity. The house-servants
+were clean, white-aproned Chinamen; those out-of-doors, Mexicans. One of
+these latter had trained a goose, “Dick,” to follow him like a pet dog,
+and nothing was more curious than to see the pride of both master and
+biped in this ridiculous relation.
+
+Cattle-raising is the leading industry; alfalfa, for carrying the stock
+over periods of scarcity, is the leading crop. Stacks of alfalfa of great
+size, one containing seven hundred tons, were seen. It is the ordinary
+color of hay externally, but when cut into is green.
+
+A successful experiment has also been made in the raising of cotton. The
+hands were in the field going about among the white pods for the second
+picking.
+
+Though out of season, a _rodeo_ was organized for our benefit, to show
+the method of handling the roving cattle on a large scale. A number of
+_vaqueros_ rode out in various directions till lost to sight. Presently
+traces of dust arose on the several horizons. The plain, on which a
+few cows had been peacefully feeding, was filled with stamping and
+lowing herds, driven toward the centre by the careering _vaqueros_.
+When gathered in sufficient numbers feats of lassoing the animals, by
+either leg or horn, separating special animals or classes, and the like,
+were undertaken, and carried through with marvellous dexterity. As a
+culmination, hats and ropes were picked up from the ground, the rider
+going at full speed. A silver half-dollar, placed on edge in the dust of
+the roadway, was seized after several attempts by a swarthy Aztec.
+
+The herders are usually Mexicans, equipped in the Mexican style, but with
+the greater part of the finery left out. The bosses, who often even excel
+them in pure horsemanship, are generally Americans.
+
+[Illustration: SAN LUIS OBISPO.]
+
+The ranch known as the Livermore borders Kern and Buena Vista Lakes,
+and is the southernmost in the tier. The herds are gathered there
+in the early spring, and driven to the ranch of San Emidio, in the
+mountains. They pick up their subsistence at San Emidio till the middle
+of September, when they are conducted back again. Such migrations from
+plain to mountain pasture, and back again, recall some features of the
+Norwegian pastoral life of Boyesen’s charming romance, “Gunnar.”
+
+At the Livermore Ranch you are at the apex of the San Joaquin Valley.
+Here the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range effect a junction, and
+oppose a natural barrier to farther progress. The railroad has to
+cross this barrier by a wonderful piece of engineering, the Tehachapi
+(Te-_hatch_-a-pe) Pass. At one place five different lengths of track pass
+and repass at different levels. By the singular “Loop” the road enters
+a tunnel, emerges, twists spirally round the mountain, and reappears
+directly above itself.
+
+At San Emidio we are on the boundary-line of San Luis Obispo
+County, and could make our way directly, no doubt, to its pretty,
+mountain-encompassed capital. This is more easily reached, however, with
+attractive Santa Barbara below, by steamer, or stage-road along the coast.
+
+Returning to Bakersfield, you may ride west to the wild cañon of the Kern
+River, and the mining towns of Kernville and Havilah. The mining industry
+has never taken the same development south of the San Joaquin River as
+north. It is probable both that there is less ore and that the ventures
+have been managed with less skill. At Kernville is a quartz-mill, with
+a hundred stamps, which after many vicissitudes has fallen into the
+hands of its former workmen for debt, and is now run by them on the
+co-operative principle.
+
+[Illustration: A RODEO.]
+
+The rolling country by which the Kern River Cañon is approached is, if
+possible, even more desolate than the plain. There is almost a necessary
+connection in our usual impressions between hills and trees, and when
+foliage is missing from hills its lack is doubly notable. An utterly
+parched, verdureless surface, with a texture like that of gravel, here
+follows all the inequalities of the ground, up hill and down dale, to the
+savage and splintered granite gorge.
+
+[Illustration: THE KERN RIVER CAÑON.]
+
+We fell in with an isolated sheep ranchman, “Captain Jack Barker,” an
+enterprising man, who had created a garden spot in the waste, and showed
+what even this is capable of. He was engaged on a project for leading the
+water, by means of a flume and ditches, from the river at the cañon’s
+mouth down upon several thousand acres of land under cultivation. In the
+spring-time, he told us, all this bareness is hidden by a perfect carpet
+of flowers, chiefly a small orange-scarlet poppy. His sheep at present
+seemed living on air. He had among them some Angora goats, a hardy
+animal, once very profitable, but now, since the decline in alpaca-goods,
+being used by him for food.
+
+The Kern River tumbles down a gorge four miles in length, between granite
+walls six hundred feet high. Its water is translucent green in deep,
+untroubled pools, again churned into milk-white floods, with black
+bowlders among them. The cañon is all but impassable. It acts like a
+funnel, and produces a local disturbance of its own on the atmosphere.
+While all around is still, a column of air will blow out of it, and,
+striking the table-land a quarter of a mile away, raise a chronic dust at
+the point of contact, like a cannon-shot.
+
+Driving across the front of it we were nearly blown out of our wagon. We
+descended into it, nevertheless, and upon this experience returned to
+dine on ribs of Captain Jack Barker’s Angora goats, and then take the
+railway and cross the Tehachapi Pass.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+_LOS ANGELES._
+
+
+I.
+
+Over the Tehachapi Pass, we are in Southern California proper. We have
+met already, it is true, with pretty Spanish names, old missions, leather
+breeches, jingling spurs, vineyards, raisin-making, and occasional orange
+and palm trees. But when the dividing mountain-range, four thousand feet
+above the sea at Tehachapi, is passed, all these are found in their
+greatest development. The country is older, the Spanish names are more
+musical; orange and lemon are not grown for ornament, but as a principal
+crop; and the climate is of that genial mildness which is most to the
+taste of seekers for health.
+
+Famed Los Angeles, City of the Angels, is the terminus of the first day’s
+journey which brings us into it. The watering-place of Santa Monica and
+the important points of San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara are not far
+distant to the west, while San Diego lies at a moderate remove to the
+southward, near the Mexican frontier. In the intervals scatter colonies
+of vine and orange growers, the numbers and dimensions of which are
+rapidly increasing.
+
+The mountain barrier across the State is deemed by some to be of such
+importance that it should be a political as well as a natural division.
+They call for the construction of a distinct new State, to be called
+South California, its capital at Los Angeles.
+
+[Illustration: TEHACHAPI PASS.]
+
+“We are different peoples,” writes one of them in the _Californian_. “We
+are different in pursuits, in tastes, manner of thought, and manner of
+life; ... our hopes and aspirations for the future are different. The
+restless, uneasy population of the North, ever drifting, without local
+attachments, has no counterpart in Southern California; neither has
+the wild spirit of mining speculation ever flourished here. With this
+peaceable life, possibly in part as a result of it, there has grown up in
+the people an intense love of their land.
+
+“And it is for their own section of the State,” he goes on, “that this
+love exists. They call themselves, not Californians, but Southern
+Californians. The feeling is intense. I can only liken it to the
+overmastering love of the old Greek for the sunny shores that lay around
+the Ægean.
+
+“For myself, I feel more and more each time that I visit the upper
+portion of the State that I am going into a strange land. And the
+impression never leaves me till upon my return I look down from the crest
+of the Tehachapi over the warm South-land.”
+
+I have thought it worth while to quote these passages, partly because
+they are amusing, partly because they accentuate the topographical
+situation, and also because they attribute a character almost the
+opposite of that which exists. Everywhere is bustle, push, and
+enterprise. This people will sell you a corner lot or quarter-section of
+land with as great a gusto as any other, and at its full value. Whatever
+effect lapse of time may have upon them, the present inhabitants, few of
+whom are born here or even drafted from indolent climes, if lotus-eaters,
+are of a very wide-awake sort.
+
+
+II.
+
+The City of the Angels is, in general, only another San José, upon a
+more hilly site. Its population must be about fourteen thousand. The
+long thoroughfare of Main Street proceeds, from the depot, at first
+through a shabby Spanish quarter, locally known as “Sonora,” consisting
+of one-story, whitewashed, adobe houses. Passing a small Spanish plaza,
+set with pointed cypresses, and the principal hotel, the Pico House, it
+becomes lined with excellent buildings of the modern pattern. Of these
+the handsome “Baker Block” is most notable. Continuing to the ornate “Los
+Angeles Bank,” Spring Street diverges at a small angle, and contributes,
+with Main Street, to give the commercial skeleton of the town the shape
+of a Y with a very long stem.
+
+On Spring Street you find a common little post-office, the municipal
+offices, and a brown, Dutch-looking, brick building, standing free,
+originally constructed for a market, and now the Court-house. If you look
+into the lobby of the small adobe jail you will find that some leisurely
+prisoner of the frescoer’s trade has converted it into a resemblance to a
+dungeon scene at the theatre. These two streets, with a shorter one, Los
+Angeles Street, parallel to Main, containing fruit and produce commission
+houses, comprise the commercial portion of the city.
+
+New buildings are seen going up; the shops are large and well-appointed,
+and placards offer, in the usual shibboleth of trade, “To Reduce Stock!”
+“At Wholesale Slaughter,” and “For the Next Sixty Days.”
+
+A serious depression afflicted Los Angeles in 1875, at the time of the
+general depression throughout the State, but that has been succeeded by
+a new reign of activity. Trim, large residences of the more prosperous
+merchants are seen in the outskirts of the town. Farther out yet these
+become villas, in the midst of plantations of orange and lemon, ruled off
+into formal plots by ditches for irrigation. The class of modest means
+abide in the side streets, in frame cottages. The German Turn-hall serves
+also the purpose of theatre for such companies as come this way.
+
+[Illustration: MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES.]
+
+It is held that Los Angeles, with its port of Wilmington, thirty
+miles away, should be now, upon the completion of the Southern Pacific
+railroad, the _entrepôt_ and Pacific terminus of a new commercial
+departure. San Francisco, it is said, has too long sat at the Golden
+Gate “levying toll on every pound of freight that passes through,” and
+this selfish greed is to be properly rebuked by the diversion of a part
+of its trade. Enthusiastic San Diego expects also to have its share. The
+wickedness of the proceeding would seem to depend largely upon who it is
+that takes the toll. Los Angeles, it is held, is to be the Lyons, and
+San Diego the Marseilles, of the State, San Francisco still remaining its
+Paris.
+
+The pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries and fern-like leaves, forms
+the leading shade and ornament of Los Angeles streets. Apart from
+these a clump of palms grows on San Pedro Street, and, before an odd,
+octagon-shaped house on Main Street, a Mexican nopal of the size of an
+apple-tree. In the court-yard of the principal hotel droops a single
+ragged banana. Tropical features in the vegetation are scarce, but it
+is evident that this is not the fault of the climate, but of failure to
+encourage them. In the door-yards are the Mexican aloe and the Spanish
+bayonet, from the adjacent deserts of Mohave and Arizona. The castor-oil
+plant grows a tall weed in neglected places. The extraction of castor-oil
+was at one time an industry of the place, but is now abandoned.
+
+
+III.
+
+The Mexican element must be something like one-third of the entire
+population of the place. In the Spanish town, “Sonora,” the recollection
+of Mexico is revived, but a very shabby, provincial Mexico. You find
+_mescal_ and _tequila_, the two varieties of intoxicating liquor
+distilled from the _maguey_, or aloe. The dingy little adobe shops
+contain samples of dingy little stocks of goods in their shuttered
+loop-holes of windows. A few swarthy, lantern-jawed old-timers hang
+about the corners, and gossip in _patois_, and women with black shawls
+over their heads pass by. Much of the quarter is in a ruinous condition.
+There remain vestiges of the arcade system of the kind known in some
+form to all tropical or semi-tropical climates. The arcades of Sonora
+are not of massive brick and stone, but are wooden roofs, such as are
+put out by our corner grocers, on light wooden posts. Here and there
+only the battered skeletons remain, attached to ruinous houses. Most
+California municipalities have borrowed something of this Spanish idea.
+At Sacramento the thriving but flat and not attractive capital of the
+State, you can walk nearly all over the business part of town under cover.
+
+There is a very respectable-looking restaurant—a vine-embowered
+cottage—opposite the Pico House, where the familiar _tortillas_, or
+pancakes, and _frijoles_, or stewed beans, may be had. Along-side is
+an adobe church, quaint in pattern, but modern and devoid of farther
+interest. From its belfry the chimes jangle loudly several times a day
+in familiar Mexican fashion. Out of Sonora emerges, on the 16th of
+September, the Juarez Guard, which escorts a triumphal car bearing the
+national colors of red, white, and green, and, aided by a _cortége_ of
+dark little maidens, in white muslin and slippers, proceeds to celebrate
+with appropriate ardor the anniversary of Mexican independence.
+
+This people, who have gone so much to the wall, wear no very pathetic
+aspect in their adversity. They are for the most part engaged in coarse
+labor, are improvident, and apparently contented. It is only rarely that
+a Spanish name—a Pacheco, a Sepulveda, or Estudillo—rises into prominence
+in the public affairs of the State of which they were once owners.
+Old Don Pio Pico, the last of the Spanish Governors, resides here,
+impoverished, in a little cottage, in sight of property of great value
+which was formerly his, and of the plaza once the centre of his authority.
+
+Don Pio is one of the picturesque features of Los Angeles, and with his
+history would be esteemed interesting anywhere. Above eighty years of
+age, with stocky figure, square head, and bright eyes, contrasting with
+his bronzed skin and close-cropped white hair and beard, he has a certain
+resemblance to Victor Hugo. He has a rather florid taste for jewelry. He
+carries himself about town, in his short overcoat with velvet collar and
+cuffs, with a bearing still erect and stately. It is strange to tell, but
+true, and it is evidence of the conservatism and lack of adaptability of
+his race, that the old gentleman, though once Governor of the State, and
+a continuous resident of it, as an American citizen, since he surrendered
+it to Fremont and Stockton in 1847, does not yet speak a word of any
+other language than Spanish. The talk of this historic personage gave but
+a rude picture of the state of society in his youth. Was there anything
+in the world so remote as the California of the years 1810 to 1848?
+
+[Illustration: DON PIO PICO.]
+
+“I am but a plain and unassuming person,” he said to me. “My father did
+not leave me a mule nor a vara of ground. I worked for the padres at the
+San Gabriel Mission when I was a boy, and I had little opportunity to
+learn book knowledge.”
+
+He disclaimed being an authority even on the events of his own fall and
+the encroachments of the Americans. “There are many,” he said, “who have
+a better head for those things than I, and who will tell you better than
+I.”... “I was a just man, however. I treated the rich no better than the
+poor. Hence when they asked who was _lo mas justo y honrado_—the most
+just and honest man—for Governor, it was answered with one accord, ‘Don
+Pio Pico.’”
+
+There are differences of opinion about those ancient officials. Some
+of them have been charged with a wholesale issue of land-patents after
+the American occupation, which patents ostensibly belonged to their
+respective administrations. Edwin M. Stanton, sent out to look into these
+matters by the Attorney-general of the United States, reported at the
+time that “the making of false grants, with the subornation of false
+witnesses to prove them, has become a trade and a business.”
+
+The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1847, by which the war with Mexico
+was concluded, made valid and of full force whatever had been done before
+the American occupation. Spanish governors were numerous in those last
+days, and went in and out of office with extraordinary frequency, by
+reason of plots, counterplots, and the inability of the home government
+to enforce its own will. Alvarado, Carillo, Micheltorena, and Pio Pico
+reigned separately, or together, or by turns, in a revolutionary,
+confused, and overlapping way, which furnished excellent opportunity for
+fraud. One prefers, however, not to linger upon unpleasant suspicions,
+but rather to esteem these fallen dignitaries, few of whom now survive
+after their misfortunes and romantic histories.
+
+[Illustration: MONGOLIAN AND MEXICAN.]
+
+Even the Chinese, singularly enough, show greater enterprise than the
+Spanish. Perhaps they may have a somewhat better warrant for coming in
+here than elsewhere, since a Chinaman is found in the list of the twelve
+original settlers of the town, in 1781. They have pushed into the best of
+the old Spanish adobe houses, once the best of their kind in the State.
+They occupy all those which flank the little plaza with an entire street,
+others debouching from it.
+
+The populace, however, have not always been the better reconciled to the
+hapless Mongolians. In an outburst of deadly prejudice, in the year 1871,
+they were dragged out of their Spanish houses and hung to lamp-posts,
+wagon-tongues, and their own door-ways, to the number of eighteen, of
+all ages and sizes. The riot was occasioned by their resistance to some
+process of a deputy-sheriff. My informant described them to me as hanging
+like bunches of carrots.
+
+At present they were putting up, near the site of these sanguinary
+scenes, an ornate open-air theatre or temple, for a triennial religious
+festival, to last a week or more.
+
+
+IV.
+
+One of my pleasantest days at Los Angeles was that which I spent in a
+drive with the Zanjero.
+
+The Zanjero, indeed! who or what is a Zanjero?
+
+His title is derived from the Spanish _zanja_—ditch—continued down from
+the times of the original settlement, and he is the official overseer
+of water and irrigation. He took me about with him to observe this
+important and entertaining part of the economy of civilization in these
+thirsty regions. Not that Los Angeles is so dry in comparison, for it has
+thirteen inches of rain against two at Bakersfield, but it is in abundant
+need of irrigation.
+
+The Zanjero is elected by the City Council annually. Six deputies aid
+him in the summer, reduced to three in the winter, when the rains render
+irrigation hardly necessary. All are invested with the authority and
+badges of policemen.
+
+The city, the Zanjero tells us, as we ride along, controls in its
+corporate capacity all the waters of the Los Angeles River. The Los
+Angeles River is a Southern California stream of the typical sort.
+It has a wide, shallow bed, almost dry at the moment, but in spring
+and winter it brawls in dangerous fashion, and often carries away its
+bridges. We ride up to the point near a certain railroad bridge where
+the water is first diverted. It is taken out by two small canals, one
+for the city proper, one for the thriving suburb of East Los Angeles.
+We find that the dam by which the river is checked for this purpose is
+constructed of earth, with a facing of stout posts and planking. At the
+beginning of winter the planking is removed, and the stream allowed to
+sweep away the rampart of earth, which is replaced by a new one, the
+succeeding spring. Chain-gangs of convicts from the prison are set upon
+this labor.
+
+A canal is taken out of the same river twelve miles above, which supplies
+water for drinking and irrigating the higher levels. There are two very
+different levels in the configuration of the city, one rising from the
+other with great abruptness, as at Santa Cruz.
+
+Upon the height are remains of the fort built by Fremont when he entered
+the city. Directly at its foot is the cottage of Pio Pico; the big hotel,
+still bearing his name, in which he sunk a handsome share of his fortune;
+the little cypress-studded plaza; and the shabby white quarter of Sonora.
+The mass of the city lies to the right, without striking features. Beyond
+it, toward the river, stretch breadths of a russet bloom which we know
+to be vineyards, together with lines and parallelograms of orange and
+eucalyptus, as formal as the conventional trees in boxes of German toys.
+Across the river, “Brooklyn Heights” and “Boyle Heights” rise to a wide,
+rolling table-land (_mesa_), which extends back to the blue Sierra Madre
+Mountains. Toward most of the horizon stretch expanses of a garden-like
+vegetation of a mysterious quality—the dreamed-of orange-groves in mass.
+
+The city has created a considerable part of its debt by its water system,
+in which it has spent probably $200,000. The works are of an ephemeral
+character, which will in time be replaced by something more substantial.
+The simple trenches and wooden flumes permit of wasted water, and are
+costly to keep in repair. One of the principal ditches, however, is
+carried through a hill some three-quarters of a mile in a tunnel of
+six feet in section. There have been formed also numbers of durable
+reservoirs or artificial lakes for the storage of additional water in
+winter to supplement the river at its lowest.
+
+We rode out among the villas and gardens and observed the practical
+application of the water. The main ditches are three feet by two,
+the lesser about two by one. The “head” is the nominal standard of
+measurement of the babbling fluid. The head should be a section of one
+hundred square inches, delivered under a certain uniform pressure, but it
+is in practice loosely administered.
+
+“The irrigators want their work _done_” says the Zanjero; “that is the
+main point. Some lands take more, others less, according as they are
+sandy or hold water. A head of fifty inches on the east side will do as
+much as one hundred and twenty around the city.”
+
+Fan-palms, India-rubber-trees, and tall bananas grow freely on the lawns
+where a little pains is taken. You stop now to exclaim at a comfortable
+home embowered in myrtle, orange, and vines, the dark, glossy foliage
+starred with golden fruit and red roses, a spot for any romance. Again,
+it is a long arcade or temple of arborvitæ, extending across the whole
+front of a garden, and framing in its arches delicious views of distant
+blue mountains, their tops now powdered with snow.
+
+This land of running brooks should be a famous place for the children to
+sail their boats, though as a matter of fact we do not see them doing
+it. Perhaps there is a law against it. There are laws, at any rate,
+against stealing the water, wantonly raising the gates to waste it, or
+transferring it to irrigators outside the city limits. These latter are
+entitled to it only upon an extra payment and after those within the city
+have been supplied.
+
+As all irrigators cannot be supplied at once, the manner of serving it
+out is as follows: Applications have to be made in the last week of each
+month. The Zanjero then apportions the supply so that it may go round
+among the applicants in the most convenient way. The complete circuit
+takes about twenty days. The applicant receives a ticket, on the payment
+of a fee, entitling him to receive the water on such a day at such an
+hour. The right for that time is exclusively his. The rates are so fixed
+as to reimburse the public treasury, and are not intended as a source of
+profit. The average charge for water is about fifty cents an hour, two
+dollars a day, and a dollar and twenty-five cents a night.
+
+The subscriber has the water delivered to him by the deputy at his
+connecting-gate. At all other times the gate must be kept fastened with
+a padlock. The wooden gate, sliding smoothly in its grooves, is like a
+little guillotine.
+
+Chop! goes the guillotine, when it has been raised long enough, and off
+goes the head, as it were, of the little stream. Thus surprised on its
+way among the orchards and gardens, it writhes and twists a while, rises
+again in its confining box, and is soon ready to begin life again on a
+new basis.
+
+
+V.
+
+Los Angeles is the metropolis of the orange trade, but the greater part
+of the culture itself is in tracts of the surrounding country, each with
+a thriving settlement as its nucleus. The lands are usually laid out and
+subdivided by capitalists, under the “colony” system, as described. Ten
+or even five acres in a crop of such value are a comfortable property.
+On Lake Guarda half an acre in lemons is sufficient for the support of a
+family. It is in evidence here that returns of from $500 to $1000 an acre
+are had from orange, lemon, and lime, after the trees have arrived at
+full bearing.
+
+The piazzas of the orange-planters command attractive views; rose and
+heliotrope bloom round them; and specimens of all the fruits are offered
+for our tasting with lavish hospitality and honest pride in their
+perfection.
+
+We begin with Pasadena, which is reached by a drive of ten miles from Los
+Angeles. Pasadena, the Indiana Colony, San Gabriel, the Lake Vineyard
+tract, the Alhambra, Santa Anita, and Sierra Madre tracts, and others,
+all of the same general character, adjoin one another. The dwellings in
+them are those of people of means and a certain taste. Even the least
+show ambition. There are pretty chapels in the Gothic style, and neat
+schoolhouses. Well-dressed children of a city air are met with on the
+roads. The roads are excellent. No violent storms or thawing snows in
+this climate tear them up, and they are kept in order with little trouble.
+
+The door-yards are enclosed with hedges of lime, arborvitæ, or
+rose-bushes. Curious small circles from time to time attract attention,
+either filled with water, or dry, like the rings of a departed circus.
+These are reservoirs, supplementing the irrigation system. They are
+usually filled by artesian wells, which flow from iron pipes a few feet
+above the ground, the water overspreading the top in a thin film, like a
+globe of glass, reflecting neighboring objects. Such globe-like films,
+sparkling from a distance, are a frequent item in the prospect. As there
+has never been any forest, no unsightly stumps indicate recent clearings.
+The country, in consequence, does not look new. Where settled at all, it
+has a surprisingly old and civilized air.
+
+The temperature, this late November day—on which there are telegrams in
+the papers of snow-storms at the North and East—is perfection. It is
+neither hot nor cold. A sybarite would not alter it. Bees hum in the
+profuse clusters of heliotrope about the porches. A single Jacqueminot
+rose on a tall stem, a beauty whose sway will not be gainsaid, makes its
+vivid crimson felt from the greensward a long way off. Among the older
+estates this is pointed out as the home of “Don Benito,” that of “Don
+Tomas,” so and so, the family name being usually American. Audacious in
+love as in other things, enterprising Americans have married into the
+Spanish families, both before and since the conquest, and succeeded to
+their acres. Very few of Spanish stock still retain any property of note.
+
+If there be or ever existed any real earthly Paradise, I think it might
+bear some such complexion as that of the Sierra Madre Villa, on the first
+bold rise of the mountains at San Gabriel. I cannot vouch for it as a
+hotel, for hotel it is, but I vouch for it as a situation.
+
+The air was heavy with the fragrance of extensive avenues of limes as
+I came up to it. The orange-trees were propped up, to prevent their
+breaking under their weight of fruit. Forty oranges on a single bough!
+I saw it with my own eyes. Some of the trees, by the freak of a recent
+gale, had been denuded of their leaves, which left only the globes of
+golden fruit, a lovely decorative effect, on their bare stems. A view of
+thirty miles is had across the garden-like San Gabriel Valley, to a strip
+of blue sea on the horizon. On the strip of blue sea rests a slight brown
+spot, the jewel of Santa Catalina Island.
+
+[Illustration: PARADISE.]
+
+Flowering vines clustered along a piazza, part enclosed in glass. In a
+warm nook a couple reclined in steamer-chairs, one reading aloud a novel
+in a gentle murmur. They were a couple of recent date, and as the place
+for a honey-moon it was ideal. The orange bears a close resemblance to
+the formal tree which the mediæval painters used to represent as the
+“tree of the knowledge of good and evil” of Genesis. It is appropriately
+placed, therefore, in our earthly Paradise.
+
+Hist! The young woman who had been reading takes her stand archly at
+one side of such a tree. The man who had been listening rises also,
+and, with a slight yawn, places himself on the other. Oh, what is this?
+Is she a new Eve? She plucks a fruit, and hands it to him. Oh, this
+is terrible! Is there to be a fall again in Eden, and all its direful
+consequences? There should be some Cranach or Dürer here to take down
+once more the particulars of the distressing scene. What does Eve wish
+Adam to do? Perhaps she wishes him to buy lands—above their value—and go
+into orange-planting himself. Alas! he will be lost forever to the higher
+financial life. Perhaps Satan is the invidious real-estate man.
+
+But really there is no pressing need of such a display of fancy because a
+young matron offers her husband a fresh orange before dinner.
+
+Certain drawbacks—drawbacks attending upon an injudicious entering into
+this apparently fascinating kind of life—should not be overlooked. The
+orange-tree grows all the time, and calls for incessant care, winter
+as in summer. Not a few invalids who had looked to its culture as a
+pastime have broken down through this cause, and through having taken up
+more land than they could manage. The lesson of such cases is, not to
+attempt too much, but to keep to the five, or ten, acres, as the case
+may be, within one’s capacity. Nor has it been politic to put everything
+into the single crop of oranges. The smaller fruits—peaches, plums, and
+especially apricots—for canning, which come into bearing quickly, are
+useful in tiding over the tedious period of waiting for the orange-trees
+to mature, and are always in profitable demand. To start existence
+comfortable here the new-comer should have a capital of from five to ten
+thousand dollars, though peculiar energy may do with less.
+
+It requires about nine years to bring an orange-tree from the seed into
+full bearing. On the other hand, it is found that by deftly inserting an
+orange-bud into the bark of a lemon-shoot slitted in an X, and setting
+this in the ground, a tree can be obtained which bears marketable
+fruit after the second year. The controversy rages as to whether it
+is worth while to do this, since the product is dwarf, like the dwarf
+pear-tree. Though it yield early it will never yield much, and its fruit
+does not stand shipment as well as that of the seedling. Against this
+it is maintained that it lives longer than the seedling, and yields
+choicer varieties of fruit, and that the fruit is more uniform in size
+and quality, and not subject to a singular form of destruction which
+sometimes overtakes that of the seedling—being dashed upon its own thorns.
+
+In the same way conflicting theories of irrigation prevail. A person who
+bought grapes in large quantities for the purpose of making them into
+wine told me that over-irrigation was rendering them watery and insipid.
+He proposed to meet this by establishing a standard. He would pay twenty
+dollars a ton for grapes containing twenty-three per cent. of sugar,
+and for those below standard less. Plentiful irrigation, however, is
+relied upon to counteract that fatal pest of the vine, the phylloxera.
+Some advocate the theory of irrigation in the winter or rainy season
+only. All the water possible is to be conducted upon the land at the
+time it naturally falls, leaving the soil to act as its own reservoir,
+and store up a portion for the dry season ahead. Others even deny the
+need of irrigation altogether. They write to the papers that it is only
+necessary to keep the surface well scratched with a cultivator, and a
+supply of moisture will always be found a few inches below it. It is
+certain that crops both of grapes and the cereals have been produced from
+unirrigated ground, even for a series of years. But then comes a dry
+year, in which everything, animals as well as plants, is scorched from
+off the face of the earth.
+
+“Certainty is what is wanted,” says a lively informant. “You may not need
+water, as you may not a revolver, all the time; but when you do, you need
+it awful bad.”
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the plain, just under the mountains, lies the old village and mission
+church of San Gabriel. The mission dates from 1761. It was founded, like
+the other missions of California, by friars sent out from the college
+of San Fernando, in the city of Mexico. I recollect well the original
+San Fernando. It stands on the street which was the scene of Cortez’s
+disastrous retreat from the city, and is marked with an inscription
+commemorating the famous Leap of Alvarado.
+
+[Illustration: A MEXICAN WEDDING AT SAN GABRIEL.]
+
+The Mission of San Gabriel is worthy of its picturesque origin. It has
+the same massiveness, color, and quaint rococo details, including the
+peculiar battlement, or Spanish horn of dominion. Six old green bronze
+bells hang in as many niches together. The fern-like shadows of a line of
+pepper-trees print themselves in the sunshine against the time-stained
+wall. No more than the church edifice now remains. Great agricultural
+establishments connected with all these missions were swept away, years
+before the American occupation, by edict of the Mexican government.
+Some bits of broken aqueduct, and a few orange-trees, above a hundred
+years old, in what was once the mission garden, are the only vestiges of
+former prosperity. The interior of the church contains a few battered
+old religious paintings, the worst of their kind. It is doubtful if the
+luxury of really good pictures was ever superadded to the excellent
+architecture, for which there was a natural instinct. It is a commentary
+on the popular estimate in which the poor old masters are held, I fear,
+that I was told by the neighborhood:
+
+“You _must_ see them. They are all Raphaels and Michael Angelos.”
+
+The village is piquantly foreign. Its single street is composed entirely
+of white adobe houses. One of them, with a tumbling, red-tiled roof,
+is so full of holes that it looks as if it had been shelled. All the
+signs are in Spanish. Here is the _zapatero_, or shoemaker, and here
+the _panaderia_, or bakery. The south walls are hung with a drapery of
+red peppers drying in the sun to prepare the favorite condiment. The
+population are a humble class, who gain their livelihood for the most
+part by day-labor on the surrounding estates. They are not too poor,
+however, to retain their taste for festivity still. On the occasion of
+some notable wedding among them they will manage to mount on horseback,
+and, surrounding a bridal carriage, driven postilion-fashion, return from
+the ceremony, at the old mission, whooping and firing pistols in the air,
+in the most gallant and hilarious fashion.
+
+Near by is the large estate of Sunny Slope, known as one of the most
+successful instances of the putting in practice of the sanguine theories
+about the country. It has been acquired, and developed, from very small
+beginnings. It consists of some nineteen hundred acres of land, most
+of it in vines and oranges. There is a large wine and brandy making
+establishment. Eight thousand boxes of oranges and lemons, four hundred
+thousand gallons of wine and one hundred thousand of brandy, have been
+produced in a year.
+
+[Illustration: THE VINTAGE, SAN GABRIEL.]
+
+The dwelling-house was approached by a stately avenue of orange-trees,
+in double lines, three-quarters of a mile in length. The road to the
+large, substantial buildings of the winery was bordered by an orchard
+of orange on one side and olive on the other. The vineyards stretched
+out in distant effect like vast reddish-tawny meadows. At the winery,
+blacksmithing and cooperage were going on on a large scale, and a deft
+Chinaman was constructing the orange-boxes. The rich juice of the grape
+poured in floods, and its more concentrated form as brandy came from its
+still as clear as water. All distilled spirit is naturally colorless, and
+the hues it obtains for market are given by burned sugar, to gratify an
+artificial taste.
+
+The hands are Chinamen and Mexicans. The superintendent tells us that
+the former do the most work and get less pay, but that there are certain
+things which they cannot do. They cannot plough, nor prune the vines,
+and they are awkward in the management of animals. Indeed, a Chinaman on
+horseback, or even in a wagon, seems almost as incongruous as Jack Tar.
+
+We visited, one evening, the Chinese quarters, and it would have been
+hard to find a more clean, domestic-looking interior among men of any
+other nationality in the same circumstances of life. They seemed much
+more orderly in their arrangements than the Mexicans, either those from
+the village or those who had a settlement on a bold slope of the estate
+above.
+
+There is much native Indian blood among these latter, and their dwellings
+were half wigwams, patched up of rubbish. Mongrel dogs, a donkey, and a
+foundered horse wandered at ease among them. A reddish-brown urchin, with
+large, liquid eyes, coming out, paused to gaze at us.
+
+“_Cor-r-re, demonio de muchacho!_” (R-r-run, demon of a boy!) cried a
+slatternly mother, who appeared behind, endeavoring to urge him upon some
+errand of peculiar expedition.
+
+But the demon of a boy, exemplifying the traits of his race, had no idea
+whatever of being in a hurry. On the contrary, having removed to a safe
+distance, he dawdled in the most exasperating way, and continued to stare
+round-eyed during all of our critical tour of inspection.
+
+[Illustration: IRRIGATING AN ORANGE-ORCHARD.]
+
+The work of the year was now the pruning of the vines. Stripped of every
+superfluity, the rugged little stocks, regimented veterans, were to
+stand bare till the exuberance of a new spring should again break forth
+in leaves. Faustino, Gaetano, Incarnacion, and the rest, for so they
+are called, appear to picturesque advantage in this work. Their swarthy
+faces are framed in slouch sombreros. They wear red-and-blue shirts, and
+bright handkerchiefs about their necks. They move forward in a line,
+pruning-knife in hand, and a small saw at the belt for the tougher
+knots. The spots of color twinkle upon the russet of the vineyard; the
+pruning-knives flash as they turn to the sun; the ground has a gentle,
+agreeable fall; and splintered granite mountains, with deep cañons among
+them for exploration, softened by a veil of atmosphere, back up the whole.
+
+The orange-tree, even at a great age, is not as large as one may have
+expected. Even those of a hundred years in the mission garden are not
+above two feet in diameter. It is gratifying to be at full liberty to
+examine this attractive vegetation, known heretofore only in its tub in
+the conservatory, or on the staircase at a ball. There seems but one
+drawback to an orange-grove, and that is that it cannot have greensward
+below to lie upon. It is very exacting—requires all the nourishment the
+soil can give, and the soil must be kept loose and open around the roots.
+It is irrigated about once a month, and the surface gone over with a
+cultivator afterward, to prevent baking up in the sun.
+
+The orange-grove is lovely at all times, mysterious when the long alleys
+are dark against the red sunset, the fruit glimmering like a feast of
+lanterns at twilight; and in the pleasant mornings sparkling among the
+glossy leaves like little suns newly risen; while we catch the perfume
+of blossoms heralding in a new crop, though the last still hangs upon
+the bough. Here and there is an example of the enormous shaddock, which
+resembles the orange in appearance but the lemon in character. The lemon
+is less hardy to rear than the orange, and is not cultivated on as large
+a scale. Chinamen, with ladders and baskets, gather the fruit, and
+chatter to one another from the trees like magpies. It is irrigation-day,
+and all at once the water is let on. Twisting and turning this way and
+that, it runs out upon the thirsty soil, as if with an eager curiosity in
+the embrace. Chinamen with hoes follow it, here throwing up little dams,
+which it tries to evade; there, when it runs sluggishly, opening little
+channels, and leading it where it should go. The whole orchard is soon
+babbling musically with running water, and in process of being thoroughly
+soaked.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+_TO SAN DIEGO, AND THE MEXICAN FRONTIER._
+
+
+I.
+
+These and kindred scenes are to be met with in fifty, I know not how many
+more, localities of a similar sort. San Fernando, Florence, Compton,
+Downey City, Westminster, Orange, Tustin City, Centralia, Pomona, and
+Artesia may be mentioned as leading examples. The “colony” government
+is of a simple sort, and consists of a justice of the peace, constable,
+water overseer, and school trustees. Anaheim, settled by Germans, was one
+of the first established colonies, and has become a town of importance.
+Santa Ana had a special bustle at present, as the terminus, for the time
+being, of the railroad in process of building from Los Angeles to San
+Diego.
+
+Perhaps, however, the greatest general air of distinction is worn by
+Riverside. This colony seems to have been sought to an exceptional degree
+by persons in good circumstances. It is fifty-seven miles lower down
+than Los Angeles, and reached by a drive of seven miles southward from
+the Southern Pacific Railroad at Colton. Four miles north of Colton,
+on the other hand, takes you to San Bernardino, an important place of
+six thousand people, originally settled by Mormons. The regular Mormons
+withdrew to Utah by order of Brigham Young on the threat of the coercive
+war there in 1857, and only a few “Josephites” now remain, whose
+practices do not differ greatly from those of other people.
+
+[Illustration: A SYLVAN GLIMPSE AT RIVERSIDE.]
+
+At Riverside is found a continuous belt of settlement and cultivation
+twelve miles long, by two miles in average width. It will be twenty long
+when all complete. The population is not large, but revels in a great
+deal of room. The general situation is a valley of about forty miles
+square, at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the sea. The access
+to this valley is by four several passes, one each on the north, south,
+east, and west, as if so many doors had been providentially left open
+in the encompassing mountain ranges. The settlement forms an oasis in
+the midst of the desert, after the general plan. Its fresh greenness,
+and canals of clear water, along which sylvan glimpses, almost English,
+are met with, derive added charm and interest from the desert. The
+rest of the high, quadrangular valley, capable, no doubt, of as great
+development, if water can be brought upon it, remains in its natural
+condition.
+
+A lovely drive, called Magnolia Avenue, planted with double rows of
+pepper and eucalyptus trees, extends through the length of the place
+from north to south. It is bordered with homes, making pretensions to
+much more than comfort. The best of these are at the division called
+Arlington, four miles below the post-office of Riverside proper. The
+native adobe, or sun-dried brick, supplemented with ornamental wood-work,
+has been used as material with excellent effect. In the interiors are
+found rugs, _portières_, Morris’s wall-papers, and all the paraphernalia
+of the latest Eastern civilization; and there is an archery club and a
+“German.”
+
+Invalidism is heard of with considerable frequency as an excuse for the
+migration hither. Certainly many advantages offer to the invalid. The
+climate permits him to be almost constantly out-of-doors. The sky is
+blue, the sun unclouded, nearly every day in the year, and he can go into
+his orchard and concern himself about his Navel or Brazilian oranges,
+his paper-rind St. Michaels, and his Tahiti seedlings, with little let
+or hinderance. Orange culture affords him both a career and a revenue.
+If the unchanging blue of the sky grow sometimes monotonous, there are
+other distractions in the noble mountain ranges. Riverside has in this
+resource a touch of the charm of Switzerland. Your entertainer points out
+to you from his piazza the great peaks of Greylock, San Bernardino, and
+San Jacinto, from ten to twelve thousand feet in height, and crowned with
+snow for a considerable part of the year, just as the Jungfrau is pointed
+out from Interlaken and Mont Blanc from Geneva.
+
+[Illustration: ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE.]
+
+It is a description that applies to all of Southern California, that,
+however great the heat by day—in midsummer often a hundred and five
+in the shade—the nights are always cool and refreshing. Sunstroke is
+not known. Nor are the violent thunder-storms with which Nature, with
+us, endeavors to restore equilibrium after having exhausted its most
+oppressive warmth. The great drawback here, as there must always be some
+drawback, consists in occasional heavy “northers,” which gather up the
+dust from the dry surface and produce painful dust-storms of two or three
+days’ duration.
+
+[Illustration: ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE.]
+
+In autumn and winter the temperature is chilly enough to make fires a
+necessity morning and evening, and even all day long in apartments shut
+off from the influence of the sun. I was astonished to find the air so
+keen at these times, and a scum of ice forming upon water in the mornings
+even as far down as San Diego. The cold has a penetrating quality beyond
+its register by the thermometer. This, though usually overlooked, is
+important, since fuel is very scarce and correspondingly dear. Fagots
+of the prunings of the cottonwoods, sycamores, and mesquit-trees along
+the beds of the streams are the principal resource. Such coal as can be
+obtained is both costly and of poor quality.
+
+The water for the irrigation of Riverside is taken from the swift little
+stream of the Santa Ana River, which falls so rapidly within a short
+compass that it is feasible to take out two separate canals with a
+difference of thirty-five feet in their levels. On all sides lands are
+held at $200 and $300 per acre, and when the orange-trees have come into
+good bearing, at $1000, which but a few years ago were purchased at a
+dollar and a quarter an acre.
+
+All these places have their local rivalries, though Southern California
+as a whole is ready to unite in vindicating its peculiar claims, against
+the outside world. All have their pamphlets to distribute, containing
+their tables of mean temperatures, altitudes, analyses of soils, and
+claims to regard, as based upon nearness to, or absence from, some
+particular natural feature. Thus the coast counties take leave to pride
+themselves upon a genial average of temperature, owing to their proximity
+to the sea. They are free, they say, from the extremes of heat and cold
+afflicting those which are shut in behind the mountain barriers. The
+inland counties, on the other hand, congratulate themselves that their
+lot is cast where the mountains form an efficient defence against the raw
+fogs and gusts which must necessarily afflict those directly exposed to
+the chilly ocean.
+
+These petty rivalries are a part of the history of all new countries, and
+pass away with the development of population and trade. There seems no
+need of jealousies, since there is encouragement enough for all in their
+several ways. The Territories of Arizona and New Mexico have just been
+opened to transportation by rail from this quarter. The lands suitable
+for the cultivation of the “citrus fruits” are limited in extent. The
+market is much more likely to improve than decline, even when production
+shall have largely increased beyond its present rate. High railroad
+freights were at one time a cause of alarm. The making of an “orange
+wine” was proposed as a resource for using up the surplus crop of this
+kind. The experiment was not a success, but it is not likely to be
+needed. Freights have declined, and will decline more with the building
+of projected new roads. Shipments of oranges have been successfully made
+from this section as far away as Denver, Chicago, and St. Louis.
+
+
+II.
+
+Great things are predicted for Wilmington, a little port twenty-two miles
+to the south-west of Los Angeles. The extensive works undertaken here
+by the railroad and the United States government are still incomplete,
+and it is but a dreary little place in its present condition. However,
+great ports have never been selected primarily for picturesqueness, but
+in accordance with such commercial necessities as short lines of transit,
+easy grades, and convenience for shipping. Wilmington had few natural
+conveniences to offer. There were originally but eighteen inches of water
+on its bar. This has been increased to ten feet. An enormous jetty, 6700
+feet long, extending out to what is called Dead Man’s Island, is under
+construction. It is to force the tide itself to do the duty of scouring
+out the bottom, so that a ship channel several miles long will eventually
+be secured.
+
+Santa Monica is another small port at the end of a branch railroad
+from Los Angeles, sixteen miles directly west, and somewhat famed as
+a sea-side resort. It has a hotel of considerable size, and a bold
+situation on a pretty horseshoe bay. The beach is of fine, hard sand; and
+the temperature admits of bathing, if one be inclined for it, all the
+year round. The hopes which were at one time entertained by capitalists,
+like Senator Jones, of Nevada, of making the place a great shipping
+point, have been for the present abandoned. It was to have been the
+Pacific terminus of a new through line from the East, coming by way
+of the Cajon Pass. A wharf 1500 feet long was built, and a breakwater
+proposed.
+
+[Illustration: OLD MISSION AT SANTA BARBARA.]
+
+From here, or from Wilmington, you sail up the coast to San Buenaventura
+and Santa Barbara—favored by invalids. These places have as yet no
+railroad, but must before long come into the general system. Both are
+on that sheltered stretch of the coast which, from Point Conception,
+makes a sharp turn to the eastward, and has direct southern exposure
+and a view of the islands of Santa Barbara Channel. Santa Barbara, on
+its practical side, has devoted more attention than most places to the
+culture of the olive—an industry still much in its infancy. Some of the
+cultivators have provided themselves with a machinery, which costs about
+a thousand dollars, for expressing the oil. As a condiment the fruit is
+not pickled green here, like the Spanish olive, but ripe and black. It
+may be that a special education is needed for liking each variety of
+olives, as it is for acquiring the taste in the beginning. Those here are
+of a small variety, descending from the old mission times, and it is hard
+not to find them either insipid or bitter. The leading shipment from San
+Buenaventura is honey. A million pounds per annum from Ventura County, of
+which it is the capital, is not an unusual product.
+
+
+III.
+
+I sailed from Wilmington to San Diego. I embarked in the evening in a
+small tug, which steamed down the tortuous windings of the channel,
+past black lighters that Whistler would have liked to etch, and past
+Dead Man’s Island, and transferred us on board a coast steamer waiting
+without. Next morning we were at our destination, a hundred miles below.
+San Diego, rising on a gentle slope, makes a pretty appearance from the
+water. A United States barracks (yellow), with a flag-staff rising in the
+centre, is the most prominent object in front. You round an immensely
+long, narrow sand-spit of a peninsula, which contributes to form the
+excellent small harbor, and make fast to an immensely long mooring wharf.
+It is a feature of all California ports to have immensely long wharves.
+To the left is “Old Town,” its beach where Dana once loaded hides in his
+famous “Two Years Before the Mast,” now the site of a Chinese fishing
+village. To the right is brand-new “National City,” the location of the
+shops and extensive depot grounds for the new railway. In the centre,
+at about four miles from either, lies “New Town,” San Diego proper. All
+together have a population of about five thousand.
+
+[Illustration: PLAZA OF SAN DIEGO, OLD TOWN.]
+
+As we came up to the wharf a locomotive, starting from National City on
+the new track, made the circuit of the water-front, with one long, shrill
+scream, which was taken up by the hills and echoed back. Gods and men
+were no longer to remain ignorant that San Diego had at last caught up
+with its future and had its railroad.
+
+It was cruelly disappointed when it was to be the terminus of the
+Texas Pacific, transcontinental, road. The panic of ’73 prevented the
+capitalist “Tom Scott” from negotiating the foreign loan which was needed
+for its completion. That enterprise was abandoned, and a half-mile of
+graded road-bed alone remains as a sort of tumulus to the blighted
+hopes and bitter memories of the time. The name of the unfortunate “Tom
+Scott”—since defunct—remains also a byword and a reproach. Now, however,
+the “California Southern” is actually at work, and under contract to
+complete the one hundred and sixteen miles necessary to meet the Southern
+Pacific, at a point near San Bernardino, within a short time. It is to
+be a link in the new “Atlantic and Pacific,” which is to follow the
+thirty-fifth parallel, and become a transcontinental road by means of
+connection with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé.
+
+The capital and management of the California Southern are largely
+supplied by the same Boston company directing the Mexican Central, the
+line to Guaymas from the Arizona frontier, and others. A farther road
+is projected by them eastward from San Diego to Calabasas, passing
+through Port Ysabel, at the head of the Gulf of California. This can be
+more cheaply built below the Mexican frontier than on this side, owing
+to special exemptions there to be had from taxation, and the lower rates
+of labor. It is thought that the Southern Pacific will also be compelled
+by competition to build across from Yuma. Hopes are still entertained
+also of the derelict Texas Pacific. With all this in prospect, it will
+be seen that San Diego has justification for making a good deal of stir.
+It claims to be hundreds of miles nearer, than San Francisco, to New
+Orleans and New York, on the one hand, and the Orient on the other, and
+is correspondingly cheerful.
+
+A hand-car on the long wharf conveyed our baggage into the town while
+we walked beside it. The town, being reached, is found a place of loose
+texture. It has a disproportionately large hotel, the Horton House, built
+in anticipation of the rapid arrival of its future greatness, and a loss
+to its original proprietor. The blue shades were down and the plate-glass
+windows dusty also, with an expectant look, in much of the “Horton
+Block,” opposite. After ’73 half the shutters in San Diego were put up.
+They have come down now, however, and probably to stay.
+
+There is a charming view of the harbor and blue ocean from the upper
+slopes of the town. Part of the view is a group of bold Mexican islands,
+the boldest of these, Coronado, a solid mass of red sandstone, which
+Americans have tried to get for a quarry, without success. Yes, here is
+Old Mexico once more; we have come back to it. The high, flat-topped peak
+of Table Mountain marks it unmistakably. It is customary to drive down to
+“the Monument,” set up on the dividing line of Baja (Lower) California,
+but the excursion is without special interest.
+
+[Illustration: OLD MISSION AT SAN DIEGO.]
+
+The chronic condition of shutters in San Diego “Old Town” is to be “up,”
+that is, so far as it can be said to have any shutters yet remaining.
+It dates from 1769. Disadvantageously situated in regard to the bay, it
+began to be deserted in favor of the newer site about ten years ago.
+Nothing could seem more desolate than it is now. The usual old mission,
+with a few palms and olives about it, stands in a valley, up the pretty
+San Diego River, and the earth-works of Commodore Stockton, who threw
+them up one night before the enemy knew he was ashore, are seen on a
+hill. Rents should be cheap in Old Town, but, according to the gossips
+who still sit around the decayed old plaza, they are not. The owners
+hold them stiffly yet, on what theory Heaven only knows. The plaza has a
+toppling flag-staff, a decayed music-stand, and vestiges of a number of
+burned edifices, which have never been worth anybody’s while to build up
+again. The “Merchants’ Exchange” will never supply cocktails to thirsty
+soul again; the Cosmopolitan Hotel is without a guest; whole rows of
+weather-beaten adobes—whole quarters—stand vacant. It should be a great
+place for ghosts. But perhaps they do not care for one another’s society.
+The children, coming from school—for there is, it seems, a school—amuse
+themselves with knocking at and rattling the vacant doors; then they peer
+in at the broken window-panes and shout, and run laughing away.
+
+
+IV.
+
+[Illustration: DON JUAN FORSTER.]
+
+In leaving San Diego I traversed the surveyed line of the new railroad
+almost due northward. A thirty-mile section of the railroad was already
+built. The rest of the journey was made by wagon, with an occasional
+half-day’s pedestrianism, for which the dry, smooth surface of the ground
+is well adapted. It afforded opportunity of making the acquaintance
+in a leisurely way of some of the ranchmen, small and great, of the
+old school. The principal one of these was Don Juan Forster (deceased
+since this visit), well known in his section. He was English by birth,
+but sailed with his father in a trading vessel, and became a Mexican
+subject and resident of California long before the American conquest.
+It was so long before that he had well-nigh forgotten his English, and
+had to learn it over again when the Americans arrived. The Señora, a
+sister of Governor Pio Pico, never learned it at all, any more than her
+conservative brother.
+
+[Illustration: SEÑORA FORSTER.]
+
+Don Juan’s estate, the Santa Margarita Ranch, comprised an area of
+twenty-seven miles by fourteen, or one hundred and forty-five thousand
+acres of land. There was one fence seventeen miles in length, and another
+ten. The owner had made two distinct efforts to colonize a portion of his
+land, without great success. He had offered in London to give forty acres
+and the use of three cows and two horses to whoever would put upon the
+land improvements, in the shape of houses, vineyards, etc., to the amount
+of $1000.
+
+[Illustration: FORSTER’S RANCH.]
+
+The Santa Margarita ranch-house is of adobe, very thick-walled, with
+a terrace in front, and an interior court. The waiting at table was
+by a broad-faced Indian woman in calico. All the domestic service was
+performed by mission Indians, except the cooking, for which a Chinaman
+had lately been secured, with the view of having meals on time. The
+manner of living on these great places was found comfortable, but without
+the “princely” features attributed to it in some of the highly colored
+narratives of former travellers.
+
+The greater part of the available land in the section was devoted to
+pasture. The cereals were cultivated, but not much fruit. Barley is the
+favorite cereal, as less liable to “rust” and spoil than wheat. Hay
+is made, not of grass, but of wheat and barley straw, cut green, with
+the milk still in it. Bee-culture is an important industry. A number
+of varieties of wild sage, wild buckwheat and sumac, furnish the bees
+exceptionally good provender. Rows of the square hives, painted in
+colors, were often seen districted into little streets on the hill-side,
+or at the mouth of some small cañon, like a miniature city.
+
+Before reaching Don Juan Forster’s the old mission of San Luis Rey is
+encountered, in the hamlet of the same name. It is almost Venetian
+in aspect. The whole exterior was at one time faced with a diagonal
+pattern recalling that of the Ducal Palace. The pile was ruined by a
+Mormon contingent of the American forces engaged in the conquest of the
+State. Parts of the heavy adobe walls and buttresses have fallen in, and
+resolved themselves back into their original element as mere earth-heaps.
+The images have been shot and hacked down, and a yawning cavern was
+excavated behind the main altar in search of fancied treasure. Upon
+a floor strewn with such _débris_ and with fragments of red tiles the
+daylight falls curiously, through holes in the broken roof and dome.
+
+[Illustration: SAN LUIS REY.]
+
+The railroad traverses some striking natural scenery. Most notable is the
+Temecula Cañon, a gorge of a wild and grand description, ten miles in
+length, through the Coast Range. A brawling stream runs down its centre.
+The gorge was filled with a busy force, as we passed, terracing up the
+track along its sides, sometimes on the natural rock, sometimes on a
+cyclopean retaining-wall of immense bowlders. Toward evening every day
+the firing of heavy blasts reverberated up the defile like a cannonade.
+The main part of the laboring force consisted of Chinamen. They had
+utilized the shelving ledges and random nooks by the stream for their
+tents and cooking-ovens with great ingenuity. The Mexicans and Indians,
+who formed the contingent next in importance, were in every way less
+provident. The surveyors were found pleasant and hospitable fellows,
+as surveyors at the scene of their labors are apt to be. Compactness
+and convenience had been reduced to the lowest terms, but a pleasant
+existence seemed possible in their small tents. A Chinese cook was
+attached to each camp, and the provisions and fare were excellent.
+
+[Illustration: A TICHBORNE CLAIMANT.]
+
+While coming up in the construction-train over the section of already
+completed road we had the distinction of being waited on by a servant of
+rather uncommon pretensions. This was a certain “Charley,” a shock-headed
+boy of fourteen, son of a later Tichborne claimant, who had strangely
+arisen at San Diego just then, and announced his purpose of again
+contesting the title. Though serving in a menial capacity—while his
+father, who claimed to have good and sufficient reason for having kept
+quiet till now, was taking the necessary steps to secure the long-lost
+title and fortune—“Charley” was deaf to all banter on the subject. He was
+supercilious and firm in the faith that he too was a Tichborne.
+
+“And don’t you forget it,” he threw out to us by way of a parting
+injunction.
+
+Out of the cañon, at the van of the construction work, we were on the
+Temecula Plains, a part of the Upper Santa Ana Valley. The course of
+the road was marked henceforth only by an occasional surveyor’s stake.
+We rode over fifty miles of absolutely treeless, verdureless desert.
+It was desert, however, with a certain fascination in its sterility.
+It had a distinct beauty of coloring. The brown, drab, and blackish
+waste, catching sparkles of light on its flinty surface, shimmered in
+the sunshine. The heat was tempered by a gentle breeze. Crags of black,
+water-worn rock, which had once been reefs in an inland sea, rose in
+bold, fantastic shapes, and noble mountain ranges stood up along the
+distant horizons, their rugged harshness softened into blues and purples
+by a delicious veiling atmosphere.
+
+Half-way across we fell in with a single sign of human life, in the shape
+of an abandoned pine shanty. On going around to the rear the boards
+were found to have been knocked off, probably to be used for fuel. Some
+former travellers, halting here like ourselves, had occupied a part of
+their leisure with writing inscriptions in lead-pencil. One had written a
+direction about drinkable water in the neighborhood. Another, apparently
+finding this erroneous, had inscribed below it, with much more vigor than
+regard for adopted usages in spelling, “Lyor!!”
+
+The sole piece of furniture remaining was a rusted cooking-stove,
+standing on three legs. It had a certain almost diabolic, knowing air.
+You suspected it of having lost its other leg in waltzing about and
+holding high carnival, as no doubt it did, with the coyotes, gophers,
+tarantulas, and lizards who dropped in to pay it visits.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+_ACROSS ARIZONA._
+
+
+I.
+
+If there be anything politically disrupting in mere topography, the
+section cut off by the range below the Los Angeles and Riverside country
+should also be made a separate State. It should clamor at any rate to be
+joined to Arizona, since it is Arizona that it follows in climate, and
+not California. South-east of the low San Gorgonio Pass the seasons are
+the same as those of Mexico; that is to say, the rains fall in summer,
+while northward they fall in the winter and spring. Thunder-storms on
+each side of the mountains may be plainly visible from the other, but do
+not pass the limit.
+
+I myself saw, from the Arizona side, in December, in hot, clear sunshine
+at the time, murky clouds billowing above the range, and the lightnings
+playing in them, and, on returning to Los Angeles, found it drenched in
+its first showers of the season.
+
+There is one excellent reason why the inhabitants of the section do
+not raise such a clamor, which is, that there are no inhabitants worth
+mentioning. For a hundred and fifty miles, from the pass, to the Arizona
+frontier at Yuma, the railroad hardly knows any local traffic. Its
+route is over the celebrated “Colorado Desert,” in comparison with
+which previous deserts are of small importance. There are various
+stopping-places, with designations on the map, but these are rarely more
+than signal-stations where the locomotive, like the passengers, stops to
+slake its thirst at a series of artesian wells.
+
+The plain is not of great extent laterally. Black and purplish mountains
+are always in sight, and spurs cross the track. Bowlders and pebbles are
+scattered thickly on the surface at first, among patches of bunch-grass.
+Then, near Seven Palms, the jaws of the black and purple mountains open
+and receive us into the genuine desert. It is strewn with bowlders still,
+but is itself a waste of drifting white sand, with large dunes and hills
+of sand. One might be riding on the shores of Coney Island or Long Branch.
+
+A singular depression below the level of the sea for a hundred miles,
+and at its lowest point nearly three hundred feet, is traversed. At Dos
+Palmas, in the very bottom of it, a board shanty, covered with signs in
+amateurish lettering, indicating that it is a saloon, stands entirely
+alone. Surely the bar-keeper must consume his own drinks, and lead
+an existence unprecedented among his kind. No; a horseman in Mexican
+accoutrements dashes across the plain—though where he should dash from,
+and how he should ride anything, here in the bottom of the sea, but the
+skeleton, say, of a dolphin or a sea-horse, is a mystery—pulls up, and
+enters.
+
+And it appears, on a better acquaintance with Dos Palmas, that a stage
+starts every other day for points on the Colorado River, and Prescott,
+the capital of Arizona Territory, and that this is but a faint survival
+of bustle which once reigned here before the advent of the railroad. The
+route of the Southern Overland Mail then came this way, and long trains
+of immigrant and freight wagons, carrying water in casks for two and
+three days’ supply, were passing continually over these wastes.
+
+Nothing, on general principles, would appear more depressing than such
+a country, but as a matter-of-fact it is a stimulus to the curiosity,
+and furnishes real entertainment. One would not wish to be abandoned
+there without resources, it is true, but he does not tire of looking
+at it from the car-window. Its blazing dryness is disinfectant and
+preservative. There can never exist the last extreme of sadness where the
+element of decay by damp and mould is not present. Chemical processes
+are those which are principally going on. Wonders of almost any sort may
+be expected, and you almost look for phantoms not of earth among the
+shifting mirages.
+
+A considerable part of Arizona, as well, is of the same character, but it
+is estimated by competent authority that with irrigation thirty-seven per
+cent. of that Territory can be redeemed for agriculture, and sixty per
+cent. as pasturage. It will be called to mind that even the apparently
+hopeless Colorado Desert, which is below the level of the sea, is also
+below the level of the Colorado River, from which water might perhaps be
+spread over it with comparative ease.
+
+The truly patriotic Arizonian in their neighborhood is not ashamed of
+his encompassing deserts, but rather proud of them, and with a certain
+reason. The desert is in reality a laboratory of useful products. Paper
+is made from the yucca, or Spanish-bayonet, which abounds in parts of it.
+There are tracts of salt, borax, gypsum, sulphur, asbestos, and kaolin,
+and quarries of pumice-stone, only waiting shipment. It is maintained,
+also, that it has deposits of the same precious metals which, mined in
+places where water is more accessible, have given the Territory most of
+its present fame.
+
+Our train runs out upon a long wooden drawbridge, across the Colorado
+River, and we arrive at Yuma. The company has placed here the first of
+its series of hotels of uniform pattern. It is both station and hotel.
+Such provision on an equal scale of comfort would hardly have been
+judicious yet as an investment for private persons. These structures
+therefore become not only a typical feature of the scenery, but an
+indication of the extent to which the railroad has had to, and has been
+able to, by reason of its ample resources, take this bare new country
+into its own hands. They are of the usual reddish-brown, two stories in
+height, and surrounded by piazzas of generous width—an indispensable
+adjunct under the dazzling light and heat of the country.
+
+
+II.
+
+The heat of Yuma is proverbial. The thermometer ranges up to 127° in the
+shade. There is an old story of a soldier who died at the fort and went
+to the place which Bob Ingersoll says does not exist, and, finding it
+chilly there by comparison, sent back after his blankets.
+
+Great heat, nevertheless, is not equally formidable everywhere. It is
+well attested that there is no sunstroke here, and no such suffering as
+from a much lower temperature in moister climates. Distinct sanitary
+properties are even claimed for this well-baked air. So near the
+sea-level, it is said to be less rarefied, and to comprise, therefore,
+a greater quantity of oxygen to a given bulk, than that of mountain
+districts, which, in purity and dryness, it resembles. It is thought to
+be beneficial in lung troubles. Yuma, among its arid sand-hills, has
+aspirations to be a sanitarium. Civilized people also may yet resort
+there to engage in a sensible sun-worship, basking in the genial heat,
+and then plunging into the river, after the fashion of the resident
+Indians, who make of it in this way a kind of natural Turkish bath.
+
+[Illustration: THE COLORADO RIVER AT YUMA.]
+
+A transition state may have disadvantages, even when a step toward
+something better. Yuma has now its railroad, and is to have a
+shipping-port of its own, by the construction of another to Port Ysabel,
+on the Gulf of California. Still, it laments a greater activity it once
+enjoyed, as chief distributing point for the mines and upper river towns.
+It expects the Port Ysabel Railroad to have the effect of doubling its
+population in two years. It will not be a very stupendous population even
+then, as it is but fifteen hundred at present.
+
+The town is a collection of inferior adobe houses, a few of the very
+best being altered from the natural mud-color by a coating of whitewash.
+The ordinary part of it resembles more the poor tropical hamlets on the
+trail to Acapulco than even the ordinary villages of Mexico. The houses
+consist of a framework of cottonwood or ocotilla wattles, plastered with
+mud inside and out, making a wall two or three inches thick. The roof is
+thatched, the floor is the bare ground. Around them are generally high
+palisades of ocotilla sticks, and corrals of the same adjoining.
+
+The waiters in a Yuma hotel are of a highly miscellaneous character.
+You are served, in the same dining-room, by Mexicans, Chinamen, Irish,
+Americans, and a tame Apache Indian. One and all had a certain astounded
+air, ending in something like confirmed depression, on finding that we
+were to remain, would dine at our leisure, and did not wish to have the
+dishes shot at us as if out of a catapult, after the practice with the
+ordinary traveller pausing here his allotted half-hour. One does not
+expect too much of his waiter in Arizona, however. There are reported
+instances in which he makes you eat your steak with his hand on his
+pistol-pocket, and the threat of wearing it out on you if you object.
+
+The Colorado at Yuma makes about the same impression as to width as the
+Sacramento at Sacramento, the Ohio at Pittsburg, or the Connecticut at
+Hartford. It is a turbulent yellow stream. It cuts into high sand bluffs
+on the Arizona side, and spreads out their contents in wide bars on the
+California side. It is without wharves. The light-draught, high-decked
+steamboats, or barges, that ply up and down its interminable reaches tie
+up when necessary to the banks.
+
+Mountains of a jagged, eccentric formation follow its general course
+northward. Peaks impressively counterfeiting human work, Castle Dome,
+Chimney Peaks, Picacho, and Cargo Muchacho, loom up along the horizon, a
+fitting prelude to the marvels of Arizona.
+
+It was at the close of an Indian war that this visit was made. It had
+been said, in rumors much exaggerated, that the whole white civilization
+of the Territory was in danger by the outbreak, and troops—but now on
+their return—had been hurried thither from all sides. The first view
+of Indians, therefore, at Yuma was of a double interest. They were not
+Apaches, it is true, but a subsequent acquaintance with the general
+field proved them to be even more picturesque. They are of that highly
+satisfactory style of savages who wear but little clothing, and none of
+it European. They are to be seen in numbers about the railway-station by
+the most casual passenger. The railroad is still new to them, and they
+have not satiated their curiosity. They bring friends from a distance to
+see it, and are observed describing to these visitors how the drawbridge
+swings, and how the cars are switched from one track to another.
+
+They are met with coming across this bridge from the patch of
+river-bottom near the fort on the California side, where their principal
+settlement is. The young men run or stride at great speed, so as to
+throw out behind them a long red sash or band, depending from the
+breech-cloth, which is, in summer, the principal part of their attire. To
+this is added, in winter, a close-fitting gray or crimson under-shirt.
+They wear their thick, coal-black hair “banged” low on their foreheads,
+and bushy about their necks. The effect at a little distance is not
+unlike that of the Florentine period, when the young gallants wore
+jerkins and trunk hose fitting them like their skins, and just such bushy
+locks, which they crowned, however, instead of going bare-headed, with
+jaunty velvet caps.
+
+[Illustration: PASQUAL, CHIEF OF THE YUMAS.]
+
+The fort is without guns, other than a howitzer for firing salutes, and
+has no strength, as it no longer needs to have, except from its position
+on a commanding bluff. The military policy of the government now is to
+station its troops along a railroad or other easy line of communication,
+where they can be quickly massed for mutual support. All the Arizona
+posts, such as Camp Lowell, with its grassy parade and fine avenue of
+cottonwoods; Camp Grant, on its table-land; and Camp Apache, at the
+junction of two charming trout streams, in the White River Cañon; and the
+others, have only this strategic importance, and no intrinsic strength.
+The barracks at Yuma consist of a series of comfortable, large, adobe
+houses, plastered, and painted green, around an oblong plaza. They have
+in front a peculiar screen-work of green blinds, which shuts out the
+glare arising from the yellow ground, and makes both a cool promenade and
+comfortable sleeping apartments for the summer.
+
+[Illustration: YUMA INDIANS AT HOME.]
+
+The chief of the Yumas, on whose settlement the fort looks down, chooses
+his sub-chiefs, but is himself appointed by the military commandant. The
+last investiture was made as long ago as 1852, by General, then Major,
+Heintzelman. He conferred it upon the now wrinkled and decrepit Pasqual,
+described at the time as “a tall, fine-looking man, of an agreeable
+disposition.”
+
+Pasqual’s people cultivate little patches of vegetables and hay in
+the river-bottom, fertilized by the annual overflow. Their principal
+sustenance, however, is the sweet bean of the mesquit-tree. This they
+pound, in mortars, into a kind of flour. Sometimes, when on the move, the
+Indians float their hay across the river on rafts, which they push before
+them, swimming. They propel the small children in the same way, placing
+them in their large, Egyptian-looking _ollas_, or water-jars.
+
+The crop of mesquit beans was so large one year as to be beyond their
+unaided capacity to consume, and they hospitably invited in their
+friends, the Pimas, to aid them. Old Pasqual describes with graphic
+gestures how haggard and lank were these visitors on their arrival, and
+what an unctuous corpulence they had attained in the end, when, after
+nearly eating their hosts out of house and home, they were only got rid
+of at last by force.
+
+
+III.
+
+Few things are more curious at this time of day than to look back at
+the old maps of our Western possessions previous to the annexation of
+Texas. Texas was not then ours; nor were a considerable part of Indian
+Territory, Kansas, half of Colorado, all of Utah, Nevada, California,
+Arizona, and New Mexico. All of this belonged to our sister republic of
+Mexico, which, as I have said, was within an ace as large as ourselves,
+and, except for its internal dissensions, could by no means be considered
+a puny antagonist.
+
+An impressive vagueness attended the delineation of most things west
+of the Mississippi. There were great tracts hardly more known than the
+centre of Africa. The upper regions of Mexico were distinguished as
+Interna; New Mexico and Arizona were simply Apacheria—Apache Land. Our
+frontier ran along the line of the Sabine River to the Red, from the Red
+to the Arkansas, and from the Arkansas, on the 42d Parallel of latitude,
+straight west to the Pacific Ocean. By the peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo our
+frontier became the Rio Grande and Gila instead, and the line had dropped
+from Parallel 40° to Parallel 32°.
+
+I have called this territory heretofore, by way of figure of speech,
+an Alsace-Lorraine of Mexico, though it is not probable, vacant as it
+was, and Americanized as it now is, that a serious grudge is still borne
+us for it, or that there will ever be momentous wars for its recovery.
+However this may be, it has been the making of us. We should be in
+but sorry shape indeed had we to go back to the limits of the thirteen
+original British Colonies, or even to these with Florida, purchased from
+the Spaniards, and Louisiana, purchased from the French, added. The
+Mexican acquisition gave us one-third of our domain—that which is now
+most open to the teeming millions of Europe and that which avails us our
+repute for essential Americanism abroad. It gave us the field of the Bret
+Harte school in literature, our chief marvels and wonders, our mines of
+the precious metals, and the command of the Pacific Ocean.
+
+The lower belt of Arizona was not even comprised in this. An area of
+460 miles by 130, below the Gila River, was not obtained till “the
+Gadsden Purchase,” in 1853. By the payment of the sum of $10,000,000
+under this treaty we obtained a number of decided advantages. We
+rectified our boundary line, confused through the inaccuracy of the map
+of one Dwinelle, on which it was based. We got rid of an embarrassing
+engagement, of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, to protect the Mexican
+frontier from Apaches—leaving them to regulate this service for
+themselves. We secured the right of way for a railroad across the Isthmus
+of Tehuantepec, which was thought desirable for speedier communication
+with our new possessions of California.
+
+But above all we acquired, in the easy levels below the Gila, the natural
+route for a Southern Pacific transcontinental railway. The files of
+the Congressional _Globe_ of that date are full of the necessity of
+binding our Pacific acquisitions securely to the rest of the country,
+and the most effectual of all the means proposed was considered to be a
+transcontinental railway.
+
+Well, we are bowling at last along that now actually constructed Southern
+Pacific Railroad, once discussed in musty debates of the Congressional
+_Globe_. It increases our respect for predecessors to whom we may not
+have given any great consideration heretofore to find how sagacious
+they were. We reach Stanwix, with its lava beds; Painted Rock, named
+from huge, mysteriously-decorated bowlders; Casa Grande, from its
+architectural ruins of the Toltecs; and Tucson.
+
+Adopting the policy of leaving Tucson to be examined on the return, let
+us push on to the extreme end of the Territory—to the eccentrically-named
+Tombstone. Benson, the point of departure, from the railroad, for
+Tombstone, is 1024 miles from San Francisco, and probably 2500 from New
+York.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+_TOMBSTONE._
+
+
+I.
+
+Tombstone is the very latest and liveliest of those mushroom
+civilizations which so often gather around a “find” of the precious
+metals. They live at a headlong pace; draw to them wild and lawless
+spirits; confer great fortunes here, the grave of the drunkard, the
+suicide, or the victim of violence elsewhere. A school of literature,
+with Bret Harte as its exponent, has arisen to celebrate their doings.
+At the present rate of advance of population and conventional usages
+westward they must shortly disappear as effectually as the dodo of
+tradition. While things go well with them the prices of commodities are
+hardly considered. Nobody haggles. The most expensive of everything is
+what is most wanted.
+
+“Diamonds—two-hundred-dollar watches and chains—Lord! we couldn’t hand
+’em out fast enough,” says an ex-jeweller, describing his experience at
+one of the camps in its palmy days. “Champagne wasn’t good enough for me
+then,” says a seedy customer, recalling his doings after the discovery
+and sale of a rich mine. He sighed for a repetition of the event, not to
+make provision for his old age, which sadly needed it, but that he might
+have “one more glorious spree” before he died.
+
+Oftentimes this rush of life departs as quickly as it came. Some fine day
+the “lead” is exhausted, there is found to be no more treasure in the
+mines. The heterogeneous elements scatter, and the town, be it never so
+well built, is left as desolate as Tadmor of the Wilderness. In a certain
+Nevada mining town, which once numbered some thousands of inhabitants,
+Indians are living in rows of good brick houses, having adapted them to
+their peculiar conditions by taking out doors and windows and knocking
+holes in the roof.
+
+A six-horse Concord coach carried us, not too speedily, over the
+twenty-five miles of dusty road to Tombstone. It was called the “Grand
+Central,” after one of the prosperous silver mines of the place. A rival
+line was named the “Sandy Bob,” from its proprietor; who preferred to
+be himself thus known, instead of by a conventional family appellation
+such as anybody might have. We should certainly have taken the “Sandy Bob
+Line” for its greater suggestiveness, except that it seemed to be coming
+down when we wanted to go up, and always coming up when we wanted to go
+down.
+
+Our own proved to have plenty of suggestiveness too. A guard got up with
+a Winchester rifle, and posted himself by the Wells-Fargo Express box,
+and the driver began almost at once to relate robber stories. His stage
+had been stopped and “gone through” twice within the past six months. The
+affair had been enlivened on the one occasion by a runaway and turnover,
+and on the other by the shooting and killing of the driver. Of this last
+item his successor spoke with a natural disgust. If the line could not be
+drawn at drivers, he said, things had indeed come to a pretty pass. He
+respected a man who took to the road and robbed those who could afford
+it. At least, he considered it more honorable than borrowing money of
+a friend which you knew you could never repay, or than gobbling up the
+earnings of the poor, like a large firm lately suspended in Pima County.
+But as to shooting a driver, even in mistake for somebody else, he had no
+words to express his sense of its meanness.
+
+[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF TOMBSTONE.]
+
+He threw stones at his horses, as in Mexico, that is, at the leaders,
+beyond the reach of his long lash. The same stone was made to “carom”
+from one to the other, such was his skill, and startle them both.
+Long string-teams of mules or Texas steers, sixteen to a team, with
+ore-wagons, were met with along the road. Mexican-looking drivers trudged
+beside them in the deep, yellow dust, cracking their animals lustily with
+huge “black-snakes.” Mesquit-bushes, and long grass dried to hay—not as
+good as it looked—covered portions of the surface; the rest was bare and
+stony.
+
+We rode for a certain distance beside the branch railroad in course
+of construction between Benson and Tombstone. A series of lateral
+valleys along the tributaries of the Gila, north and south, as the Santa
+Cruz, Salt River, San Carlos, San Pedro, and San Simon Valleys, afford
+excellent stock ranges, promise of a flourishing agriculture, and easy
+routes for tributary railways. They have already begun to be utilized.
+The San Pedro has the Southern Pacific branch above mentioned, and the
+Santa Cruz will have the Arizona Southern, connecting the centre of
+the Territory at Florence, on the Atlantic and Pacific, with Mexico at
+Calabasas. The transcontinental road—or roads, when the Atlantic and
+Pacific shall have been built—will draw through these tributary valleys,
+as the Gila draws its waters, a trade from Northern Mexico, where mining
+enterprises in particular, in the hands of Americans, are making great
+headway.
+
+The route began to be very much up-hill. We changed horses and lunched at
+Contention City. One naturally expected a certain belligerency in such
+a place, but none appeared on the surface during our stay. There were
+plenty of saloons—the “Dew-drop,” the “Head-light,” and others—and at the
+door of one of them a Spanish señorita smoked a cigarette and showed her
+white teeth.
+
+Contention City is the seat of stamp-mills for crushing ore, which is
+brought to it from Tombstone. The latter place is without an efficient
+water-power. The stamps are rows of heavy beams, which drop upon the
+mineral, on the mortar and pestle plan, with a continuous dull roar, by
+night as well as day.
+
+“That’s the music I like to hear,” said our driver, gathering up his
+reins, “poundin’ out the gold and silver. There ain’t no brass bands
+ekils it.”
+
+The route grew steeper yet. On the few wayside fences that exist were
+painted flaring announcements, as “Go To Bangley and Schlagenstein’s At
+Tombstone. They Are The Bosses, You Bet.”
+
+Then over the edge of bare hills appeared Tombstone itself, a large,
+circular water-tank, big enough for a fort, painted with advertisements,
+the most conspicuous object in the foreground.
+
+
+II.
+
+At the beginning of the year 1878 there was not so much as a tent
+at Tombstone. One “Ed” Schieffelin and his brother started thither
+prospecting. It was supposed to be an adventure full of dangers. At the
+Santa Rita silver mines, in the Santa Cruz Valley, for instance, nothing
+like so far away, three superintendents had been murdered by Indians in
+rapid succession.
+
+His friends therefore said to Ed, “Better take your coffin with you; you
+will find your tombstone there, and nothing else.”
+
+But Ed Schieffelin—a young man yet, who has not discarded a picturesque
+way of dressing of which he was fond, nor greatly altered his habits
+otherwise—found instead the Tough Nut and Contention Mines. He made a
+great fortune out of them, and was so pleased at the difference between
+the prediction and the result that he gave the name of Tombstone to the
+town itself.
+
+One of two well-printed daily papers has assumed the corresponding
+title of the _Epitaph_. The unreliability of epitaphs—if the remark may
+be safely ventured even at this distance—is proverbial. Nevertheless,
+they may occasionally tell the truth. From appearances it would seem
+that this was one of the occasions. Almost any eulogy of its subject
+by the _Epitaph_ would seem justified. The city, but two years old
+at this date, had attained to a population of 2000, and a property
+valuation, apart from that of the mines, of $1,050,980. A desirable
+lot of 30 by 80 feet, on Allen Street, between Fourth and Sixth—such
+was the business-like nomenclature used already in this settlement of
+yesterday—was worth $6000. A shanty that cost $50 to build rented for $15
+a month. A nucleus of many blocks at the centre consisted of substantial,
+large-sized buildings, hotels, banks—Schieffelin Hall, for meetings
+and amusements—and stores stocked with goods of more than the average
+excellence in many older and larger towns.
+
+[Illustration: “ED” SCHIEFFELIN.]
+
+The mining claims run under the city itself. From the roof of the Grand
+Hotel you look down at the shafts, hoist-works, and heaps of extracted
+ore of the Vizina, the Gilded Age (close to the Palace Lodging-house),
+the Mountain Maid, and other mines, opening strangely in the very midst
+of the buildings. This circumstance has given rise to disputes of
+ownership, so that whoever would be safe purchases all the conflicting
+titles, both above ground and below. On a commanding hill close by, to
+the southward, are the Tough Nut and Contention, and above them many
+others later discovered. The larger mines had extensive buildings, of
+wood, and in handsome draughting and assay rooms within were regularly
+educated scientists, ex-college professors and the like, in charge. The
+lesser mines put up in the beginning with commoner sheds and poorer
+appliances of every kind. About them all lie heaps of a blackish
+material, resembling inferior coal and slate, the silver ore in its
+native condition. A laborer above-ground earned $3.50, and below-ground
+$4, for a “shift” of eight hours, and the work went on night and day,
+Sundays and all.
+
+I leave to others to estimate the bulk of treasure in the place. I was
+told that it was “the biggest thing since the Comstock,” and there
+were forty million dollars in sight. I was offered, daily, fractional
+interests in mines, now by a young surveyor who was going to be married
+and needed money for his wedding outfit; now by new friends who were
+straitened for assessment funds to carry out the provisions of the
+law; and again by others who would kindly make any sacrifice for the
+pleasure of associating a traveller from a distance with the interests
+of the place; and yet it will be well for the novice to be wary of these
+seductive openings at Tombstone, as elsewhere.
+
+This I know, however, that I descended four hundred feet or so into
+the Contention Mine, and found great chambers hollowed out, from which
+mineral had been taken, showing a generous width in the vein. The yield,
+from its discovery up to March, 1881, had been $2,000,000. The Tough Nut,
+with the Lucky Cuss, Good Enough, Owl’s Nest, and Owl’s Last Hoot—the
+racy vernacular of their names will be observed—had yielded $1,000,000.
+
+The outskirts of Tombstone consisted still of huts and tents. A burly
+miner could be seen stretched upon his cot in a windowless cabin,
+barely large enough to contain him. There were some tents provided with
+wooden doors and adobe chimneys. New as it was, the business portion
+of the place had been once swept out of existence by a devastating
+fire, which originated from a characteristic incident—the explosion of
+a whiskey-barrel in the Oriental Saloon. Within fourteen days all was
+rebuilt far better than before.
+
+I took the pains to count the number of establishments in a single short
+block of Allen Street at which intoxicating liquors were sold. There were
+the bar-rooms of two hotels, the Eagle Brewery, the Cancan Chop-house,
+the French Rôtisserie, the Alhambra, Maison Doré, City of Paris, Brown’s
+Saloon, Fashion Saloon, Miners’ Home, Kelly’s Wine-house, the Grotto,
+the Tivoli, and two saloons apparently unnamed. At these places gambling
+also went on without let or hinderance. The absence of savings-banks or
+other opportunity for depositing money, in these wild communities, and
+the temptation arising from having it always under the eye, no doubt
+has something to do with the general passion for gambling. Whiskey and
+cold lead are named as the leading diseases at Tombstone. What with the
+leisure that seems to prevail, the constant drinking and gambling at the
+saloons, and the universal practice of carrying deadly weapons, there is
+but one source of astonishment, and that is that the cold-lead disease
+should claim so few victims. Casualties are, after all, infrequent,
+considering the amount of vaporish talk indulged in, and the imminent
+risks that are run. The small cemetery, over toward Contention Hill,
+so far from being glutted with the slaughtered, is still comparatively
+virgin ground.
+
+
+III.
+
+A farther element in addition to that of the miners is to be cited as
+having a good deal to do with the exceptional liveliness of Tombstone—the
+“Cow-boys.”
+
+The term cow-boy, once applied to all those in the cattle business
+indiscriminately, while still including some honest persons, has been
+narrowed down to be chiefly a term of reproach for a class of stealers
+of cattle, over the Mexican frontier, and elsewhere, who are a terror in
+their day and generation. Exceptional desperadoes of this class, such
+as “Billy the Kid,” “Curly Bill,” and “Russian George,” have been the
+scourges of whole districts in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and
+have had their memories embalmed in yellow-covered literature.
+
+I bought on the train, on leaving, a pamphlet purporting to be an account
+of the exploits of Billy the Kid. He had committed, it appeared, at
+least a score of horrid murders, but “so many cities have claimed the
+honor of giving him birth,” said my pamphlet, “that it is difficult to
+locate with any accuracy the locality where he passed his youth.” It
+was finally determined, however, in favor of New York. “It was on the
+Bowery,” said the author, whose ideas of morality were peculiar even for
+a sensationalist, “that his mates learned to love him for his daring and
+prowess, and delighted to refer to him as Billy the Kid.”
+
+This promising life was cut off at the early age of twenty-two. “Curly
+Bill,” also died young, and so did “Man-killer Johnson.” I remarked upon
+this peculiarity, of their youth, to a philosopher of the region itself.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “they _don’t_ seem to live to be very old; that’s so.”
+
+The recipe for a long life in this country was described as being very
+quick and getting “the drop” on an antagonist; that is to say, being
+ready to shoot first. Unless this can be done, it is the custom even
+to put up with some ignominious abuse at the time, and await a more
+favorable opportunity.
+
+The cow-boys frequenting Tombstone were generally from the ranches in the
+San Pedro and San Simon valleys. There were said to be strongholds in the
+San Simon Valley where they concealed stolen cattle until re-branded and
+sent to market, and where no officer of the law ever dared to venture.
+They looked upon the running off of stock from Mexico, as far as that was
+concerned, only as a more dashing form of smuggling, though it was marked
+by frequent bloody tragedies on both sides.
+
+Not to fix upon all the misdeeds of but a few, no doubt there were on
+the streets of Tombstone plenty of cow-boys of a legitimate sort, whose
+only faults were occasional boisterousness and too free lavishing of
+their money. There appeared to be something of a standing feud between
+the miners and the cow-boys, and there was besides a faction of “town
+cow-boys” organized against the “country cow-boys.”
+
+The leading cattle-men had a Southern cut and accent, and hailed
+originally from Missouri or Texas. Some appeared in full black
+broadcloth, accompanied by the usual wide sombrero. The landlord of our
+hotel described them as “perfect gentlemen,” some of them good at the bar
+for as high as $20 or $25 a day.
+
+The great object in life of the various factions, or of individuals who
+arose from time to time in search of notoriety, was to “run the town.”
+This consisted largely in the privilege of blustering in the saloons,
+whooping and firing occasional pistol-shots, if thought good, in the
+streets, and having a moderate security from arrest, inspired by dread of
+their prowess.
+
+This was necessarily a very insecure preëminence. New aspirants and
+rebels were continually piqued into appearing against it whenever it
+seemed fairly attained. Our visit happened upon the heels of a conflict
+making the most tragic page yet written in the annals of Tombstone.
+Opinions seemed divided about it—even official opinions. The sheriff
+extended his sympathy to one side, the city marshal, who was, in fact,
+its leader, to the other.
+
+City Marshal Earp, with his two brothers, and one “Doc Holliday,” a
+gambler, had come down the street, armed with rifles, and opened fire on
+two Clanton brothers and two McLowry brothers. The latter party had been
+practically first disarmed by the sheriff, who feared such a meeting, and
+meant to disarm the others as well. Three of the assailed men fell, and
+died. “Ike” Clanton alone escaped.
+
+The slayers were imprisoned, but released on bail. The Grand Jury was
+now in session, hearing evidence in the case. It was rumored that the
+town party—the Earps—would command a sufficient personal influence to
+go free of indictment. The cow-boys were flocking into town to await
+the result, and on a certain quiet Sunday wore an ominous look. It was
+said that, should justice fail to be done them, the resolute-looking men
+conferring together darkly at the edges of the sidewalk would take the
+matter into their own hands. The jury, I have since learned, did not find
+an indictment, and the remaining parties to the affair, with many others,
+I believe, have since died with their boots on in the same cause. If
+anything could reconcile us to the untimely taking-off of these paladins,
+it would be partly their own contemptuous indifference to it.
+
+It would seem that we ought to have at least half a dozen lives apiece,
+to account for such an indifference, but to be ready to toss away
+the only one on any and every pretext or no pretext is not at all so
+intelligible. It is certainly not the desperation of poverty by which it
+is occasioned. Many of them are in very good circumstances. The younger
+McLowry, a boy under twenty, had $3000 in his pocket, the proceeds of a
+sale of cattle, the day he fell.
+
+The elder Clanton had played cards most of the night before with two
+of his deadly enemies, both parties keeping a hand on their pistols
+meanwhile. When “Billy” Clanton, a boy, like McLowry, lay prone on the
+ground in the fight, dying of his mortal wound, he still managed to get
+out a pistol, steadied it on a shattered arm, and fired once more at “Doc
+Holliday,” saying,
+
+“I’ll get one of you, any way.”
+
+“You are a daisy if you do,” replied Doc Holliday, continuing to advance
+as coolly as if at target practice, and emptying another barrel of his
+own into him.
+
+And the last words of Billy Clanton, in the Nibelungen-like contest—which
+I am quite aware will not be quoted, in school-readers, with those
+of Lawrence, Nelson, and Montcalm, since there was no sense at all in
+this frenzied display of pluck and tenacity—were: “For God’s sake more
+cartridges!”
+
+[Illustration: A TOMBSTONE SHERIFF AND CONSTITUENTS.]
+
+Meantime the whistles of the mining works were shrieking notes of alarm,
+the miners pouring forth from underground, and the reputable citizens,
+who might have exclaimed, “A plague o’ both your houses!” arming
+themselves in hot haste, and coming to their doors, to prevent the spread
+of general anarchy.
+
+There is a grimly humorous element in it all. It seems such an excellent
+joke to idly snuff out the most precious of human possessions. A cow-boy
+shoots a tumbler from the hand of another, just raised to his lips,
+saying, “When you drink with me I will teach you to take whiskey plain,
+and no mixtures.”
+
+A group of others sit around in a saloon where lies a fresh-made corpse.
+An officer of the law enters, and says, “Who claims this man?” whereupon
+all jump to their feet to dispute the honor.
+
+There is a large supply of these amusing stories. To kill your man seems
+a way of winning your spurs, as it were, and establishing yourself on
+a proper footing in the community. Even the defunct, in various cases,
+could he be heard from, would probably find no great fault with the
+manner of his taking off, but only with the “luck” of it which had gone
+against him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+_CAMP LOWELL, TUCSON, AND SAN XAVIER DEL BAC._
+
+
+I.
+
+The night journey returning by stage to Benson was enlivened by more
+shooting stories. I heard, among others, of the doings of the late
+Brazelton of Tucson, and at Tucson I bought his photograph, taken, after
+death, in his mask and other paraphernalia of his craft. He robbed stages
+for years while apparently working quietly as a hostler in a corral. He
+was finally tracked to his fate through some peculiar marks of the horse
+he rode.
+
+One of our passengers had just recovered from wounds received in a fight
+over cards with a Mexican, whom he had killed, and was now able, with the
+aid of morphine, to pursue his journey toward his home in New Mexico. The
+train men at Benson were chary of carrying their lanterns about the depot
+yard, a habit having arisen, it seemed, among the cow-boys of trying to
+snuff out these moving targets with revolvers from a distance.
+
+There seemed a certain tameness even in the Apaches after this wild
+product of the higher civilization of the whites. The principal group of
+prisoners taken after the attempted massacre of General Carr’s command
+was found in confinement at Camp Lowell, nine miles north of Tucson.
+There were forty-two of them, with Sanchez, their chief. They were of
+fairly regular features, and their expression, with the war-paint washed
+off, not unamiable. They were handcuffed together in couples, their legs
+also manacled, and now wore gray army under-shirts and cotton drawers,
+the rags in which they had come having been taken from them. Their long
+black hair hung about their ears, not frowzy, like that of the Yumas, but
+smoothly parted in the middle, and brushed back. A number wore red bands
+or kerchiefs around their heads.
+
+[Illustration: APACHE PRISONERS AT CAMP LOWELL.]
+
+Seen obscurely in the chief prison-room by side-light from a grated
+window, they had a certain resemblance to Greek insurgents, or the _sans
+culottes_ of 1793, or, again, the wild Vendean peasants who fought with
+Rochejaquelein and Jean Chouan for religion and the king.
+
+They were taken out for an airing in the mornings, and allowed to squat
+in the sun at the edge of the pleasant parade-ground, flanked by its
+well-shaded row of officers’ dwellings. The recent rising had been the
+result of a fanatical delusion. A medicine-man persuaded them that he
+had received a revelation to drive all the whites from the land. As soon
+as the corn was ripe, he said, their dead brethren would arise and take
+arms to aid them in carrying out the decree of Heaven. He had, as many
+prophets have not, the courage of his convictions. Though taken in charge
+himself by the troops, he gave a signal agreed upon for the massacre of
+these to begin, calling to his people not to be concerned about his fate,
+as he would come to life and join them again in three days.
+
+The bluff Arizonians are apt to indulge in a derisive way of talking
+of the army and its relation to the savages. They would make but short
+work of these latter, they say, if they took the matter into their
+own hands. They imply that the army does not wish to kill off, or
+even wholly put down, the Indians, but rather to preserve them, as a
+gentle stimulus to public dread, to hasten promotions, and also to
+furnish occasion for profitable supply-contracts. However this may be,
+it would seem that after the repression of this revolt, and the rapid
+penetration of railroads into the Territory, Indians need no longer be a
+deterring influence of great moment with the intending settler. This old
+historic source of apprehension seems as good as abolished from its last
+stronghold.
+
+Eight miles to the north brings us to a ranch called Fuller’s Hot
+Springs. This is one of the few places where a beginning of systematic
+cultivation has been made, and interesting besides as a typical Arizona
+summer resort. There was a young orchard of twenty-five acres, sheltered
+by a wind-break of three rows of ash-trees, doing very well in an alkali
+soil. The buildings consisted of a number of unpainted adobe houses, each
+of a single large, comfortable room, roofed with strips of cactus.
+
+[Illustration: AN ARIZONA WATERING-PLACE.]
+
+There was a “summer dining-room” made of ocotilla sticks, the intervals
+open; and a “winter dining-room,” with tight walls, and a fireplace, in
+which a wood-fire was burned mornings and evenings. The hot spring, a
+clear, pleasant water, said to resemble English Harrogate, ran out from
+below a bath-house, consisting of a patched canvas tent. It became,
+below, a pretty brook, a pond for the cattle, and source of supply
+for irrigating the orchard. The mountains behind the place, the Santa
+Catalinas, are like the Sierra Madres behind Los Angeles. They are of
+the same sharp fracture, but higher and grander, jutting up here and
+there into as perfect castles as those of Harlech, the Trostberg, or
+Rheinstein. Forests of pine of large dimensions crown a part of their
+summits. South and south-west, across the wide plain, appear the Rincons
+and silver-bearing Santa Ritas.
+
+There was a fascination in being able to examine at leisure the strange
+growths of the plain, and not merely to know them in glimpses from the
+car-windows. I made haste especially to cut down for inspection an
+example of the enormous saguara, the organ-cactus. Taller than that on
+the hill-sides of Guerrero along the Acapulco trail, it often rises to a
+height of sixty feet, bristles over the landscape like masts or columns,
+or, again, like the seven-branched candlestick of the Mosaic law. Inside
+it consists of a white, juicy pulp, imbedding a bundle of fibres in the
+form of long wands, which, when dried, serve a number of useful purposes.
+It has a palatable fruit, which the Indians collect from its top in
+August with forked sticks.
+
+[Illustration: CACTUS GROWTHS OF THE DESERT.]
+
+The ocotilla is simply a shrub growing as a wattle of sticks, fifteen or
+twenty together, only waiting to be cut down and turned into palings.
+The bisnaga is a thorny cactus like an immense watermelon growing on
+end. One need never die of thirst where it is found. The cholla is a
+mass of spines, which are even barbed, on the fish-hook principle. It is
+considered funny to hear of somebody’s falling into a cholla, and nothing
+could better represent the traditional “bramble-bush” in which the man
+who was so wondrous wise met with the famous adventure of scratching out
+his eyes. The “deer-brush” somewhat resembles the horns of the animal.
+The palo verde—green stick—grows as large as an apple-tree, with the
+texture of a mammoth sea-weed. The “grease-wood” is a large bush, said
+to burn just as well when green as dry. Most of this vegetation is
+leafless, or rather the plant seems a leaf itself, since coarse bark is
+lacking, and the green of chlorophyll and the tenderness of structure
+seem equally distributed throughout.
+
+There are homely legends and superstitions about these plants of the
+desert. A certain one, for instance, poisons any white spot on a horse,
+but not one of any other color. Another, eaten by horses, makes them lazy
+and imbecile. The loco, or rattle-weed, on the other hand, drives them
+raving crazy, and they try to run themselves to death. I do not know
+whether this last be wholly a superstition, for I rode in California a
+horse whose eccentric proceedings could hardly be accounted for on any
+other basis.
+
+Tucson, from a distance, in early morning or late afternoon, is level,
+low, square, and brown, with a mellow light upon it and the castellated
+mountains behind it. In the foreground you see lazy ox-wains, a
+prospector, perhaps, with his pots and kettles, and a mounted Mexican
+towing by a lariat a bull, which ducks its head in vain resistance. From
+a distance it is thoroughly foreign, and of attractive promise. There is
+something of the Dead Sea apple in the realization of this promise. If
+Ruskin be right in holding that a house should be of the general color
+of the soil on which it stands, Tucson may lay claim to great artistic
+merit. It is entirely of adobe brick of the natural mud-color. Violent
+rainstorms occur, to the detriment of paint and kalsomine, on such a
+friable surface, and their use becomes a serious question of economy.
+
+[Illustration: STREET VIEW IN TUCSON.]
+
+Tucson has great antiquity as a mere corporate existence. It was founded
+by one of the early Spanish expeditions that came up the Santa Cruz
+Valley in quest of the reputed treasure of the Aztecs in the fabled “land
+of Cibola,” but retains no visible trace of age. If there were ever
+any monuments of importance, they have effectually vanished. Even the
+church is new. Such foreignness as there is consists of a very provincial
+Mexican squalor.
+
+The considerations of interest about it are of a purely utilitarian
+character, as: how it is to be paved, drained, lighted, provided with an
+adequate water supply, so as not to have to pay four cents a bucket for
+it, as at present; and how it is to get rid of its malarial fevers and
+shabby rookeries.
+
+A writer in one of the papers one day paid a glowing eulogy to its
+peculiar situation, in the desert. He held that this was a matter not
+only of those material products which I have mentioned, but also of
+the highest moral and intellectual advantages. It was apropos of the
+establishment of a public library. No great idea has ever been evolved
+in the usual scenes of human habitation (so the argument ran), and that
+there is no place for study and contemplation like the desert. Christ,
+Mahomet, Zoroaster, and Confucius all formulated their creeds in the
+desert. I gathered that we are to expect from Arizona, at the proper
+time, some new prophet or sage, to sway again the destinies of men in the
+same way.
+
+The correspondent was satisfied, at any rate, that, with a public
+library, Tucson could shortly become another Alexandria of the desert,
+“a seat of learning and fountain-head of ideas, to be sought by students
+from Mexico, from the Pacific Islands, from China and Japan, and the
+mountains and valleys of the Rio Grande,” and I for one shall be very
+glad to see it so.
+
+[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.]
+
+It is the commercial centre of the important Southern mining district,
+and has an eligible situation for future development. It has derived in
+its time considerable profit from furnishing supplies to the army, and
+from a smuggling trade with Mexico. The goods for this latter were taken
+out in teams, then “packed” over the mountain passes, on donkeys, to the
+objective points of Altar and Magdalena, in cactus-grown, arid Sonora.
+
+The traders at Tucson, again, are largely Jewish. A certain kind of
+“life” prevails freely, as at Tombstone. Roulette, faro, and other games
+of chance are played in a large way in the leading saloons, while the
+poor Mexicans gamble for small stakes at _fondas_ of their own, where
+some wretched lithograph of Hidalgo or Zaragoza looks down on them from
+the walls. There is lacking, however, the choleric and dangerous air of
+Tombstone. People make way for you to pass if you wish, and do not seem
+exclusively occupied with looking about for somebody to tread on the
+tails of their coats.
+
+If Tucson be without historic remains of its own, it has one of the
+loveliest possible in its vicinity, the old mission church of San Xavier
+del Bac.
+
+San Xavier is on the reservation of the Christianized Papago Indians, in
+the Santa Cruz Valley, ten miles to the southward. It is a new sensation
+even for one from Mexico who may have flattered himself that he knew the
+style completely. This ancient landmark of a frontier civilization which,
+since its destruction, has not been even faintly approached in its kind,
+is not surpassed either in Mexico or out of it for the quaintness, the
+qualities of form and color, and the gentle sentiment of melancholy that
+appeal to the artistic sense. Old Father Time has trodden with heavy step
+on green wooden balconies in its front, broken out their floors, and
+left parts of them dangling free. The original sweet-toned bronze bells
+still hang in one of the towers. The space, terminating in a scrolled
+gable, between the towers is enriched with escutcheons and rampant
+lions, wreathed in foliage. Niches hold grotesque broken statues, and
+complicated pilasters flank the entrance door-way, the whole formed in
+stucco upon a basis of moulded bricks. Where a portion has fallen away it
+can be seen that the pilasters are constructed upon or held together by a
+centre consisting of a stick of timber.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.]
+
+The designer, whoever he may have been, was inspired by
+Venetian-Byzantine traditions. It is roofed with numerous simple
+domes and half-domes. The interior of these, frescoed with angels and
+evangelists, the chancel walls, almost covered with gilding, but stained
+and battered, and the painted and gilded lions on the chancel rails,
+recall to the least observant Saint Mark’s at Venice. The style is not
+quite consistently carried out, however. A later rococo decoration, as
+exuberant as the vagaries of East Indian work, mingles with and at places
+overrides it. A Henri II. candlestick will give a certain idea of the
+pattern of the columns.
+
+The date has disappeared from the façade, but it is believed to be about
+1768, and the present edifice was built on the ruins of a former one,
+going back much nearer to 1654, when the mission to the Papagos was
+first begun. Large angels, with bannerets, their draperies formed of
+_papier-maché_ or gummed muslin, are attached to the main chancel piers;
+and a painted and gilded Virgin, with a long face, and hair brushed up
+from a high forehead, as in the sculptures of Jean Goujon, looks down
+from a high altar niche.
+
+All within is of a mediæval richness and obscurity. All without is broad
+sunshine falling upon the peaceful Papago village. A few old men trudge
+about, concerning themselves with their bake-ovens and some water-jars
+and strings of dried squashes, and women pass by with tall loads of hay
+and other produce carried in the _kijo_, a singular hamper of sticks and
+netting, on their backs. Nobody concerns himself about visitors, except a
+foolishly smiling boy, one Domingo, who has brought us the key.
+
+To have come from that spasm of aggressive modernism, Tombstone, and to
+be at ancient San Xavier del Bac—it seemed to me that contrast could
+little farther go.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[1] Detailed figures of our trade with Mexico, and other useful matters,
+will be found in the “Border States of Mexico,” by Leonidas Hamilton.
+Chicago, 1882.
+
+[2] Brocklehurst’s “Mexico To-day.” John Murray: London, 1883.
+
+[3]
+
+    “Si á lo lid contra hueste enemiga
+      Nos convoca la trompa guerrera,
+      De Iturbide la sacra bandera,
+    Mexicanos valientes, seguid!”
+
+
+
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+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77881 ***
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+  </head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77881 ***</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">[i]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus001" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus001.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>LAS CASAS PROTECTING THE AZTECS.</p>
+    <p>By Felix Parra.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">[ii]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">[iii]</span></p>
+
+<h1>OLD MEXICO<br>
+<span class="smaller">AND HER LOST PROVINCES</span></h1>
+
+<p class="titlepage">A JOURNEY IN<br>
+<span class="mid">MEXICO, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, AND ARIZONA<br>
+BY WAY OF CUBA</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage"><span class="smcap">By WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP</span><br>
+<span class="smaller">AUTHOR OF “DETMOLD” “THE HOUSE OF A MERCHANT PRINCE” ETC.</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage sans">WITH ILLUSTRATIONS</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage">NEW YORK<br>
+<span class="smaller">HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE<br>
+1883</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">[iv]</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage smaller">Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by<br>
+HARPER &amp; BROTHERS,<br>
+In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.</p>
+
+<p class="center smaller"><i>All rights reserved.</i></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Part I.</span>—OLD
+    MEXICO.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td><i>By Way of Cuba and the Spanish Main</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#I">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td><i>Vera Cruz</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#II">16</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td><i>Up the Long Mountain Slope</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#III">24</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td><i>The Capital</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#IV">37</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td><i>The Projectors</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#V">54</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td><i>The Ferro-carriles</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VI">70</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td><i>The Railways at Work</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VII">80</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td><i>The Question of Money, and Shopping</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VIII">96</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+    <td><i>Social Life, and some Notable Institutions</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#IX">107</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">X.</td>
+    <td><i>The Fine Arts and Literature</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#X">120</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XI.</td>
+    <td><i>Some Traits of Peculiar History, and the Mexican “Warwick”</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XI">134</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XII.</td>
+    <td><i>Cuatitlan, and Around Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XII">149</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIII.</td>
+    <td><i>To Old Texcoco</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XIII">162</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIV.</td>
+    <td><i>Popocatepetl Ascended</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XIV">175</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XV.</td>
+    <td><i>A Banquet, and a Tragedy, at Cuautla-Morelos</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XV">185</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVI.</td>
+    <td><i>San Juan, Orizaba, and Cordoba Revisited</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XVI">192</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVII.</td>
+    <td><i>Puebla, Cholula, Tlaxcala</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XVII">210</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVIII.</td>
+    <td><i>Mines and Mining Traits, at Pachuco and Regla</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XVIII">227</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIX.</td>
+    <td><i>A Week at a Mexican Country-house</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XIX">245</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XX.</td>
+    <td><i>On Horseback and Muleback to Acapulco</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XX">263</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXI.</td>
+    <td><i>Conversations by the Way with a Colonel</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXI">275</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[vi]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdc" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Part II.</span>—THE
+    LOST PROVINCES.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXII.</td>
+    <td><i>San Francisco</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXII">295</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIII.</td>
+    <td><i>San Francisco</i> (Continued)</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXIII">324</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIV.</td>
+    <td><i>The Villas of the Bonanza Kings</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXIV">343</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXV.</td>
+    <td><i>The Vintage Season, and Monterey</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXV">359</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVI.</td>
+    <td><i>A Wondrous Valley, and a Desert that Blossoms like the Rose</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXVI">380</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVII.</td>
+    <td><i>Visalia, Bakersfield, and Life on a Spacious Ranch</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXVII">399</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVIII.</td>
+    <td><i>Los Angeles</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXVIII">421</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIX.</td>
+    <td><i>To San Diego, and the Mexican Frontier</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXIX">448</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXX.</td>
+    <td><i>Across Arizona</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXX">469</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXXI.</td>
+    <td><i>Tombstone</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXXI">482</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXXII.</td>
+    <td><i>Camp Lowell, Tucson, and San Xavier del Bac</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XXXII">496</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[vii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="ILLUSTRATIONS">ILLUSTRATIONS.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>LAS CASAS PROTECTING THE AZTECS. By Felix Parra</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus001"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MEXICO, SHOWING PRESENT AND OLD FRONTIER</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus002">5</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus003">9</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>DOMES OF VERA CRUZ</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus004">17</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MAP OF ENGLISH RAILROAD FROM VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus005">25</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>TRANSCONTINENTAL PROFILE OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus006">31</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A RAILWAY JUDAS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus007">33</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A FLOWER-SHOW IN THE ZOCALO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus008">43</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>COMPARATIVE LEVELS OF LAKES</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus009">46</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE HOMES OF THE POOR</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus010">49</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>ENTRANCE TO A TENEMENT-HOUSE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus011">51</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>OLD SPANISH PALACE IN THE CALLE DE JESUS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus012">56</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SEMI-VILLA ON THE PASEO OF BUCARELLI</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus013">57</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE MODERN STYLE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus014">58</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PORCELAIN HOUSE IN SAN FRANCISCO STREET</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus015">59</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE DRIVE TO CHAPULTEPEC</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus016">63</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GENERAL RAILWAY SYSTEM OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus017">75</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE GREAT SPANISH DRAINAGE CUT</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus018">85</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PAY CARAVAN ON THE MEXICAN NATIONAL ROAD</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus019">91</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“NOT HERE FOR THEIR HEALTH”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus020">93</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MODERN SHOP-FRONTS AT MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus021">99</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE “PORTALES” AT MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus022">102</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A “MERCERIA” AT PUEBLA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus023">106</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>INTERIOR COURT-YARD OF MEXICAN RESIDENCE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus024">111</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MEXICAN COURTSHIP</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus025">113</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE DEATH OF ATALA. By Luis Monroy</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus026">123<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[viii]</span></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ, EX-PRESIDENT OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus027">139</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GENERAL MANUEL GONZALES, PRESIDENT OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus028">143</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>ENVIRONS OF MEXICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus029">150</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SUNDAY DIVERSIONS AT SANTA ANITA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus030">153</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CREW OF “LA NINFA ENCANTADORA”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus031">165</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE “FIND”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus032">169</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IN TIERRA CALIENTE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus033">186</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE HILL OF EL BORREGO, AT ORIZABA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus034">196</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PRISONERS WEAVING SASHES AT CHOLULA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus035">217</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>OLD FONT AT TLAXCALA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus036">222</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE FIRST CHRISTIAN PULPIT IN AMERICA. TLAXCALA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus037">223</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PART OF CONVENT OF SAN FRANCISCO. TLAXCALA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus038">224</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SUPERINTENDENT’S HOUSE AT REGLA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus039">241</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PLOUGHMAN IN GRASS CLOAK</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus040">243</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE HACIENDA OF TEPENACASCO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus041">246</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE THRESHING-FLOOR</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus042">249</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE TLACHIQUERO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus043">251</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>NURSE AND CHILDREN AT THE HACIENDA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus044">261</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE “DILIGENCIA”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus045">267</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>OUR CAVALCADE AT IGUALA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus046">281</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus047">290</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>ALCATRAZ ISLAND</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus048">297</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“NOB” HILL, FROM THE BAY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus049">299</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CALIFORNIA STREET, SAN FRANCISCO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus050">305</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>LONE MOUNTAIN</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus051">309</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“HIGH JINKS” OF THE BOHEMIAN CLUB AMONG THE BIG TREES</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus052">313</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GOLDEN GATE, FROM GOAT ISLAND</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus053">317</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>HIGH-GRADE RESIDENCES</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus054">327</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CHINESE FISHING-BOATS IN THE BAY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus055">331</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CHINESE QUARTER, SAN FRANCISCO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus056">335</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A BALCONY IN THE CHINESE QUARTER</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus057">337</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IN A CHINESE THEATRE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus058">339</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>RAILWAY ROUTE: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus059">345</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PALO ALTO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus060">354</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>RALSTON’S COUNTRY HOUSE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus061">357</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>BOTTLING CHAMPAGNE AT SAN FRANCISCO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus062">361</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A BRANDY CELLAR, SAN JOSÉ</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus063">363<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[ix]</span></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A BIT OF OLD MONTEREY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus064">365</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>LOOKOUT STATION</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus065">367</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CUTTING UP THE WHALE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus066">369</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE HOTEL DEL MONTE, MONTEREY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus067">371</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CLIFFS AND FOREST AT MONTEREY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus068">373</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus069">375</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SAN CARLOS’S-DAY AT THE OLD MISSION</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus070">376</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>DRYING FISH AT CHINESE VILLAGE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus071">377</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>COURT-HOUSE AT FRESNO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus072">387</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PRIVATE RESIDENCE AT FRESNO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus073">393</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>FIRST BUILDING IN VISALIA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus074">400</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>AN OLD-TIMER</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus075">401</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>LOGGING, BACK OF VISALIA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus076">403</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CHINATOWN, BAKERSFIELD</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus077">409</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GYPSY CAMP AT BAKERSFIELD</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus078">411</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A TYPICAL RANCH-HOUSE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus079">414</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SAN LUIS OBISPO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus080">416</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A RODEO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus081">418</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE KERN RIVER CAÑON</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus082">419</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>TEHACHAPI PASS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus083">422</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus084">425</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>DON PIO PICO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus085">428</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>MONGOLIAN AND MEXICAN</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus086">430</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PARADISE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus087">437</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A MEXICAN WEDDING AT SAN GABRIEL</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus088">441</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE VINTAGE, SAN GABRIEL</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus089">443</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IRRIGATING AN ORANGE-ORCHARD</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus090">445</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A SYLVAN GLIMPSE AT RIVERSIDE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus091">449</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus092">451</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus093">452</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>OLD MISSION AT SANTA BARBARA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus094">455</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PLAZA OF SAN DIEGO, OLD TOWN</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus095">457</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>OLD MISSION AT SAN DIEGO</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus096">460</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>DON JUAN FORSTER</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus097">461</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SEÑORA FORSTER</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus098">462</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>FORSTER’S RANCH</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus099">463</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>SAN LUIS REY</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus100">465<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[x]</span></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A TICHBORNE CLAIMANT</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus101">466</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE COLORADO RIVER AT YUMA</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus102">473</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>PASQUAL, CHIEF OF THE YUMAS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus103">476</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>YUMA INDIANS AT HOME</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus104">477</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>DISTANT VIEW OF TOMBSTONE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus105">484</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“ED” SCHIEFFELIN</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus106">487</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A TOMBSTONE SHERIFF AND CONSTITUENTS</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus107">494</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>APACHE PRISONERS AT CAMP LOWELL</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus108">497</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>AN ARIZONA WATERING-PLACE</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus109">499</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CACTUS GROWTHS OF THE DESERT</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus110">501</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>STREET VIEW IN TUCSON</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus111">503</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>EXTERIOR OF MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus112">505</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus113">507</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PART_I">PART I.<br>
+OLD MEXICO.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="OLD_MEXICO">OLD MEXICO.</h2>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="I">I.<br>
+<i>BY WAY OF CUBA AND THE SPANISH MAIN.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Boom! Two ruddy old castles domineering a narrow
+harbor entrance; on the other side a city, gray, warm-colored,
+and time-stained, and the bells of the Church of
+the Angels chiming for very early morning service! It
+was Havana!</p>
+
+<p>I began this journey to Old Mexico and her Lost
+Provinces by sailing away from the foot of Wall Street,
+East River, on the 31st day of March, 1881. Some
+would have begun it, no doubt, by taking the railroad
+to our Southern confines, and sailing by the steamers,
+of medium size, which ply from New Orleans, Galveston,
+and Morgan City—all places feeling very much the new
+stimulus lately given to Mexican trade. Others—and
+very likely they could not do better—would have taken
+direct the excellent Alexandre Line, which carries the
+mail from New York, calling at Havana, Progreso, Campeachy,
+Frontera, and Vera Cruz.</p>
+
+<p>Others, perchance, more adventurous, and fond of mixing
+as much hardship as possible in their pleasure, might
+have crossed the frontier at Texas, and, the new railroads
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>being yet unfinished, been bumped and thumped a thousand
+miles to the capital in the wretched <i>diligencias</i>
+(stage-coaches) of the country.</p>
+
+<p>I did none of these. I shall not be guilty of the egotism
+of insisting that I did any better; but I had formed
+a little plan of infusing variety into the trip without
+making it too onerous. I stood boldly upon the deck of
+the luxurious steamer <i>Newport</i>, bound for Cuba only.
+From there I was to take the French packet making
+regular trips from the ports of St. Nazaire and Santander
+to Vera Cruz, and bringing much of the French and
+Spanish migration; or a British steamer from Southampton,
+or a Spanish one from Cadiz, might be taken in
+the same way. The fare by any and all of the direct
+sea routes is about the same, and may be set down
+roughly at $85.00. The time consumed, where all connections
+are expeditiously made, should be about eleven
+days.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>There was no uncontrollable excitement on that raw
+31st of March when we took our departure. People in
+the great financial mart, hurrying about their stocks and
+bonds, even blockaded us in an unthinking way as we
+came down to the steamer. It might have been simply
+a case of going to Europe, or anything else quite usual
+and of little import. It was, instead, a case of going to
+a land remote far beyond its distance in miles; shrouded
+in an atmosphere of mystery and danger; little travelled
+or sought for; the very antipodes of our own, though
+adjoining it; venerable with age, though a part of a
+new world; and said to have been suddenly awakened
+from slumber by the first touches of a phenomenal new
+development.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span></p>
+
+<p>There are those of us whose conception of Mexico has
+been composed principally of the cuts in our early school
+geography, and the brief telegrams in the morning papers
+announcing new revolutions. We rest satisfied with this
+kind of concept about many another part of the globe as
+well till the necessity arrives for going there or otherwise
+clearing it up. I saw, I think, a snow volcano, and
+a string of donkeys, conducted by a broad-brim hatted
+peasant across a cactus-covered plain. I heard dimly
+isolated pistol-shots fired by brigands, and high-sounding
+<i>pronunciamentos</i> and cruel fusillades accompanying the
+overthrow from the Presidency of General this by General
+that, who would be served in the same way by General
+somebody else to-morrow. To this should be added
+some reminiscence of actions in the Mexican War, and
+notably the portraits of General Scott and bluff old
+Zachary Taylor.</p>
+
+<p>To this, again, I would add fancies of buried cities in
+Central America, and of Aztec antiquity, and the valor
+and astuteness of Hernando Cortez and his cavaliers, remaining
+from Prescott’s history of the Conquest. One
+of the most captivating of volumes, this had seemed almost
+mythical in its remoteness; and as to the idea of
+actually verifying its scenes in person, it was beyond the
+wildest imagination.</p>
+
+<p>But now all at once this uncertain territory had become
+real. The railroad had penetrated it, and made it
+accessible to the average private citizen. Not that it
+could yet be reached by railway, for the first international
+line is still incomplete, though its termination is near
+at hand; but a multitude of lines, undertaken by American
+capital and enterprise, and aided by a Government
+of liberal ideas, were traced over every part of the land,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>and some of them in progress. The locomotive screamed
+along-side the troops of laden donkeys and in sight of
+the snow volcanoes. Even the brigands were said to
+have been dislodged from their fastnesses, the revolutions
+had ceased, and a reign of peace and security begun.</p>
+
+<p>Momentous rumors from these new enterprises were
+frequent in the newspapers, and predictions indulged in
+of the great increase of trade and population to result
+to Mexico by them. General Grant, to whose personal
+influence much of the turning of public attention in this
+unwonted direction, after his first visit, should certainly
+be ascribed, had taken the presidency of one of them.
+Their stocks and bonds were being prepared in bank-parlors,
+but as yet there was no “boom,” little that was
+overt.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>I did not quite know, when standing on the deck of the
+departing steamer, that I was to return to this dense New
+York, with its tall towers and mansards and fairy-like
+bridge, from the other side of the world. This journey
+lengthened out into a long, desultory ramble, beginning
+with Cuba, and, after Mexico, concluding with the most
+remote, novel, and characteristic of our own possessions
+on the Pacific slope. There is unity of subject, and even
+a certain pathos, in the recollection that this latter was
+once Mexican territory also. Its most obvious basis of
+life is still Spanish, and it may be sentimentally considered
+a kind of Alsace-Lorraine—a part of the sister republic
+when it was well-nigh as large and powerful as
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp87" id="illus002" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus002.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MEXICO SHOWING PRESENT &amp; OLD FRONTIER</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It was naturally cold on the 31st day of March, and
+blustering weather followed us down the coast as far
+as it dared. Then I awoke one morning early, at the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>warm gleam of summer in the yellow lattices of my cabin
+window, and, looking out, saw that we were voyaging, on
+an even keel, on the placid blue sea of the tropics. Fragrant
+odors were wafted over to us from Florida, though
+we did not see the land. The Pan of Matanzas came in
+sight, and we studied the long, bold outline of the island
+of Cuba. It was the Spanish Main. It was the perfection
+of weather for piracy. If the “long, low, suspicious-looking
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>craft, with raking masts,” which used to steal out
+from sheltered covers to plunder rich galleons, had many
+such days for their occupation, it was, so far at least, an
+enviable one.</p>
+
+<p>We had on board a Cuban who had married a Connecticut
+wife, and lived so long in a Connecticut village that
+he had a kind of Connecticut accent himself, and he was
+taking his wife to see his family, where, no doubt, much
+astonishment awaited her.</p>
+
+<p>The captain, a merry and entertaining soul, had promised
+us, for our last day’s dinner, a baked ice-cream. He
+endeavored to get up bets on the improbability of his
+being able to accomplish it; but there, sure enough, it
+was, and doubters were put to scorn. There was a form
+of ice-cream, frozen hard and firm, and a crust over it,
+brown and smoking—a dish, as it were, typical of our
+situation, as a hardy Northern element in the embrace of
+the tropics. Not to continue the mystery of it, and as an
+earnest that there shall be no “tales of a traveller” in
+this record which are not strictly true, let it be explained
+that the ice had been covered with a light froth of white
+of egg, which was rapidly browned and scorched at the
+cook’s galley before the interior had time to be dissolved.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>And so, as I say, two ruddy stone castles, full of green
+old bronze guns (we found that out afterward), looking
+down upon a narrow harbor-entrance; and it was Havana!</p>
+
+<p>It was the morning of the 5th of April on which we
+entered it. We steamed up the strait to where it widens
+out into a basin, made fast to a buoy, and had our first
+glimpse of cocoa-palms, growing, unfortunately, around
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>a cluster of coaling-sheds. Some harbor boats took us
+ashore. We landed at broad stone steps pervaded by
+smells, passed into the Custom-house (which had been
+an old convent), and out of it into paved lanes full of
+donkeys, negroes, soldiers, sellers of fruits and lottery-tickets,
+engaged in transactions in a debased fractional
+currency. The money of the debt-ridden island is that
+of our “shin-plaster” war period, of unhappy memory. A
+couple of boiled eggs in a common restaurant cost forty
+cents; a ride in a horse-car, thirty-five. The wages of a
+minor clerk at the same time were but $30 or $40 a
+month. How does he make ends meet and provide for
+his future? He buys regularly a certain amount of
+hope in the Government lottery. “A demoralizing system
+indeed!” I said, as I frowned over the wares of a
+dealer who had lost a leg in the insurrection. I think
+it was No. 11,014 I bought, however, in a grand extra
+drawing, the first prize of which was to be a million, in
+paper. I trust the gentle reader will feel that I repented
+when I heard the result, some months after, in Mexico,
+and that I should have tried just as hard to repent had
+I won.</p>
+
+<p>The Havanese were exercised just then over the discovery
+of great frauds in their Marine Department.
+Forty million dollars had been stolen, by collusion between
+contractors and the commissariat, since the outbreak
+of the rebellion in 1868. The Morro Castle was
+full of prisoners of distinction—officers, marquises, and
+counts, of the sugar aristocracy of the island, and Old
+Spain—awaiting their trial by court-martial. The principal
+operator, one Antonio Gassol, had already been
+sentenced to two years’ confinement and the restitution
+of a million of his ill-gotten gains.</p>
+
+<p>The talk of not a few intelligent persons was, that the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>ten years’ insurrection had been purposely kept alive by
+rings of contractors for purposes of spoliation, and by
+ambition for military advancement. Dulce, they said—going
+through the list of Captains-General—had married
+a Cuban wife, and was secretly a traitor; De Rodas, when
+asked for re-enforcements at a certain place, withdrew a
+portion of the troops already there; Pieltan was occupied
+in intriguing for the republican cause in Spain,
+and the easy-going Concha for the cause of King Alfonso.
+Finally, Martinez Campos and Jovellar were sent out,
+and, yielding to the demand of the universal weariness,
+by a little display of vigor, the one in the cabinet, the
+other in the field, made an end of the languishing
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p>This may have been, however, merely the story of the
+discontented, which should be taken with a grain of salt.
+It is true, on the one hand, that the area of the island is
+not great, and the despatch of forces from Spain easy; the
+insurgents never held a town, and received no aid worth
+mentioning from without. But, on the other hand, there
+were no railroads of consequence, the ordinary roads were
+wretched, and there was the wild <i>manigua</i>, as it is called,
+half forest, half swamp, with which a good part of the
+island has abounded from the date of Christopher Columbus
+down. It was in the <i>manigua</i> that the insurgents
+found refuge from pursuit.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>It so happened that the <i>Ville de Brest</i> was delayed in
+her coming, and I had six or seven days of leisure in
+the island. I employed part of it in a run down to Matanzas,
+the second city. I saw on the way the <i>manigua</i>,
+which is sentimentally pretty, from a distance, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
+masses of laurel, cypress, and graceful palms; but within
+it is a thicket of intertwisted cactus, thorns, and creepers,
+through which a way must be opened with the <i>machete</i>,
+a formidable half knife, half cleaver, carried by the
+peasants for general uses on the plantations, and which
+served also as their weapon in the strife.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus003" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus003.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span></p>
+
+<p>There was an International Exhibition in progress at
+Matanzas, easily rivalled by almost any American county
+fair. The railway ride of three hours and a half by a
+ram-shackle train, run by a Chinese engineer, was hot and
+dusty, but how well repaid by the first deep draughts of
+satisfaction in understanding at last the heart of a tropical
+country! There was the thatched cabin, shaded by
+the broad-leafed banana. It was like “Paul and Virginia.”
+Where was the faithful negro Domingo? The
+hedges were of cactus and dwarf pine-apple. There were
+groves of cocoa-nuts like apple-orchards with us, and unknown
+fruits too numerous to mention. It was as if each
+peasant proprietor had cultivated a gigantic conservatory,
+and were indulging himself in the luxuries of life
+in consideration of foregoing its necessities.</p>
+
+<p>Matanzas was dull, even with its Exposition, a pretty
+plaza, and the memory of a locally immortal poet, Milanes,
+of whom a tablet in a wall testified that he was
+born and died in a certain house. I looked into his
+works at a book-stall. He wrote on “Tears,” “The Sea,”
+“Spring and Love,” “The Fall of the Leaves,” “To
+Lola,” and “A Coquette.” “Your mother little thought,
+when she held you an infant in her arms,” he says, in
+substance, to the coquette, “of what wiles and perfidies
+you would be capable. Your beauteous aspect will in
+time fade away, and what remorseful memories will
+you not then have to look back upon!”</p>
+
+<p>With this dip into the poetic inspiration of the heart
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>of the island of Cuba let me take the train back to
+town, having made a beginning of the discovery that a
+glib rhyming talent—and facility in speech-making as
+well—is common among the Spanish-Americans.</p>
+
+<p>I visited a sugar plantation, where the negro slaves,
+swarming out of a great stone barracks—the men in ragged
+coffee-sacks, the women in bright calicoes—were as
+wild and uncouth as if just from the Congo. Next I
+went to the bathing suburb of Chorrera, where there is
+a battered old fort that has done service against the pirates,
+and where the American game of base-ball has
+been acclimated.</p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>Havana was gay with parks, opera-houses, clubs, and military
+music. Awnings were stretched completely across
+the two narrow streets of principal shops. Bright
+tinting of the modern walls contrasted with a gray old
+rococo architecture. An interior court of my hotel was
+colored of so pure an azure that it was puzzling at the
+first glance to say where the sky began and the wall
+ended. The more important mansions were of a size
+and stateliness within which is probably nowhere surpassed,
+but neither in them nor the shabby little attempt
+at a gallery were there any pictures worthy of the name.</p>
+
+<p>“You will find all that—the treasures of art—in Mexico,”
+the Havanese say. “Yes indeed! that is the place
+for them.”</p>
+
+<p>They speak with great respect of Mexico, with which,
+perhaps, they have no very intimate personal acquaintance.
+Up to the independence of the latter, in 1821, it
+was the richest and greatest of all the Spanish possessions;
+and Cuba, made more important in its turn by this
+independence, was but a stopping-place on the way to it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is worth while to have seen Havana and Cuba as a
+preliminary to Mexico. The Spanish tradition pervading
+both is the same, with local modifications. It was here,
+too, that Hernando Cortez prepared his immortal expedition
+of discovery and conquest. Since I am preparing
+my own, to follow over exactly the same course, why
+should I repine that the <i>Ville de Brest</i> is a day or two
+longer in coming?</p>
+
+<p>He was a wild young fellow in the island in early
+days, this Cortez, his chroniclers say, and gave little
+promise of the great qualities he developed in the enterprise
+which steadied him. The shilly-shally Velasquez
+would have stopped the sailing of his expedition and
+thrown him into prison, but he dropped down the harbor
+before his preparations were half completed and finished
+them elsewhere. He put to sea at last, with five hundred
+and fifty men, in nine small vessels, to undertake the conquest
+of an empire teeming with millions. The largest
+of his vessels was of a hundred tons, and some were mere
+open boats. In these he conveyed, too, sixteen horses,
+which cost him, it is said of them, “inexpressibly dear.”</p>
+
+<p>We make a boast of our hardihood sometimes, yet
+grumble at sea-sickness, delays, the ordinary mischances
+of the traveller. But think of it! To set out in such a
+fashion, without steam, without charts, subject to every
+bodily ill for which modern science has found a remedy,
+and carrying your horses, worth well-nigh their weight in
+gold, to proceed against an unknown empire! Why, we
+do not know the first principles of boldness!</p>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<p>At last, on the 11th of April, the <i>Ville de Brest</i> came
+in, and went out again on the same day. She was a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>steady-going, <i>bourgeois</i>-looking craft, as compared with
+the elegant American steamer, and showed traces of hard
+knocks in her long, plodding journey of twenty days to
+this point. She treated us well enough, however, and
+presented the novelty of surroundings for which I had
+come aboard. There was a little, gold-laced captain, and
+the crew wore white canvas hats and suits of two shades
+of blue cotton, as if equipped for some charming nautical
+opera. I believe I was the only English-speaking passenger;
+and as it has never been known to occur to a foreigner
+to practise his English, it was an excellent opportunity
+for practising the languages likely to be needed
+in the new country.</p>
+
+<p>There was a young Frenchman who had been back to
+his own country to marry a wife, and brought her with
+him. There was a French engineer coming to report
+for principals in Paris on Mexican mines; an agent of
+a scheme for the establishment of a national bank. A
+young Italian of Novara, who had “Student” printed on
+his visiting-card, had secured an engagement as clerk in
+the capital for three years. An elderly Spaniard was
+coming over to look into the subject of forgotten heritages;
+another had obtained a position in the mines at
+Guanajuato. There were commercial men, and a well-to-do
+Mexican family, returning from their travels, with
+a son who had studied law at a Spanish university.</p>
+
+<p>It has been proposed to call this body of water—made
+up of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico—the
+Columbian Sea, in compliment to sadly-neglected Columbus;
+and it seems a good idea, but it will hardly now be
+carried out. My predecessors have seen many an interesting
+sight on this tropical old Spanish Main, the source,
+too, of that greatest of natural mysteries, the Gulf Stream.
+But these must have been in times long gone by. In the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>day of steam, with the swift prow always in motion, the
+ocean is vacant. There is no catching of sharks and dolphins,
+hardly even a covey of flying-fish. Those things
+were for the long, lazy periods of calm, when the denizens
+of the deep gathered curiously around the craft half
+quiescent among them.</p>
+
+<p>One of my predecessors in 1839—Madame Calderon
+de la Barca, whose book on Mexico remains full of interest
+still—was twenty-five days making the voyage from
+Havana to Vera Cruz. She saw, too, as she approached,
+the snow-clad peaks of Orizaba and the Cofre of Perote,
+thirty leagues inland. We saw nothing of these. The
+sky was of an opaque gray above low sand-hills, on which
+a white surf was tumbling. We made our transit in
+three days, including some stoppage by a “norther.”
+The norther is of peculiar moment to the Mexican harbors
+of the eastern coast; they are little more than open
+roadsteads, and when it blows they cannot be entered.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="II">II.<br>
+<i>VERA CRUZ.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The sea of the subsiding “norther” was still running
+heavily toward Vera Cruz, as if it would overwhelm it.
+It was a little Venice that we saw when we came to it.
+A half-mile or so of buildings, compact and solid, with
+blackened old rococo domes and steeples; yellow for the
+most part, scarlet, pink, green, and blue, in patches; a
+stone landing-quay, and a long, light iron pier projecting
+from it. At the end of the pier from a crane hung an
+iron hook, and to this the imagination instantly hooked
+on. It was the termination of the English railway to
+the capital. By that road, with all possible expedition,
+we should be borne up out of the miasmatic lands of
+the coast—the over-luxuriant <i>Tierra Caliente</i>—to the
+wonders of the interior.</p>
+
+<p>To the left a reddish castellated fort. No suburbs—not
+a sign of them—only long, dreary stretches of sand. Very
+far down on the sand, with the sea breaking white over
+her, was the English steamer <i>Chrysolite</i>, dragged from
+her moorings by the gale and wrecked. We came in at
+evening, and joined ourselves to a little cluster of steamers
+and sailing-vessels made fast to buoys under the lee
+of a coral reef, on which stands the disreputable old castle
+of San Juan d’Ulloa. It is whitewashed in part, and
+partly as blackened by time and powder as the reef itself.
+A revolving lantern moved round on its summit. It was
+told to the confiding that the Government kept prisoners
+there to turn it; and they were instructed to look for
+their dark, flitting forms and hear their lugubrious cries.
+We heard all night, at any rate, the creaking of the pumps
+of an American bark along-side, which had come disabled
+into port, with a freight of logs from Alvarado, and could
+barely keep afloat.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus004" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus004.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>DOMES OF VERA CRUZ.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span></p>
+
+<p>It so happened that it was the anniversary of the arrival
+of Cortez, in the year 1519. He had arrived on the
+evening of Thursday of Holy Week, and so had I. It
+was on the morning of Good Friday that I went ashore.
+We were taken off in small boats, and our ship unloaded
+by lighters, for there is not one of these Mexican harbors
+where a ship can lie up to a wharf in safety.</p>
+
+<p>More than the usual embarrassments await the ordinary
+traveller on the quay at Vera Cruz, by so much as
+he is apt to know less of Spanish than of French—in
+which most of the dearly-bought early foreign experience
+is acquired—and nobody will tell him the truth. Let it
+be fixed in mind that but one train a day starts for the
+capital, and this at eleven at night. The designing bystanders
+make you take your baggage to a hotel, pretending
+that no other course is possible. Take it, instead, to
+the depot at once and get rid of it, and then see the town.</p>
+
+<p>For the town is by all means to be seen. One had
+not expected much of a place the reputed home of pestilence,
+and I shall not advise a lengthened stay; but, from
+the point of view of the picturesque, it has some pleasant
+surprises.</p>
+
+<p>Founded by the Count de Monterey in the early part
+of the seventeenth century—for it is not quite the site
+of the original Vera Cruz of Cortez, which was above—it
+has now attained a population of about seventeen thousand.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>The principal shops had a large, well-furnished
+aspect, especially those in groceries and heavy hardware.
+The Custom-house square was piled to repletion with
+bales of cotton, railroad iron, and miscellaneous goods
+awaiting transit.</p>
+
+<p>I walked, the very first thing, into a large, cool public
+library, which had once been a convent. It was not much
+of a public library, the books being few, and to a certain
+extent bound in vellum, as if they too had belonged to
+the convent; but it was public, and what one did not
+expect.</p>
+
+<p>The churches were of a well-proportioned, solid, grandiose,
+rococo architecture, and had charming bells. The
+principal one, in a little shaded plaza, had its dome encrusted
+with colored china tiles, which shone in the sun—a
+feature waiting in plenty farther on. They were
+draped in black, and crowded with worshippers to-day,
+and abounded in strange figures of bleeding Christs, with
+other evidences of a florid form of devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Grass grew in joints of the pavement in the minor
+streets, as I had seen it, for instance, in some such place
+as Mantua. Long water-spouts project from the tops of
+the flat-roofed white and yellow houses, and upon these
+sit the solemn zopilotes. All the world knows that the
+street-cleaning of Vera Cruz is conducted by the ravens,
+or buzzards; but all the world does not know with what
+a dignity these large zopilotes, of a glossy blackness, often
+pose themselves immovably on the eaves against the deep
+blue sky. They might be carved there for ornament.
+Many a street-cleaning department is at least less sculpturesque,
+and perhaps less efficient.</p>
+
+<p>The principal thoroughfare, called of the Independence,
+leads to a short, concrete-covered promenade, bordered
+with benches and a double row of cocoanut-palms,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>and this to the open country. It is an early discovery
+that the Mexican is patriotic. He is fond of naming his
+streets and squares after his military achievements, and
+particularly the Cinco de Mayo (the Fifth of May). We
+shall hear plenty more of it, this Cinco de Mayo. It was
+won at Puebla over the French, in 1862. He attaches
+also to cities the names of his heroes. Thus Vera Cruz
+itself is Vera Cruz of Llave, a general and governor;
+Oaxaca, Oaxaca of Juarez, the sagacious President; and
+Puebla, Puebla of Zaragoza, its commandant on the
+5th of May above-named.</p>
+
+<p>There were notices of a bull-fight posted on the dead
+walls. Nearly all typical notes are struck at once—plaza,
+Renaissance churches, patriotism, bull-fight, and tropical
+vegetation. I took a tram-car of a peculiar, wide, open
+pattern (made, however, in New York) out to the open
+fields, and saw a dancing-place, a ball-ground, and the
+dark, heavily walled-in cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>The road to this latter should not be grass-grown, if
+half the tales of dread told abroad be true. And yet
+there are apologists even for the yellow-fever, or rather
+those who say that its ravages are greatly magnified.</p>
+
+<p>I fell in with the Yankee captain of the disabled bark
+which had lain by us during the night. He was sitting
+on a low stone post at a street corner, and was half disconsolate,
+half desperate, by turns. He could find no dry-dock
+in which to lie up for repairs; and he could get no
+steam-pump, by the aid of which he might have kept on
+his way. He was condemned to see his venture sold for
+a song, for want of means to save it.</p>
+
+<p>If little, as I say, was expected from the land at this
+place, a good deal, on the other hand, was expected from
+the water, at an ancient port, the New York of Mexico,
+receiving nine-tenths of the commerce of a nation of ten
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>million people. But not a year passes without a number
+of disasters, which has led the underwriters to make
+their risks to Vera Cruz about five times higher than to
+most other ports. The aggregate of these losses for a
+brief time would pay the cost of works needed to make
+the inhospitable roadstead a harbor.</p>
+
+<p>A few rudimentary preparations are absolutely necessary
+before Mexico can enter upon the expected period
+of prosperity, and the creation of harbors in some degree
+commensurate with the new transportation facilities is
+one of them. A breakwater plan will, no doubt, have to
+be adopted like that so much in use on our great lakes
+and the Channel ports of Europe. It was of interest to
+hear, during my stay in the country, that this need had
+impressed itself upon the authorities at Vera Cruz and
+Tampico, and that they had taken the step of counselling
+on what was best to be done with the American
+engineer, Captain Eads, who was engaged in his unique
+scheme of a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I had the pleasure of spending the evening, pending
+the departure of the train, in a large, cool, roomy house,
+with the American consul. He had been a resident for
+twelve years, and had brought up a family of daughters
+here. It did not seem, at first sight, an attractive place
+in which to bring up a family; but they saw a good deal
+of company from the ships in port, took an occasional
+run to the capital, or a vacation at Jalapa or Cordova,
+above the danger-line, and seemed well content.</p>
+
+<p>The consul was himself a physician, and had much to
+say on the subject of the yellow-fever. He insisted that it
+was epidemic, but not contagious. The local authorities
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>put afflicted patients in their hospitals along-side others
+suffering from ordinary sickness, and these latter do not
+take it.</p>
+
+<p>“Great damage,” he said, “is done to the commercial
+interests of both countries by the annoying restrictions
+of quarantine arising from this cause. There is no more
+need of quarantine against yellow-fever than against common
+fever and ague, since it cannot be transmitted.”</p>
+
+<p>He quoted eminent medical authority at New Orleans
+as sharing his views. From which it would seem that the
+subject is worth careful looking into from official sources,
+in order that, if there be a mere popular delusion, it may
+be dispelled. As I write the Mexican Government has
+just granted authority to the steamer line which carries
+the mail into New Orleans to reduce the number of its
+trips to one each month during the quarantine, increase
+its freight and passenger rates fifty per cent., and, if the
+traffic does not pay even under the increase, to abandon
+it entirely.</p>
+
+<p>The consul, in conclusion, had known but one countryman
+of ours to die of it during his stay, and only a few
+to be attacked. I may say, however, that the consul succeeding
+this one—who has since gone away—arrived fresh
+from Minnesota, and died at his post within a week.</p>
+
+<p>Another interesting subject of talk with the consul
+was the tariff laws and the usages of the port of entry,
+naturally of leading importance here. The tariff system,
+based on an original law of 1872, has been greatly tampered
+with since, and is in a confused state; so that, with
+the best intentions, importers are apt to be visited with
+double duties, fines, detentions of goods, and law-suits.
+There are some three hundred and seventy-eight articles
+in the specified list. New articles are charged for after
+the manner of those which they resemble. Thus, when
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>the article of celluloid was first introduced there was
+doubt whether it ought to be taxed twenty-nine cents a
+kilogram as bone, or $2.20 a kilogram as ivory, and the
+decision was finally in favor of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>The merchant must use the names employed in the
+country. Thus, our “muslin” should be merely “shirting”
+or “calico;” while what is understood here by muslin
+is really lawn, taxed twice as much. The least variation
+in a label or form of package is visited with penalties.
+Storage in the warehouses, too, is estimated, not by
+the space occupied, but by the package, which is a hardship.
+A case is told of where ordinary <i>argenté</i> hooks-and-eyes,
+which should pay nineteen cents a kilogram,
+were charged for as “plated silver,” which pays $1.15,
+and then a double duty imposed for “false declaration,”
+making the total $2.30 a kilogram. As a rule, a “venture”
+is not a success. The laws, framed with excessive
+severity against contrabandists, whom they often fail to
+reach, afflict well-meaning persons. They make the consignee
+of goods subject to all the penalties; and many
+of these latter are afraid to touch, without the most ample
+guarantees, consignments of goods which they have
+not specifically ordered. The Germans succeed best in
+this traffic, through their painstaking attention to the
+local requirements.</p>
+
+<p>“I will tell you a story,” said the consul, “of an unlucky
+fellow who came here from England with a small
+venture of fancy goods, part free of duty. The whole
+cost him originally $1200; and he had consulted the
+Mexican consul at Liverpool, and thought he knew what
+he was about. When he got through the Custom-house
+his total charges and fines had amounted to $2850. He
+sold his stock for $2000, and borrowed money to pay the
+difference and get out of the country.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="III">III.<br>
+<i>UP THE LONG MOUNTAIN SLOPE.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>There is but one train a day, each way, on the English
+railway, and the journey occupies twenty hours. The
+road is a great piece of engineering, and has been described
+more than anything else in Mexico. Photographs—almost
+the only good ones to be had in the country—are
+plentiful, displaying its notable points. It climbs
+seven thousand six hundred feet to the table-land in a
+distance of about two hundred miles, the whole way to
+the capital being about two hundred and sixty. It has
+the transporting of the greater amount of construction
+material brought into the country for the new roads, and
+has lately been quite profitable. A first-class fare is $16;
+a second-class, $12.50; and baggage is charged for, as on
+the Continent of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Behold us at last at the station, at eleven o’clock at
+night, ready to climb to the capital—but how unlike our
+great predecessor, Cortez—by railway. No, indeed; poor
+hero! he had to linger at the coast for months before
+beginning his long and painful march, with a battle at
+every step. Nor was it by the same route. He went in
+by Tlaxcala, Cholula, Puebla, and so over between the
+great snow-peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl (the
+White Woman), down to the gleaming lakes and palaces
+of ancient Tenochtitlan. In this course he was followed
+by General Scott in his turn. The old diligence road—of
+their adventures on which my predecessors have written
+so much—continued practically the same route, going
+first by National Bridge and beautiful Jalapa.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus005" style="max-width: 62.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus005.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MAP OF ENGLISH RAILROAD FROM VERA CRUZ TO MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span></p>
+
+<p>I say beautiful Jalapa—although I have not been
+there myself—because all testimonies point with such
+a unanimity to the charms of soil and climate, and the
+beauty of the feminine type, in what is considered a peculiarly
+favored spot, that I think there can be no doubt
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>There were no sleeping-cars; but the carriages, divided
+into compartments for eight, and comfortably padded (on
+the European plan), filled their place very well. The
+passengers in the third-class cars had already begun the
+night with a boisterous singing and playing of harmonicas.
+To-morrow was the <i>Sabado de Gloria</i> (or Holy Saturday),
+an occasion of merry-making, and they were taking
+an earnest of it. A car containing half a company of
+dusky Indian soldiers, who act as an escort, was coupled
+on to the train.</p>
+
+<p>The associates in the compartment in which I established
+myself were the French engineer sent out to report
+for principals in Paris on Mexican mines, and the
+young Frenchman bringing back a bride from his own
+country. All at once there entered it so lawless and
+bizarre-looking a figure that the French engineer sent
+out to report on mines to his principals in Paris thought
+it prudent to descend hastily and seek quarters elsewhere.
+The rest of us, though remaining, were, perhaps, in no
+small trepidation. It was the first view at close quarters
+of a dashing type of Mexican costume and aspect which
+is peculiarly national.</p>
+
+<p>Our new friend was dressed in a short black jacket,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>under which showed a navy revolver, in a sash; tight
+pantaloons, adorned up and down with rows of silver
+coins; a great felt sombrero, bordered and encircled with
+silver braid; and a red handkerchief knotted around his
+neck. A person in such a hat seemed capable of anything.
+And I had forgotten to mention silver spurs,
+weighing a pound or two each, upon boots with exaggerated
+high and narrow heels. This last, by-the-way,
+is a peculiarity of all boots and shoes in the market,
+which aim thus, it would seem, to continue the old Castilian
+tradition of a high instep.</p>
+
+<p>Would it be his plan to overawe us with his huge
+revolver, alone?</p>
+
+<p>Or would he, at a preconcerted signal, be joined by
+confederates from the third-class car or a way-station,
+who would assist him to slaughter us?</p>
+
+<p>The traveller is rare who arrives in Mexico for the
+first time without a head full of stories of violence. The
+numerous revolutions, the confused intelligence which
+reaches us from the country, give a color to anything of
+the kind; and the stories retain their hold for a time
+even in the most frequented precincts.</p>
+
+<p>We got under way. The new arrival, instead of devouring
+us, proved the most amiable of persons, and
+we were soon upon excellent terms with him. He was
+a wealthy young hacendado, or planter, returning to
+estates of his, on which he said six hundred hands were
+employed. He offered cigars, gave us details in answer
+to our eager curiosity about his novel dress; and we had
+shortly even tried on—bride and all—the formidable
+sombrero, and learned that the price of such an one in
+the market is from $20 to $30. The silver-bound sombrero,
+and ornaments of coins, are a favorite kind of
+Mexican extravagance even among the lower classes,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>which is perhaps accounted for by the lack of proper
+places of deposit for savings in other forms.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>It was moonlight. Sleep on such a night was out of
+the question. Not a foot of the scenery ought to be lost.
+But the padded coach was comfortable; the fatigues of
+the day had been severe. The lively conversation became
+fitful, then lapsed into long silences. The events of that
+first night, half dozing, half waking, sometimes even
+alighting at the little stations, seem wholly like a dream—the
+waking part, if possible, stranger than the other.</p>
+
+<p>Palms and bananas and dense coffee shrubbery, with
+hamlets of thatched cottages sleeping peacefully among
+them; a glimpse of a cataract; an Indian mother singing
+to her baby; perfumes coming in at the window;
+statuesque, silent men in blankets, and Moorish-looking
+women, offering fruits; stations from the outer doors of
+which, when reached, no town was visible, but only an
+immense darkness; persons taking coffee in lighted interiors;
+the dusky soldiers laughing loud in their compartment;
+a few startling words of English, sometimes
+with a Southern or even Hibernian accent, spoken by
+imported employés of the line meeting to exchange a
+comment, generally unfavorable, on their situation—these
+are the impressions that stamp themselves upon
+the memory.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the first gray of daylight appears it seems
+incumbent on us to begin to admire the country. We
+are not far past Cordoba, the centre of its most important
+coffee-growing interest.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Pouf!</i>” says our friend, the hacendado, with an air
+of disdain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span></p>
+
+<p>He will not take the trouble to look out of the window.
+He expects things very much better. We have,
+in fact, passed remarkable scenes in the night, but the
+best is still before us, and presently begins.</p>
+
+<p>At a little station called Fortin we commence to wind
+along the side of one of the vast sudden gorges which
+impede travel in the country, the <i>barranca</i> of Metlac.
+There are horseshoe curves which almost permit the
+traditional feat in which the brakeman of the rear car
+is said to light his pipe at the locomotive. We pass
+tunnels and trestle bridges, see our route above and below
+us on the hills in such varied ways that it is hardly
+possible to understand that these are not so many different
+roads instead of the same. There is a point
+above Maltrata, distant but two and a half miles in a
+direct line, which must be reached by twenty miles of
+zigzag.</p>
+
+<p>The history of this road, from the political point of
+view, presents hardly fewer obstacles and vicissitudes
+than those opposed by nature to its engineers. It has
+passed, in its time, under the rule of forty different presidencies,
+and lost and recovered its charter in the revolutions.
+Though of so moderate length it required over
+thirty years and $30,000,000 to build it.</p>
+
+<p>The passengers ran out at the small stations for flowers,
+with which we adorned ourselves. So, too, wreaths were
+hung about the neck of Cortez’s horse in his progress,
+and a chaplet of roses upon his helmet. We gave the
+new bride heliotrope, roses, jasmine, and the splendid
+large scarlet flower—the tulipan—which may pass for
+the type of tropical beauty.</p>
+
+<p>The sun came up and lighted Orizaba, rising 17,375
+feet beside us to the right, making it first rosy-red, then
+golden. The peak is a perfect sugar-loaf in form, with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>nothing splintered and savage about it, as in Switzerland.
+It seems almost too tame at first—a sort of drawing-master’s
+mountain—and, above the tropical landscape, is like
+snow in sherbet. The city of Orizaba is an important
+small place, the scene of a dashing surprise of the Mexicans
+by the French, at the hill of El Borrego. It has
+charming torrents, which furnish water-power for cotton
+and paper mills. One of these torrents, conveyed in an
+arched aqueduct, turns the machinery of the <i>ingenio</i>, or
+sugar plantation, of Jalapilla, once a country residence of
+Maximilian.</p>
+
+<p>A delegation of relatives had come down the night before
+to await our young couple here. What embracing
+and chattering! A Mexican embrace has a character of
+its own. The parties fall upon each other’s necks, as we
+are accustomed to see done on the stage. It is given,
+too, between mere acquaintances, almost as commonly as
+shaking hands.</p>
+
+<p>A vivacious sister-in-law aimed to give the new-comer
+an idea of what was before her in her future home.
+“Such flowers as I have in the court-yard!” she said, raising
+her eyes, with an expressive gesture; “such oranges,
+camellias, azaleas! Ah yes, indeed, I believe it well.”</p>
+
+<p>“And Jack?” inquired the husband, addressed as Prosper;
+“how always goes poor Jack?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! he is dead,” replied the vivacious sister-in-law.
+“I regret to tell you, but so it is.”</p>
+
+<p>It appeared that Jack was a favorite monkey, and for
+a moment his untimely fate cast a certain gloom over the
+company.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>From the heights where we were little villages, with
+squares of cultivated fields around them, were seen at vast
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>distances below, with the effect of those miniature topographical
+preparations in relief displayed at international
+exhibitions.</p>
+
+<p>It greatly simplifies Mexico to remember that, in profile,
+it is a long, continuous mountain-slope, rising from
+the Atlantic to a central table-land, and falling, though
+more gradually, on the other side to the Pacific. Along
+the ascents, as well as at the top, are some benches, or
+level breathing-places. These table-lands are the chief
+seats of population, and they are utilized as much as
+possible for the lines of the north and south railways.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus006" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus006.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>TRANSCONTINENTAL PROFILE OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>This steep formation accounts for absence of navigable
+streams and for the existence of climates verging from
+tropical to temperate, nearly side by side. The sharpness
+of contrasts in climate is scarcely to be appreciated by
+the hasty voyager. The really tropical vegetation is succeeded
+by a kind which to the eye of the American of
+the North is quite as exotic. Banana and cocoa-nut are
+followed by a hardy kind of fan-palm; by nopal, or
+prickly-pear, as large as the apple-tree with us; by the
+tall, straight organ-cactus, in use for hedges; and the
+remarkable maguey, or century-plant.</p>
+
+<p>What would not some of our American conservatories
+or a certain well-known New York club give for some
+of these splendid specimens! The spiky maguey, like a
+sheaf of sword-blades, grows eight and ten feet high. It
+is the typical production of the central table-land. Its
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>sap furnishes in extraordinary quantities the beverage
+called <i>pulque</i>—the wine of the country. From it, in addition,
+are made thatch, fuel, rope, paper, and even stuffs
+for wearing apparel.</p>
+
+<p>Our third-class passengers celebrated their <i>Sabado de
+Gloria</i> with great spirit, by shouting, and firing pistols
+and Chinese crackers from the car windows. Teams of
+mules, with their load, whatever it might be, gayly
+adorned, showed that it was being equally observed in
+the country. It is a day devoted by custom to the particular
+abasement of Judas, who is treated as a kind of
+Guy Fawkes and dishonored in effigy. Venders parade
+the streets with grotesque images of him, and children
+at this time estimate their fortune in the number of
+Judases they possess, just as at the season of All-Souls
+it is in cakes, gingerbread, and even more substantial
+viands, fashioned into death’s-heads, cross-bones, and
+coffins.</p>
+
+<p>At Apizaco, the junction of a branch-road to Puebla,
+we met a merry excursion, decorated with rosettes and
+streamers. It had two mammoth Judases, stuffed with
+fire-works, one on the locomotive, the other on a baggage-car.
+The former was blown up, as a kind of compliment
+to us by way of exchange of ceremonies with our own
+train, amid hilarious uproar.</p>
+
+<p>We had now entered upon the central table-land of
+Mexico. Long, dotted, perspective lines of maize and
+maguey stretched to distant volcanic-looking hills. A
+few laborers in white cotton were ploughing with wooden
+ploughs, after the pattern of the ancient Egyptians.
+At the stations squads of a mounted rural police, in buff
+leather uniforms and crimson sashes, which give them
+a certain resemblance to Cromwell’s troopers, salute the
+train.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span></p>
+
+<p>The sparse towns consist of a nucleus of excellently
+built old churches amid an environment of mud-colored
+habitations. They are in crying need of whitewash.
+Will they ever get it?</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp93" id="illus007" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus007.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A RAILWAY JUDAS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The face of the country was not the verdant paradise
+that may have been expected, but parched and brown.
+We had come at the end of the rainy season. Small
+columns of dust, whirling like water-spouts, were a constant
+feature of the landscape. A stage-coach going
+along a distant road was marked by its own dust, as a
+locomotive by its smoke.</p>
+
+<p>Isolated houses there were none, with the exception
+of (at long intervals) some gloomy, square, fort-like hacienda,
+with straw-stacks and flocks and herds near it.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>Indian peasants offered for sale, all along the way, cakes
+spiced with green and red peppers. The village of
+Apam is the centre of the Bordelais of the <i>pulque</i> industry.
+The new-comer here usually makes his first trial
+of that beverage, milk-like in aspect, but somewhat viscid
+and sour to the taste, with heady properties. It does not
+commend itself to favor on a first acquaintance. Wry
+and contemptuous grimaces are made over it, but in time,
+as occurred in my own case, it may become very palatable,
+as it is said to be healthful. It is poured into little
+earthen pitchers from bags of whole sheep-skins, with the
+wool-side in, like the wine-skins of the East and “Don
+Quixote.” These bags, resembling dressed pigs, lie about
+on the ground or the freight-car, with their legs dumbly
+kicking up in the air, in many a grotesque attitude.</p>
+
+<p>But one glimpse of real Aztec antiquity along the way,
+and that at San Juan Teotihuacan, thirty miles from the
+capital. The deceptive shapes of the hills, which assume
+symmetrical forms, had frequently produced a throb of
+half self-delusion, but here are two genuine pagan teocallis,
+pyramids dedicated to the sun and moon, and a
+great area covered with broken fragments and vestiges
+of tombs. It is thought to have been old and ruined
+even in the time of the Aztecs. Children offer at the
+train <i>caritas</i>, as they call them (“little faces”), and other
+fragments of earthen-ware, together with occasional pots
+and idols of large size, which they represent as having
+been dug up out of the soil. They have certainly been
+buried in the soil; but later, finding that the manufacture
+of spurious antiquities is a thriving industry, one
+takes leave to question for what length of time.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, what can it matter? These ancient-seeming
+jars, with their symbols and images of the war-god and
+what not upon them, are at least unique and historically
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>correct. One does well to bring home what he can get,
+for default of better, and not ask too many questions.</p>
+
+<p>San Juan is a place that one mentally makes a note
+of as to be returned to; and I spent some pleasant days
+there later, poking among the potsherds of the past, and
+picking up ordinary <i>caritas</i> and bits of flint weapons, for
+myself.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>But no dallying now. The shades of evening draw
+on. We are weary and travel-stained with the twenty
+hours’ journey and the many excitements of the day; but
+the great moment is at hand. Gleams of distant water,
+thickets of maguey and cacti, with a peasant stealing
+mysteriously among them, behind a troop of donkeys!
+The geography picture is realized to the life. The water
+comes nearer; we skirt its borders. Can it be that these
+lonesome, shallow expanses, without vestige of sail or
+even skiff, their muddy shores white with a deposit of
+salt and alkali—can it be that these are the great lakes of
+Tenochtitlan, on which Cortez launched his brigantines?
+And the famous floating gardens, where are they? All
+in good time! We shall see. The sacred hill of the
+Virgin of Guadalupe, with a cluster of interesting-looking
+churches upon it, is passed. Remains of ruined haciendas
+and fortifications, and dilapidated adobe hovels, appear.
+We run out upon a long, low causeway, skirted
+by the arches of an aqueduct, over marshes. Other similar
+causeways are seen converging from a distance. One
+had not expected to find everything so unrelievedly flat.
+It is like climbing the mountain to find the Louisiana
+lowlands. A chain of yet higher mountains surrounds
+it, it is true; the snowy summits of Popocatepetl and its
+mate, the White Woman, always shine upon it from a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>distance, but Mexico itself is a basin. It has been under
+water, and would be yet, but for artificial works by
+which the lakes have been made to recede and left
+behind them these alkali-whitened margins.</p>
+
+<p>It is a disillusionment very like that of approaching
+Venice at low tide.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV.<br>
+<i>THE CAPITAL.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>There was a custom-house at the Buena Vista station.
+Part of its profits are national, part municipal. The capital
+is in a Federal District, ruled by a governor, not unlike
+the District of Columbia. There is little inter-state
+comity as yet among the different parts of the republic.
+Each state still collects dues at its own frontiers, and the
+towns take tolls (the alcabalas) on merchandise and food
+entering their gates.</p>
+
+<p>Mexico is not a cheap city of abode. Its hackney-coaches,
+as in European countries as well, are an exception
+to the general rule; but even these, with the various
+commissionaires, who zealously aid you in putting your
+baggage upon them, after getting it through the custom-house,
+are dear for the first time. Travelling is like so
+many other things in the world: you pay a bonus, or initiation
+fee, in the beginning, after which the charges
+are in a declining series. The particular hackney-coach
+which conveyed us, a travelling companion and myself,
+may have been a trifle dearer on account of a driver who
+aspired to a few words of English. Not that we greatly
+wanted it. The injury to one’s feelings in these cases of
+the indifferent reception by the native of your first overtures
+in his own language (as if his own language were
+not good enough for him, forsooth), is sufficient, without
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>a pecuniary burden added. But he charged for it, as I
+say.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, good-night,” he said, saluting us as patrons.
+“Wass you wants?” And, after having passed the long,
+shady strip of park called the Alameda, he even ventured
+upon a certain facetiousness, as, “Wills you to want a
+wiskey?”</p>
+
+<p>He had learned this proud acquirement in the military
+service on the frontiers of Texas.</p>
+
+<p>A long, dark ride conveyed us to the principal hotel.
+As it was once the palace of the Emperor Iturbide, after
+whom it is named, it should have something stately about
+it, and so it has. There is a high, sculptured door-way, of
+an Aztec touch in the design, though not in the details,
+and long, grotesque water-spouts project into the street.
+Within is a large, dark, arcaded court, from which open
+<i>café</i> and billiard-room, the leading resort of the golden
+youth of the town.</p>
+
+<p>The office is a dark little box of a place, with two serious
+functionaries, who seem to receive the visitor only
+with suspicion. The gorgeous and affable hotel clerk of
+northern latitudes is unknown. In the rear are more
+courts, not arcaded; and around all of these the rooms
+are ranged in several stories.</p>
+
+<p>It is not so late on the evening of his arrival but that
+the traveller may, after dinner, still take a stroll. He
+will be apt to fancy at first, from the quietude, that his
+hotel is not on a principal street; but it is in the most
+central part of the city—on the street which, with three
+others running parallel for say half a mile, and the included
+cross-streets, contain the principal retail traffic.</p>
+
+<p>It is an early discovery that Mexico is a grave and
+not a gay city. There are no crowds on the sidewalks,
+no eating of ices in public, no <i>cafés chantants</i>, nothing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>Parisian. By nine or ten o’clock the people seem to have
+retired, perhaps to be up betimes in the morning for the
+work of the day. A military band plays three evenings
+in the week, but even these concerts, except on Sundays,
+are so sparsely attended that the men seem discoursing
+the music for their own amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Policemen are stationed at short intervals apart in the
+quiet streets, with their lanterns set in the middle of
+the roadway. They are obliged, by regulation, to signal
+their whereabouts every quarter of an hour. The sound
+of their whistles, which have a shrill, doleful note, like
+that of a November wind, is heard repeated from one to
+another all the night through.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>As Mexico has not, until lately, at any rate, expected
+tourists, there are almost none of the usual appurtenances
+for their pleasure and information to be met with. While
+this may have its annoyances, if an ardent curiosity be
+baffled too long, on the other hand freedom from the
+sense of responsibility to exacting Baedekers and Murrays
+has advantages of its own. The visitor with an eye
+for the picturesque dips into a delicious feast of novelties,
+makes discoveries on every hand, and has the pleasure
+of testing the value of his own unaided conclusions.
+By daylight, with all its bright colors upon it, and its
+normal stir of life going on, the famous capital is a very
+different place from what it was at night. By little and
+little misapprehensions are shaken off. After the first
+moments of disappointment we like it always more instead
+of less, and in the end it takes a powerful hold.</p>
+
+<p>Here at length is the great central plaza, in which
+events of such moment have been transacted. To actually
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>sit down upon a bench in the midst of it, and gaze
+comfortably about—can it be possible?</p>
+
+<p>The imposing cathedral makes a new pyramid on the
+spot where once stood the pyramid of the Aztec war-god.
+These stones should be ankle-deep with all the blood of
+various sorts that has been spilled upon them. For a
+moment one renews the pagan superstition. I would
+gladly see set up again, for a brief instant, old Hutzilopotchli,
+the war-god, aloft on his ancient terrace, hear
+the beat of the lugubrious war-drum, and see the mournful
+procession of captives winding up to the sacrifice, in
+charge of the sinister priests with their black locks flowing
+down upon their shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>But not one instant too long. What! hideous priests,
+you will indeed lay them down on the sacrificial stone,
+and raise the knives of flint above their bared breasts for
+the monstrous slaughter? Not one hair of their heads
+shall be harmed. San Jago and Spain! When was Castilian
+ever known to turn his back upon a foe? Up the
+pyramid we go, leaping from step to step, though with
+no better weapon than a sun-umbrella in hand, to their
+deliverance. Ay, howl if you will, baffled miscreants,
+and rattle your spears and arrows like hail upon us!
+Down with your old Hutzilopotchli till he crashes in
+fragments below there. Your carven sacrificial stone
+shall be set up in the court-yard of the Academy of
+Fine Arts of San Carlos for this, and your great calendar-stone,
+a show-piece, against the side of the cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>It is a good day’s work. I estimate that there were in
+that train of captives not less than a hundred souls!</p>
+
+<p>But it is hard to conjure up images of desperate conflicts,
+though there have been so many, in this bright
+sunshine, with the multitude of pretty, novel sights. On
+one side of the square a beneficent institution, the National
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>Loan Establishment, occupies what was once the
+site of the palace of Cortez; on another, the long, white,
+monotonous National Palace, the site of that of Montezuma.
+In the centre is a charming little garden, with
+benches, the Zocalo.</p>
+
+<p>The cathedral, like most of the earlier architecture, is
+in the Renaissance style, far gone to the vagaries of rococo.
+It is saved from finicality, however, by its great
+size and massiveness, except in respect to the terminations
+of its towers, which are in the shape of immense
+bells. Adjoining, and forming a part of it, is a parish
+church, in a rich, dark-red volcanic stone, with carving
+that recalls the fantastic façades of Portuguese Belem.
+What a painting it would make, on one of the perfect
+moonlight nights, which bring out every line of the
+sculpture softly, and show the whole like a lovely vision!</p>
+
+<p>There are little book-stalls in front, and gay booths devoted
+to the sale of refreshing drinks—<i>aguas nevadas</i>—from
+large, simple jars and pitchers of most noble and
+pleasing shapes. The drinks are dispensed by dusky
+Juanas and Josefas of Indian blood, with straight black
+braids of hair down their backs. With a characteristic
+taste the fronts of their booths are often wholly studded
+and banked up with flowers, and furnished with inscriptions
+formed in letters of carnation pinks and blue cornflowers.</p>
+
+<p>Figures go by in blankets which one hankers to take
+from them for <i>portières</i> or rugs. The men of the poorer
+sort wear or carry, universally, the <i>serape</i>—a blanket with
+a slit in the centre for the insertion of the head. Apart
+from its artistic patterns, it is a useful garment in many
+emergencies. It is not the most improbable thing in the
+world that, in the course of the Mexican revival, we may
+yet see it introduced in the States, and running a course
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>of popularity like the ulster. The corresponding garment
+of the women is the <i>rebozo</i>, a shawl or scarf, generally
+of blue cotton, which, crossed over the head and
+lower part of the face, gives a Moorish appearance. The
+background of life here seems more like opera than sober
+existence. Two other sides of the square are occupied
+by long arcades, among the merchants of which, protected
+from the sun and rain, one may wander by the
+hour, watching the shrewd devices of trade, and picking
+up those knick-knacks, trifling in the country of their
+origin, which are certain to be curiosities elsewhere.
+From time to time pass across the view, dark and Egyptian-like,
+in a peculiar dress of bluish woollen, trudging
+under heavy burdens, Indians who have yet preserved
+the tradition of their race. Followed to their homes,
+they are found to dwell, among the ruined walls of the
+outskirts, in adobe huts which can have changed little
+since the time of the Conquest.</p>
+
+<p>These genuine Aztecs have peculiarly soft, pleasant
+voices, in contrast with the Spanish voice, which is apt
+to be harsh. They are shiftless and squalid, but their
+manners are above their surroundings. It is a favorite
+way with the Mexican to say, “This is your house;” and
+I have had said to me on being introduced, “Well, now,
+remember! number so-and-so, such a street, is your
+house.”</p>
+
+<p>Having looked into one of these Indian abodes, and
+asked an elderly woman, by way of making talk, if it
+were hers, she replied, “Yes, Señor, and yours also.”</p>
+
+<p>Neither in the Zocalo nor the Alameda (a park, which
+holds somewhat the position of the Common, in Boston),
+are there trees with the hoary antiquity one might expect
+in such time-honored places. But it appears that the setting
+out of the trees, and the formation of the Zocalo<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+entirely, is of modern date, the work of Maximilian, a
+monarch who, in his short, ill-fated reign, had many
+excellent projects.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus008" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus008.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A FLOWER-SHOW IN THE ZOCALO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Zocalo is occasionally allowed to be enclosed, and
+an admission-fee charged, for select festivities. The orations
+were delivered there, for instance, on the national
+festival of the 5th of May. When I first arrived a flower-show
+was in progress. I have never seen anything
+more charming of the sort. Our florists might get a
+score of new ideas for the arrangement of bouquets.
+Strawberries were introduced into some for effects of
+color. Little streamers with gallant mottoes floated from
+others. There were lanterns, and birds in cages. A military
+band played, and people promenaded—dandies with
+silver-braided hats, stout duennas, and fathers of families,
+and slender, lithe señoritas, wearing the graceful mantilla
+instead of the Paris bonnet.</p>
+
+<p>In front of the Zocalo a permanent flower market is
+held every morning, which is almost as pleasing.</p>
+
+<p>Tramway cars run out of the plaza in numerous directions.
+The city early utilized this invention, and boasts
+of having one of the most complete systems existing.
+The inscriptions on them have an attractive look. One
+would like to take all the different routes at once. Patience!
+it is all accomplished in time. Shall we go to
+Guadalupe Hidalgo, with its treasures and its miraculous
+Virgin; to Tacubaya and San Angel, with their villas;
+Dolores, with its pensive cemetery, full of sculptures; La
+Viga, with its picturesque canal, giving access to the <i>chinampas</i>
+of flowers and vegetables; the gates of Belem
+and Niño Perdido, familiar in the story of the American
+conquest; Chapultepec? Yes, that shall be the very
+first—Chapultepec, theatre of exploits of American valor
+and of moving events in every historic epoch.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mexico is extraordinarily flat, and laid out as regularly
+at right angles as our own symmetrical towns. At the
+ends of all the streets the view is closed by mountains.
+Its flatness, together with its position in reference to the
+adjoining lakes, are circumstances which have occasioned
+great solicitude in the past, and still call for almost as
+much, on a different ground. Formerly it was danger of
+inundation; now it is defective drainage. Bad odors
+offend the nostrils, and stagnant gutters and heaps of
+garbage the sight, of the wayfarer about the interesting
+streets.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus009" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus009.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>COMPARATIVE LEVELS OF LAKES.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The drainage problem, divested of the mystery with
+which it has been surrounded in learned treatises, is
+simply this. When the vast slope from the sea has been
+surmounted, and the Valley of Mexico—as high as the
+Swiss pass of St. Gothard—is reached, it is found to be
+a shallow depression, containing six lakes. These are of
+many different levels—Texcoco the largest and lowest.
+On the edge of Texcoco, or in the midst of it, like another
+Venice, with canals for streets, was built ancient
+Mexico. This principal lake received the overflow of the
+others, and the city was subject to frequent inundations.
+It is even now, after a large shrinkage in the lakes, but
+a little more than six feet, at its central portion, above
+Texcoco. The waters of the three upper lakes—San Cristoval,
+Xaltocan, and Zumpango—were turned back as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>has been done with the Chicago River of late. A great
+Spanish drain in the early seventeenth century, the Tajo
+of Nochistongo, was cut through the mountains, and got
+rid of it in the direction of the Atlantic.</p>
+
+<p>But Texcoco itself has no outlet, and, as experience
+has proved, even with only Chalco and Xochimilco to be
+taken care of, is still liable to overflow. With relief
+from this peril is inseparably bound up the drainage
+problem. The fall is so slight at best, that though Lake
+Texcoco be preserved at a normal level, and kept from
+backing up into the sewers, there is no destination for
+the sewage received by it, which lies festering in the
+stagnant water. With the rest is complicated also the
+irrigation of the valley. No end of plans have been
+offered to resolve these difficulties. Their history would
+make an interesting chapter by itself. Some have proposed
+to pump out the lake by steam; others, to intercept
+the waters running into it, and allow it to dry up
+naturally; another, to exhaust it by means of a great
+siphon of stone and cement. But the judgment of most
+is in favor of establishing a current, through a canal, to
+some point lower than the lake; and the mountains in
+the neighborhood have been searched for the most favorable
+point of exit for such a canal.</p>
+
+<p>The plan was officially adopted, in fact, and a considerable
+beginning made, under the direction of an able
+engineer of foreign education, Don Francisco Garay.
+But the works were allowed to languish. Neither government
+nor community seemed more than half-hearted
+in the effort to get rid of evils to which they had so long
+been used. The problem still remains one of the most
+pressing of those to be resolved, and one of the most
+interesting to foreigners intending to make Mexico their
+home.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Choosing any street at random where all are so attractive,
+and proceeding to its termination, in this direction
+or that, you arrive now at a mere <i>cul-de-sac</i>, now at a
+city gate, now at vestiges of adobe fortifications, with a
+moat. Few vehicles, apart from the hackney-coaches, are
+to be seen, but plenty of troops of laden donkeys, and
+everywhere the cotton-clad natives themselves bearing
+loads under which the regular beasts of burden might
+stagger. There is a story that when wheelbarrows were
+first introduced to their notice on the railroad works, the
+natives filled them in the usual way, and then carried
+them on their backs.</p>
+
+<p>Each separate kind of business has its distinctive emblem.
+The butcher—elsewhere not a person noted for
+great taste in ornament—displays a crimson banner, and
+has his brass scales decked with rosettes. His supplies
+are brought him by a mule, trotting along with quarters
+of beef or carcasses of mutton on each side hung from
+hooks. But it is especially the <i>pulque</i> shops (corresponding
+to our corner liquor stores) which devote themselves
+to decoration in its most florid form. Not one so poor
+as to be without its great colored tumblers, and ambitious
+fresco of a battle scene, or subject from mythology or
+romance. They delight in such titles as “The Ancient
+Glories of Mexico,” “The Famous St. Lorenzo,” “The
+Sun For All,” “The Terrestrial Paradise,” and even
+“The Delirium,” which often enough expresses the condition
+of customers who imbibe too freely.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus010" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus010.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE HOMES OF THE POOR.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the tramways pass not only passenger-cars, but
+others for freight. They move the household goods of
+a family, for instance. There are also impressive catafalques
+and mourning-cars, running smoothly along, with
+funeral processions. You may graduate from a hearse
+with six horses, driver, lackey, and four pall-bearers, all
+in livery, for $120, to one drawn by a single mule for
+$3; and there are cars for the mourners in the grand
+style at $12 and plain for $4.</p>
+
+<p>Both these ideas, it would seem, might be advantageously
+adopted by suburban lines of our own.</p>
+
+<p>Presently comes by a more economical funeral—a
+couple of <i>peons</i> (as the Indian laborers are called), at a
+jog-trot, bearing a pine coffin on their shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>Battered old churches and convents on a great scale,
+and of a grand architecture, now for the most part devoted
+to other purposes, are extraordinarily frequent.
+Before the sequestration of Church property—in the war
+called of the Reform, under Juarez, in 1859—Mexico was
+well-nigh one great ecclesiastical estate. Without going
+into the religious question, and supposing only the operation
+of ordinary causes, it is easy to see how the Church
+corporations—repositories of the gifts of the faithful,
+moved by no feverish haste in speculation, and with no
+reckless heirs to spend their gains—must in course of
+time have become possessed of an enormous share of
+worldly goods.</p>
+
+<p>There is no lack of sculptured old rococo palaces, of
+the conquerors and their successors, either. Many of
+these are of a peculiar, rich red stone, with carved escutcheons
+above their door-ways. There is one of which
+I was fond, in the Calle de Jesus, with immense water-spouts
+to its cornice, in the shape of field-pieces. Wheels
+and all project in high relief.</p>
+
+<p>Only infinitesimal quantities of vacant land exist within
+the compass of the city. All is compactly built. The
+Continental system of <i>portes cochères</i> and interior court-yards
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>prevails. How many glimpses, both pleasing and
+curious, into these interiors! What a pity that the severity
+of our winters prevents building in a style which
+would be so admirably adapted to our summers! Over
+the entrances of some tenement-houses are placed pious
+dedicatory signs, as “Casa de la Santisima,” “Casa de la
+Divina Providencia.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus011" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus011.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>ENTRANCE TO A TENEMENT-HOUSE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>One day, as I made a hasty sketch of one of these, with
+a water-carrier lying asleep in the archway, the custodian
+came out and offered strenuous objections. “You are
+mapping the house” (<i>mappando la casa</i>), he said, “and I
+do not see how it can be for other than evil purposes.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span></p>
+
+<p>One of the most charming of all the mansions I saw
+stood nearly opposite our hotel, and was faced up entirely
+with china tiles, chiefly blue and white, and set with old
+bronze balconies, as dainty and quaint as a dwelling in
+fairy-land. I examined the interior of this house also,
+and found it faced within as well with the same simple,
+Moorish-looking, tiles, in staircase walls, ceilings, and
+even the high, banked-up furnace, or range, in the kitchen.
+An affable major-domo occupied his leisure with
+painting, in a large library on the ground-floor. He was
+just now engaged in copying and enlarging, very poorly,
+the photograph of a lady, over which he held up his
+brush for criticism. A maroon carpet was laid up the
+centre of a grand staircase, and the same uniform color
+prevailed in the carpets throughout. The rooms were
+large and high, the principal ones opening both on the
+street, and, by means of light glass doors draped with
+lace, on the balconies running around the courts. These
+balconies are edged in the general practice with climbing
+vines and rows of handsome plants. In one of the rear
+courts could be heard and seen the family carriage-horses,
+together with others for the saddle, stabled according to
+custom under the common roof.</p>
+
+<p>There was a large saloon, with divans, and old-fashioned
+mirrors, sloped forward from the walls, instead of pier-glasses;
+and a little boudoir, with furniture entirely in
+gilded wood and cane. There was a pretty family chapel,
+with two <i>prie-dieux</i> for the master and mistress, and a
+couple of benches for the use of the servants. In the
+bedrooms of such houses are usually religious pictures,
+copies of Murillo and the like; and there are also found
+quaint effigies of sacred things, as a representation of the
+Nativity; a Christ, with purple mantle and crown of
+thorns; a life-size Virgin, in raiment of tissue of silver,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>standing upon the globe and a serpent’s head. The men
+of the country are very widely imbued with the sceptical
+spirit of the age, but the women, whose property these
+objects are, are still devoutly Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>These rooms, in such interiors, though less lofty and
+impressively finished perhaps than those at Havana, have
+not the complexity of objects with which we, in an ill-understood
+passion for decoration, overload our own in
+the United States. They are large, and contain a few
+simple articles, with plenty of space around, and have an
+unmistakable dignity of effect. When we can make up
+our minds to do that, instead of depending upon a complication
+of costly rarities in little space, we shall begin
+to be palatial, and not merely <i>bon bourgeois</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know how republican we are, after all our
+travelling abroad and reverence for things European, till
+we come to where the stately old Continental traditions
+are actually in force.</p>
+
+<p>One of the enthusiasts of the new progressive movement,
+writing of late of Monterey, a city of 40,000 people,
+in the north, already connected with us by the Mexican
+Central Railway, and coming into notice as a winter
+resort, notes, as one of the signs of improvement, that
+“the old Latin style of building, the square, flat-roofed
+house, with interior court, is giving place, in the new
+quarters, to American architecture.” To which I reply,
+Heaven forbid! Let us never “improve” away with
+“American architecture” the Moorish-looking dwellings
+which, to lovers of the picturesque, should be one of the
+principal inducements for visiting the country.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="V">V.<br>
+<i>THE PROJECTORS.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the court-yard of our hotel, the palace of
+the ancient Emperor Iturbide, is full of a curious group
+of English-speaking foreigners, discussing a multitude of
+projects. They sit usually in chairs on a little terrace at
+the left of the court, behind which is a modest little
+parlor, with a piano. As a general rule, the Mexican hotel
+is without parlor, reading-room, or any other of those
+appurtenances we are accustomed to look upon as an essential
+part of the composition of a hotel.</p>
+
+<p>The guests take their meals at a restaurant, entered
+from the second court, or at other restaurants in the town
+where they please, there being no provision by the hotel
+itself. They look up wearily at their rooms around the
+circumscribing galleries, push their hats on the back of
+their heads, and pass their hands across their brows. The
+atmosphere, at this elevation of 7600 feet, is very rare,
+it will be remembered, and most are affected at first by a
+feeling of dizziness and loss of appetite. They do not
+find themselves quite right in health; and even the most
+athletic pause once or twice, and hold by the balusters,
+on their way up-stairs. The same amount of exercise
+cannot be taken, in fact, by either men or animals, as
+in a more dense atmosphere. The horses, for instance,
+though good and speedy, can only be run short distances,
+and then, as evaporation is rapid and draughts particularly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>dangerous, must not be let stand, but must be
+walked up and down till gradually cooled.</p>
+
+<p>I recollect my first glimpse of my room, to which, after
+an interview with the sepulchral clerks below, I was
+shown by the barefooted boy, “Pancho,” carrying a tallow
+dip. It was without windows or other opening except
+through a large transom above the door, and seemed
+hot and suffocating. This may have been the influence
+of imagination, however, for the climate is rarely either
+hot or cold, but noted for its remarkable evenness.
+There is no provision for heating during the winter. It
+is said that even after a very few minutes of fire, in
+stove or grate, the already thin air becomes so much farther
+expanded as to produce discomfort. Later, in my
+long stay at this hotel, I had a room higher up, on the
+sculptured front, looking down upon the life in the thoroughfare,
+which, taking a separate name at every block,
+is here the Calle de San Francisco. Again, I had one
+with a window commanding the shining, tile-covered
+dome and part of a garden approach to the lovely old
+convent of San Francisco, now devoted to the uses of an
+Episcopal mission, and beyond that the mountains, with
+the fair blue sky above them. Rising to begin the day,
+the mornings were found peaceful and lovely, the genial
+sunshine bathing the prospect, the blue sky but varied
+with the piled-up clouds out of which castles in the air
+are constructed. The visitor, having got over his temporary
+oppression, remarks upon this almost unbroken
+series with increasing wonder and admiration. It is
+hardly the custom to comment on the weather in Mexico,
+at least in the agreeable season, though the rainy
+season is a different matter.</p>
+
+<p>“A pleasant day?” says the listener, with lifted eyebrows,
+should you do so. “Well, why not?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp52" id="illus012" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus012.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>OLD SPANISH PALACE IN THE CALLE DE JESUS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Most familiar
+among the group
+of English-speaking
+foreigners in
+the court-yard during
+my stay was
+General Grant,
+who has lent a
+part of his great
+fame to the development
+of the resources
+of a much-suffering
+people.
+Did he ever reflect
+in these historic
+halls, one wondered,
+on the career
+of the Emperor
+Iturbide? Had all
+the talk on Cæsarism
+in the Press
+ever put the idea the least bit in his head? Rumors,
+mischievous to the cause of amity, ran at the very time
+that it was in Mexico, not the United States, that he proposed
+to found his empire. Certainly it would be difficult
+to imagine so unmelodramatic a figure in the robes
+and stars and crosses in which Iturbide has arrayed himself,
+after the pattern of Napoleon the Great, in his portrait
+at the National Palace.</p>
+
+<p>Iturbide wrote in his memoirs—which, as a display of
+egotism, are highly interesting reading—one sagacious
+sentence. “Devotees of theories,” he says, “are apt to
+forget that in the moral as in the physical order only a
+gradual progress can be expected.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is very true; but the short-lived Emperor forgot,
+as have many of his republican successors, that despotism
+can never educate
+the citizen
+for the duties of
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Only once before—namely,
+on the coming
+of Maximilian—has
+there been a
+stir that might
+be compared to
+the present in a
+country which
+the progress of
+the century has
+heretofore seemed to ignore.
+Could a secure government then
+have been established, much
+would have been done. But the
+new-comers arrived as masters,
+not as friends; and the conditions
+were wholly unfavorable.
+The real improvements, too, apart
+from those intended for the glitter
+and the comfort of the throne,
+were but the shadow of those
+proposed to-day.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="illus013" style="max-width: 18.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus013.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SEMI-VILLA ON THE PASEO OF BUCARELLI.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Here the more efficient lighting
+of the city by electric light
+was heard discussed; there the opening of coal mines;
+here the establishment of sugar refineries, shoe factories,
+cotton mills. There were archæologists, constructors of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>telegraph lines, and engineers starting out or returning
+from reconnoissances. This person had come down to
+look into coffee-plantations; that,
+to establish a new line of steamers.
+This discourses of the improving
+tranquillity of the country, and asserts
+that three ploughs are now
+sold to one revolver.
+He names
+over prominent
+bandits who have
+become peaceable
+contractors and
+farmers.</p>
+
+<p>Some will organize
+banks of
+issue, and rid us
+of the cumbrous
+silver dollar. Another
+is up from
+the interior with
+a scheme for a colony and mines—much too rose-colored,
+one would say—with which he will start back to New
+York to organize a syndicate. Mines of gold and silver
+are one of the specialties of the country; but they seem
+to present fully the uncertainties of mines elsewhere.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp63" id="illus014" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus014.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE MODERN STYLE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Some organized dinners, at which Mexican senators and
+deputies were enlisted for the cultivation of more friendly
+relations. These were held at the Concordia restaurant,
+or the Tivoli of Bucarelli, or of the Eliseo (summer gardens),
+with spacious banqueting halls. Much international
+good-feeling was manifested, and the Mexican national
+anthem and the “Star Spangled Banner” were played
+alternately after the speeches. Everything was to be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>made over anew. A few of the younger men were going
+and returning from expeditions of pleasure. They
+came back from a bull-fight; from the baths of Alberca
+Pane, where there is a fine tank for swimming, covered
+with an awning; or the theatre. They had many an
+amusing gibe, after our American way, on the backwardness
+of things, and the difference of manners and customs
+in the country.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp63" id="illus015" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus015.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PORCELAIN HOUSE IN SAN FRANCISCO STREET.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>But pleasure had as yet few votaries; the object of
+most was serious work. The business of railroad-building,
+and procuring of charters and subventions from
+government, threw all else into the shade. Five great
+lines, two of which had already
+made long strides, were to traverse
+the country from north to
+south, and more than twice as
+many from east to west, connecting
+the oceans.
+There were said
+to be six hundred
+American
+engineers in
+Mexico. They
+are often young
+graduates of
+Cornell and other
+polytechnic
+schools. In the
+capital the engineers
+and employés
+form settlements
+in boarding-houses of their own; make resorts
+of certain economical restaurants where little but English
+is spoken. They associate but little with the natives,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>but go about their work rather rough-and-ready in appearance,
+and seem to postpone adornment till the heat
+and burden of the campaign are over. There was a
+noticeable Southern element among them; and it will
+be found, generally, that the enterprises in Mexico have
+attracted a large representation from the Southern States.
+There is still, among the rest, a remnant of the ex-Confederate
+officers who came hither after the war, to engage—without
+great success, as it happened—in coffee-planting
+and the like.</p>
+
+<p>Not a few of the young engineers, however, particularly
+those who have their field of operations in the
+provinces, have already found wives among the slender
+señoritas of the country. It seems another case of going
+after the women of Moab, as it were, for the rumor
+comes back that these exacting helpmeets have often
+made them change their religion, as a preliminary to
+naming the happy day.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>A leading point with the projectors, is whether or not
+Mexico is likely to become a large or metropolitan city.
+It seems difficult, when on the ground, to doubt it.
+Great cities have sprung up at a mere intersection of
+railroads. But here is one with a population of 250,000
+people already, a seat of government and of schools, colleges,
+museums, and galleries of fine arts, with an admirable
+climate and extraordinary scenery, and three
+hundred and sixty years and traditions of great fascination
+behind it. There are to come into or connect with
+it, when all is complete, the Mexican Central, National,
+and International roads, from the north; the Mexican
+Oriental, on the eastern sea-board, and Occidental, on the
+western; and General Grant’s road, the Mexican Southern,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>from the south—all to have interoceanic branches
+and feeders; the Morelos road, the Acapulco road, the
+English road to Vera Cruz; another, now constructing,
+to the same point by Puebla and Jalapa; and a number
+of short lines of less importance.</p>
+
+<p>A small portion only of this would be sufficient to
+create a metropolis outright, while Mexico has grown to
+a certain greatness with no advantages at all—not even
+wagon-roads. It seems its manifest destiny, with its
+central position on transcontinental lines, and its established
+prestige, to become the chief depository and place
+of exchange for the whole country. It ought to be a
+favorable point, too, for manufactures, and to become the
+metropolitan residence of the wealthy from the interior.
+These have rarely come to the capital heretofore. Not
+even the senators and deputies bring their families, owing
+to the barbarous state of the roads. The existing
+difficulties of communication can hardly be conceived.
+There are perfectly authentic accounts of persons who
+have gone from Mexico to Vera Cruz, thence to New
+York, thence across to San Francisco, and thence by
+Pacific mail-steamer to Acapulco, rather than make the
+direct journey of three hundred miles on muleback
+over the sierra.</p>
+
+<p>It is fair to say, however, that there are those who
+think the future metropolis may be farther to the north,
+as at San Luis Potosi.</p>
+
+<p>If Mexico, then, is to be a great city, whither is it to
+spread? It is compactly built within, and much of the
+land about it is low, traversed by causeways. There is
+no better place to think about it, nor to look down upon
+the capital as a whole, than Chapultepec.</p>
+
+<p>My first visit there was made on the tramway, where I
+fell in with a Mexican colonel, who told me that he liked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>the Americans very well. He had spent some time in
+captivity among them, having been taken prisoner at
+San Jacinto, and had learned to know them as they are.
+They mean well, he said, and are enterprising and appreciative
+of the arts of life; and you can depend upon what
+they say. Most of his countrymen, he said, very sensibly,
+did not understand this, but were distrustful and jealous.
+Their idea of American character, in fact, is largely
+derived from foreign books in which it is conventionalized
+and caricatured in an unfriendly way. There is evidence
+of it on every hand. The American, as touched
+upon in the newspapers and current literature, is the
+“Yankee” of Dickens and followers of less intelligence
+on the Continent. He is a sordid person, exclusively
+wrapped up in “dollars,” and can know but little of the
+chivalrous nature of those who thus superciliously disapprove
+of him.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing very warlike about Chapultepec at
+present. A glimpse is got, as you approach, of a light,
+oblong, colonnaded edifice, with a lookout on the top,
+which is now a part of the government observatory.
+The hill is not precipitously high, though of a good elevation.
+There is a monument at its foot to the memory
+of the pupils of the military school who fell in its defence
+in 1847, and in the grounds moss-grown cypresses and a
+tank of clear water. I found the main part of the building,
+when an upper terrace was reached, in a state of ruin.
+The light iron columns of an arcade had been coquettishly
+painted and gilded, and its walls decorated in the Pompeian
+style, under Maximilian, but all had been wrecked
+in the revolutions. There was a little garden, in which
+a small guide picked me some flowers. He answered,
+“<i>Quien sabe?</i>” in a childish lisp, to most inquiries, just
+as his father, the custodian, if he had been there, would
+have answered in his deeper base. “<i>Quien sabe?</i>” (Who
+knows?) is a more dreamy and speculative rendering of
+our own “Give it up,” or perhaps “Dunno!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus016" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus016.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE DRIVE TO CHAPULTEPEC.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span></p>
+
+<p>The most prominent object, in the long line of the
+distant city against the bright gleam of Lake Texcoco
+behind it, is a sudden little volcanic hill—El Peñon—which
+rises out of it like a teocalli; and next to this the
+cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>As the lay of the land is studied from here it seems
+rather natural that the city of the future, on grounds of
+good drainage, ease of access, and scenery, should advance
+in this direction to Chapultepec, ex-palace of the Montezumas
+and of viceroys, military school, fortress, and observatory,
+on the foremost spur of the foot-hills.</p>
+
+<p>This was the intelligent forecast of Maximilian—a
+ruler, it must be admitted, much better fitted to cope
+with such pleasant matters than the ferocity of Mexican
+war and diplomacy. And such was the view of a
+rather wild-cat American Improvement Company, found
+among the projectors in the court-yard, which professed
+to intend a large purchase of land for building upon, to
+sell part of it, with houses, on the instalment plan, and to
+put up a mammoth hotel.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a little incongruous, this selling of the heritage
+of Montezuma on the instalment plan; but we are
+a people who do not stop even at the most venerable of
+traditions; and the scheme might not be a bad one in
+responsible hands.</p>
+
+<p>Maximilian also made Chapultepec his summer palace,
+and laid out to it the handsome Paseo de la Reforma, the
+afternoon drive and promenade—the Bois and Central
+Park of fashionable Mexico. During Lent, however,
+fashion takes the caprice of changing to the Paseo de la
+Viga, along the canal by which vegetables and flowers
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>are brought to the capital from the floating gardens.
+The Paseo de la Reforma is a wide, straight boulevard,
+nearly two miles long, starting from a certain equestrian
+statue of Charles IV. of Spain—the first bronze cast in
+this hemisphere, and fine and excellent work. It is two
+hundred feet wide, and has a double row of trees—eucalyptus
+and ash—shading its sidewalks. The Mexican
+equestrian dandy should be observed as he curvets his
+horse along it among the fine carriages. He wears now
+not only his weighty spurs and silver-braided sombrero,
+but a cutlass at his saddle-bow, and larger revolvers than
+ever. Not that there is need of them, since a couple of
+mounted carbineers—of whom there seems no great need
+either—are stationed at nearly every hundred yards; but
+they are a part of his peculiar display. Some of our
+young Americans, too, in the country, it must be said,
+almost out-Mexican the Mexicans themselves, carrying
+all their customs to an exaggerated extreme.</p>
+
+<p>There are to be six circles, with statues, spaced at
+proper intervals along the way. The first, containing a
+fine Columbus, is finished; a Guatemozin, for the second,
+is in progress. The next, it is said, will contain
+Cortez. There at last will stand, face to face—their
+countrymen now one people—the heroic defender and
+the heroic conqueror, the two characters of such contradictory
+traits within themselves, who both acted according
+to their lights in their day and generation, and but
+followed the path of inevitable destiny.</p>
+
+<p>The causeways of La Veronica and La Romita—containing
+ancient small-arched aqueducts, which bring water
+to the city—branch off from Chapultepec, and form two
+sides of an obtuse triangle, which the Paseo (or Calzada)
+de la Reforma bisects. It was along these causeways that
+the Americans ran, in that invasion of a very different
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>character, in 1847. It is said that as Shields was charging
+on that to the right, after the fall of the castle, Scott,
+fearing his imprudent haste, sent to detain him. The
+aide had got as far as the preliminary “General Scott presents
+his compliments, and begs to say—” when Shields,
+apprehending the message, cut him short with, “I have
+no time for compliments now,” and hurried on, and got
+into the city before he could be overtaken.</p>
+
+<p>Do the Mexicans bear us a grudge for all that? They
+seem just now to have amiably forgotten it, and far be it
+from me to revive such memories in a boasting spirit.
+There is a behind-the-scenes to it, here, upon the ground.
+It is pathetic, and by no means calculated to produce
+complacency, to read in the small history studied
+in the schools the Mexican account of what took place.
+The almost unbroken series of defeats from which they
+went up, without hope of success, to the slaughter are
+frankly admitted. The country was torn by internal dissensions.
+The generals went back from the field to put
+down or sustain governments, refused to aid one another
+in their operations, and availed themselves of the troops
+given them to seize upon power, instead of fighting the
+Americans. There were not less than eleven changes of
+government, chiefly violent, during the short course of
+the war. In February and March of the year in which,
+in September, the invaders made their entry there had
+been fighting in the streets of the capital for well-nigh a
+month between two presidents, neither strong enough to
+put the other down. Want of courage is not a Mexican
+failing. It was want of leaders, unity, everything that
+gives steadiness in a great crisis.</p>
+
+<p>The land ostensibly aimed at by the so-called Improvement
+Company follows the Calzada of the Reform for
+a considerable part of its length. It lies vacant, except
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>for use as pasture. It has not been safe to live too far
+from the thickly-settled district till the establishment of
+law and order by the present administration, and the city
+itself has furnished room enough. But what new accommodations
+are to be needed in the great future, with the
+vision of which imaginations are regaling themselves, it
+is not an easy matter to determine.</p>
+
+<p>Villas were spoken of, to be built with restricted
+rights, so as to preserve a select and park-like aspect.
+There were to be front lots enough on the Calzada alone
+to pay the cost. The grand hotel talked of was to surpass
+anything on the continent.</p>
+
+<p>If somebody would but put up a hotel equal to our
+own of the second grade it would be a boon to American
+travellers. It might expect to draw, too, not a few of
+the Mexicans themselves, who are hardly slower than the
+rest of the world in recognizing a good thing when they
+see it. The magnates who shall have made fortunes in
+the new enterprises, and others who have them already,
+could, no doubt, be relied on for a liberal patronage.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>This project is of no farther importance than as a
+text for a mention of the Mexican tax and real estate
+laws, which have their features of decided interest. “In
+the moral as in the physical order,” as our friend Iturbide
+tells us, “only a gradual progress can be expected.”
+A nation of nine or ten millions, two-thirds of whom are
+of pure Indian blood, used only to the most primitive
+and poverty-stricken ways of life, cannot be too suddenly
+pushed forward. They must be allowed to go at a
+certain pace, even with the best of intentions, and slowly
+adapt themselves to the improvements designed for their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>good; for it is by them, the rank and file, after all, that
+these must be supported.</p>
+
+<p>The country might seem, at first sight, the most glorious
+place for real estate speculation in the world. Real
+property is not taxed except upon such income as it produces.
+When not actually producing income, it may be
+idle indefinitely, and escape scot-free, however much it
+may enhance in value meanwhile. But there are embarrassing
+restrictions, devised through fear and jealousy of
+the foreigner, which make the prospect much less attractive.
+The traveller of means cannot follow his whim,
+as he might almost anywhere else in the world, of buying
+a pretty bit of land or house that attracts him and
+leaving it, to return to when he will, or do what he
+please with it.</p>
+
+<p>By the Mexican Civil Code “no foreigner may, without
+previous permission of the President of the Republic,
+acquire real estate in the frontier states or territory
+within twenty leagues of the frontier.” And “it is absolutely
+prohibited to foreigners to acquire rustic or
+urban property within five leagues of the coast.”</p>
+
+<p>This may be well enough, and is aimed principally at
+the United States, as a way of preventing any gradual
+encroachments from the borders; but farther, and more
+important: no foreigner may own real property at all,
+except on condition of remaining permanently and looking
+after it. If he be absent from the country for two
+years, his property may be denounced and entered by the
+first comer, the same as if it were a mine. He cannot
+even have an agent in the country to hold it for him.
+Nor, even should he comply with the rigid condition
+named, could he then sell it to another foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>The transient foreigner, so far as he is concerned, cannot
+acquire real estate on any condition.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span></p>
+
+<p>All this is set down in the Code in the most explicit
+terms. The most driving improvement company, therefore,
+could sell lots only to Mexicans. The class of
+wealthy Americans expected as winter residents would
+be ruled out of the calculation, though, of course, they
+may stop at the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>There is also some ambiguity as to what commercial
+corporations, with one-third of their directors resident in
+the country, may or may not do, since the construction
+of the term “corporation” is not the same as with us.
+Some construing or explanatory enactments are needed
+to remedy the ambiguity last mentioned, and an entire
+sweeping away is needed of all the rest.</p>
+
+<p>If there be sincerity in the manifestations of desire for
+progress, and aid from without, Mexico must sweep away
+narrow and benighted restrictions. If outside capital be
+demanded for works of amelioration and embellishment,
+how can it be expected at such a price?</p>
+
+<p>And why, in the name of goodness, in this enlightened
+day, should not the foreigner be put upon the same footing
+as the native in these matters, and allowed to hold
+property wherever he will throughout the civilized world?</p>
+
+<p>Let the foreigner bear in mind, too, that he must
+be matriculated at the Department of Foreign Affairs,
+through the Consul-general, in order to have any recognized
+standing in a court of justice, in cases of difficulty.
+Without this formality even his foreignness is not necessarily
+conceded to him as a protection.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI.<br>
+<i>THE FERRO-CARRILES.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The <i>ferro-carriles</i>, the <i>caminos de fierro</i>, or railways,
+were the business of the hour. In speaking of the coming
+greatness of the capital I mentioned glibly the principal
+ones which are supposed to have a part in it. They
+are by no means all built. Far from it! It is not even
+certain that some of the most promising of them, on
+paper, ever will be built.</p>
+
+<p>The matter of granting railroad charters in Mexico is
+by no means new. They have been granted for thirty
+years or so, to Europeans and natives, who did little or
+nothing with them. It was only when, under the adoption
+of a more enlightened policy, they came to be
+granted to Americans that the roads were built and the
+charters had a value. At once everybody who prided
+himself upon the necessary influence began to desire a
+charter also. He might not want to use it at once, but
+could keep it and see what turn things were to take. Or
+he might transfer it to some more powerful ownership
+to which it would be worth a consideration. This new
+ownership, too, might wait to see what was likely to
+happen. If railways promised to be profitable in the
+country, it was well for certain great corporations in the
+United States to have their feeders or extensions there;
+at any rate, they could keep others from the field till they
+should be satisfied of its character.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is in this way, I surmise, that some of the present
+franchises have been got, and are reflectively held. There
+have been henchmen to procure them and turn them over
+to patrons, who wait a while before going to work, trusting
+to influence to procure the proper extensions and
+renewals of time, if needed.</p>
+
+<p>Stories were afloat of practices employed in the obtaining
+of concessions and subsidies, which I should prefer
+to believe falsifications. I heard one or two of them, it
+is true, from somewhat inside sources, and such practices
+are not unknown elsewhere; yet I like much better to
+think that there are no persons of standing and influence
+in Mexico who could prostitute their high position, and
+put a shameless greed for gain before the public interest
+in a crisis like the present, as these stories seem
+to indicate.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, in our great West,” said an American visitor,
+settling himself back in his chair to complain vigorously
+of certain treatment he had received, “if an immigrant
+comes among us, we give him a lift. We help him build
+his house, or perhaps put him up a barn; and are glad
+to do it. If he has capital to start some kind of factory,
+we give him a piece of land free of charge. That is the
+American style. We put our hands in our pockets and
+pay out a little, knowing full well that we shall get it
+back in time in the greater prosperity of the town.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” I said, by way of sympathy with his aggrieved
+situation, and a proper pride in the American style of
+doing things, “and I am told that, in Chicago and St.
+Louis, they pay his hotel bills a while, and try to keep
+him, if not as a permanent resident, at least long enough
+to get out a new census, in which he may be included.”</p>
+
+<p>“But here,” my interlocutor continued, “there is nothing
+of the kind. The first thing they ask about a new-comer
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>is, ‘How much can we make out of him?’ They
+want pay for permitting him to do something for them.
+There is no public spirit, no local pride. What they
+want is exorbitant gains.”</p>
+
+<p>He went on to tell of an application for a charter
+by an American company, which was absolutely refused.
+They were afterward approached and told that the privilege
+would be granted to a committee of Mexican senators,
+who would in their turn transfer it to the company
+for a handsome consideration. The go-betweens in this
+negotiation declared that the personages who were to
+have the final voice in the granting of the charter, as well
+as themselves, would require to be paid, which might
+have been true, and might not. A liberal share of the
+subsidy to be voted for the railway was to be exhausted
+in this way.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether this be anything more than
+political “striking,” or black-mailing, with which we are
+familiar at Albany and elsewhere, and whether the corruption
+ever really reaches to head-quarters. At any rate,
+it was said that some part of the aid devoted to each several
+enterprise was diverted in this way to private benefit.
+The drainage of the valley had been offered in the
+United States at a reduction of forty per cent. from the
+amount voted by the appropriation bill, the difference to
+be retained by the purveyors of the opportunity. One
+hundred thousand dollars in cash was demanded, again,
+as a preliminary, for the opportunity to fill in the works
+of a certain harbor with stone at a reasonable rate. Such
+accounts may be worth looking into by Mexican authority,
+with the interest of good and economical work and
+the abatement of scandal at heart. There is probably no
+better form of patriotism for Mexico just now than a
+strict and uncompromising honesty of administration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>There were entered in the convenient statistical hand-book
+known as the “Annuario Universal,” for the year,
+a list of forty-one railways as in <i>explotacion</i> (running),
+or under construction. But after many of those enumerated
+was inserted a note, to the effect that, owing to
+some unforeseen delay, the works were not yet begun.
+Taking out these, and a larger number on which, though
+technically begun, little or no labor had been expended,
+there was still an unlooked for array of constructed
+roads. Taking out the English road from Vera Cruz,
+and what had been done by the American companies,
+almost at the moment, these were found to consist of
+short bits of local line scattered throughout the country.
+There was not a through line among them; many were
+operated by animal traction only; they had been built by
+natives, been afflicted by bankruptcies and other troubles;
+and represented the railway situation of the country
+apart from outside assistance. You were even drawn a
+good part of the way by animals on the English branch
+from Vera Cruz to Jalapa; and in going from Mexico
+to the mines at Pachuca, after leaving the main line at
+Ometusco, we took first a diligence, and were then pulled
+by mules in a Philadelphia-built horse-car. The number
+of these isolated bits has not increased in the mean time,
+several of them having been bought up and incorporated
+in the larger enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time, however, the list of projected roads
+at least has been liberally increased. The Congressional
+session of 1881 was the most active ever known in the
+authorization of new enterprises on a great scale. The
+great Mexican Central, trunk line, had, however, been
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>chartered in 1878, and the Mexican National in 1880.
+The first charter under the modern movement dates
+from October, 1867; and since then the Mexican Government
+has issued charters for over 20,000 miles of road,
+with subsidies probably to the amount of $200,000,000.
+Many of these, with their subsidies, have lapsed, of
+course. The Government is now held for about 15,000
+miles of road, and subsidies of $90,000,000.</p>
+
+<p>The enterprises on a great scale are all American, and
+the chief ones among them may be estimated roughly as
+follows:</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <th></th>
+    <th>Miles.</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mexican Central (Boston Company)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">2,000</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mexican National (Palmer-Sullivan)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">2,000</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sonora (Boston Company)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">500</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="nw">Mexican Southern (General Grant, President)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">1,000</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Oriental (De Gress and Jay Gould)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">1,200</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Topolobambo (Senator Windom, President)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">1,200</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>International (Frisbie and Huntington)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">1,400</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Pacific Coast (Frisbie)</td>
+    <td class="tdr">3,000</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">Total</td>
+    <td class="tdr total">12,300</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>To these may be added the Sinaloa and Durango, from
+the city of Culiacan to the port of Altata, in Sinaloa; the
+Tehuantepec railway, and Captain Eads’s ship railway
+across the same isthmus, to take the place of a ship canal.
+The privilege to build an American railway across Tehuantepec,
+it may be remembered, was secured (at the
+same time with the lower belt of Arizona) by the Gadsden
+treaty of 1853, supplementary to that of Guadalupe
+Hidalgo. The road was supposed to be needed for the
+consolidation of relations with our then newly acquired
+territory of California. The Pacific railroad filled its
+place, however, and the project, taken up and dropped
+from time to time, has since had but a lingering existence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus017" style="max-width: 62.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus017.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>GENERAL RAILWAY SYSTEM OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span></p>
+
+<p>Captain Eads proposes to transport bodily ships of
+4000 tons, 190 miles, by land. He will have twelve
+lines of rails, and four locomotives at once; and, to avoid
+jarring in transit, changes of direction will be made by
+a series of turn-tables instead of curves. The scheme is
+a startling one, and meets with no little opposition. It
+is still only on paper; but its proposer, who has abundantly
+vindicated his sagacity in constructing the jetties
+of the Mississippi and the great St. Louis bridge, remains
+firm in his conviction that he will be able to sail ships
+across the isthmus on dry land.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>The several enterprises are succinctly divided into two
+classes—those on the ground, and those on paper. It is
+not necessarily a disparagement to the last that they are
+still in such a condition, for many of them are of very
+recent origin.</p>
+
+<p>The original Mexican Southern road is to run south
+from Mexico, by Puebla and Oaxaca (capital of the populous
+state of the same name) and the frontier of Guatemala,
+with branches to the ports of Anton Lizardo, on
+the Gulf of Mexico, and Tehuantepec, on the Pacific. It
+is to connect also with the Tehuantepec railway. It
+relies, as a principal resource, upon the transport of the
+valuable productions of a rich tropical country, as cotton,
+sugar, coffee, rice, and the like. Oaxaca is an important
+small city of 28,000 people, birth-place of General Porfirio
+Diaz, the Mexican power behind the throne, and undoubtedly
+the weightiest person in the country. The
+route will be a rugged one to build. Much of the area
+is high and salubrious. The Oaxacan Indians are a sturdy
+race, who have followed their leader, Diaz, and others in
+many a hard-fought campaign.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span></p>
+
+<p>This company, however, has lately effected a consolidation
+with the Mexican Oriental, and both will henceforth
+be known under the name of the Mexican Southern.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican Oriental sets out from Laredo, on the
+Texas frontier, and proceeds to the capital by way of
+Victoria, the capital of the state of Tamaulipas. It
+claims to have a bee-line, and to be 200 miles shorter
+than any other. Its mission is to occupy the district between
+the coast and the Mexican National. It throws
+out a branch from Victoria to San Luis Potosi; and has
+a coast-line connecting Tuxpan, Nautla, and Vera Cruz.
+It is fed by some 12,000 miles of road under control of
+Jay Gould in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>The International is chartered to run from Eagle Pass,
+in Texas, to the city of Mexico, occupying a field left
+vacant between the Mexican Central and National; and
+is allowed to have also a cross-line to a point between
+Matamoras and Tampico, east, and between Mazatlan and
+Zihuataneso, west. The theory of each, it will be seen, is
+to have an interoceanic line as well as a main line north
+and south.</p>
+
+<p>The Pacific Coast road covers the right to a vast
+stretch, beginning at a point below Fort Yuma, Arizona,
+and connecting the whole series of Pacific ports down to
+Guatemala. The Topolobampo has also a long extension
+southward, to touch at some of the same points.</p>
+
+<p>The Topolobampo route (Texas, Topolobampo, and
+Pacific) crosses the northern border states. It professes
+to be a shorter transcontinental route to Australia and
+Asia than any other that can be laid down on the map.
+It claims to have at Topolobampo, just within the Gulf
+of California, the ancient Sea of Cortez, one of the few
+fine harbors of the Pacific coast.</p>
+
+<p>These harbors are spaced at wide intervals apart.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>That of the Columbia River of Oregon is the highest
+up. Then, 600 miles south, comes San Francisco; 441
+miles below this is San Diego; 650 miles farther on, in
+a direct line, or 936, doubling Cape St. Lucas, is Topolobampo;
+and 740 miles south of this again is Acapulco.
+Between them all there is nothing worthy the name of
+harbor.</p>
+
+<p>Topolobampo city, within the confines of the state of
+Sinaloa, exists only on paper as yet, but nothing is more
+impressive in its elegant regularity and finish than a paper
+city. It claims to be 800 miles nearer New York
+than San Francisco by railroad travel, and that a person
+coming from Liverpool to Sydney, Australia, would save
+600 miles in laying out a course from Fernandina, Florida,
+by New Orleans and Topolobampo, which is indicated
+as a route of the future. If some of these representations
+be correct, no doubt it will be. We live
+in times of a ruthless commercial greed which is stopped
+by no sentimental considerations of vested rights and
+convenience. We have but to see a short, through
+line, with possible economies, to build it with all possible
+despatch.</p>
+
+<p>The road in question is to start from Piedras Negras,
+on the frontier of Texas, and make for Topolobampo,
+across the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Sonora,
+with branches to Presidio del Norte, also on the Texas
+frontier, and to Alamos, in Sonora, and the port of Mazatlan,
+down the coast. These routes pass near, and
+would greatly facilitate operations in some of the large
+silver-mining districts, of late entered with success by
+American capital and immigration. The reports of its
+surveys chronicle an engaging prospect in various other
+ways. It passes from belts of tropical products to those
+of white pine, oak, and cedar, and others fitted for cereals,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>grass, and cotton, with a rich iron mountain, and deposits
+of copper as well as silver.</p>
+
+<p>The maxim is laid down that a railroad pays, in local
+traffic, in proportion as one section of its line supplies
+what another lacks. If the situation be as represented,
+Topolobampo seems provided with most of the essential
+conditions of success.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII.<br>
+<i>THE RAILWAYS AT WORK.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The Sonora road is already built, and in operation as
+I write. It is a stretch of three hundred miles, from
+the Arizona frontier, to the port of Guaymas, near the
+centre of the shore line of the Gulf of California. Its
+United States connection is by a branch of the Atchison,
+Topeka, and Santa Fé, from Benson, through Calabasas,
+to the border at Nogales; and another is proposed, from
+the Southern Pacific at Tucson. The management of this
+enterprise, as well as of the Great Mexican Central, is
+practically that of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé.</p>
+
+<p>Its course is across the state of Sonora. It abolishes
+the old system of ox-train transportation and the dusty
+stage-line from Tucson. It will be found fault with,
+among others, by the savage Apaches, whose refuge
+Northern Mexico has so long been. Their depredations,
+with their territory penetrated by railroads, must soon
+come to an end once for all. The other Indians of the
+state—Yaquis, Mayos, and Opatas—are docile, and a
+principal reliance for cheap labor. The road taps mines,
+and, by means of a branch, what is even more important
+for Mexico, the valuable Santa Clara coal-fields. It has
+the little city of Hermosillo, with its plantations, irrigated
+by aqueducts, in its course; and its port of Guaymas is
+commodious and sheltered.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I have purposely reserved to the last—the better, perhaps,
+to present them to view—the two great trunk lines
+of principal importance, the Mexican Central and the
+Mexican National. These two represent the bulk of the
+entire movement as it is at present. Neither had many
+miles in actual operation during my stay; but the works,
+railway stations, city offices, and army of employés of
+both, were constantly in sight at the capital, and were
+the principal evidences by which the manner of the railway
+invasion of Mexico could be judged.</p>
+
+<p>Energy of movement, ingenuity in planning, and an
+almost limitless expenditure, all indicated here conscientious
+work, and not simply railroad building on paper.</p>
+
+<p>The Central begins at El Paso, the terminus of the
+Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, as well as a station on
+the Southern Pacific, at the frontier of New Mexico.
+It extends to the capital, a distance of thirteen hundred
+miles, tapping on the way a long series of the leading
+cities of the republic, most of these as well capitals of
+states. It has also a great interoceanic cross-line, which
+is to pass from the port of Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico,
+through the cities of San Luis Potosi, Lagos (the
+junction with the main line), and Guadalajara, to San
+Blas, on the Pacific. It is expected that the main line
+will be completed about July, 1884.</p>
+
+<p>The first reached in the chain of leading cities is Chihuahua,
+with about eighteen thousand inhabitants. The
+line is already running to this point, and is completed in
+all three hundred and thirty-one miles southward from
+Paso del Norte. The visitor by rail may already have
+in Chihuahua a glimpse of a place presenting most of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>typical Mexican features. It has Aztec remains, and a
+large cathedral, built out of a percentage of the proceeds
+of a silver-mine in bonanza. It is the scene where the
+patriot Hidalgo, who first raised the standard of insurrection
+against Spanish rule, was shot, having been treacherously
+betrayed by his friends. This story is, unhappily,
+of but too frequent repetition in Mexican annals.</p>
+
+<p>Durango, three hundred miles farther, has twenty-eight
+thousand people. It has been spoken of as the <i>Ultima
+Thule</i> of civilized Mexico, the barren plains to the
+north—which are, indeed, very common in all these uppermost
+states—not having been considered worthy to
+be included with the country below. There are places
+where water is not to be had for two and three days at a
+time, but must be carried by the traveller. The inhabitants
+have had to depend considerably upon themselves
+for defence, as is seen in the occasional fort-like haciendas,
+with walls turreted and pierced for musketry.</p>
+
+<p>Zacatecas, moving onward now into a country of recognized
+civilization, has 62,000 people; San Luis Potosi,
+45,000; Aguas Calientes, 35,000; Lagos, 25,000; Leon,
+100,000; handsome Guanajuato, capital of the state
+which is the richest of the whole interior, 63,000; Celaya,
+30,000; Silao, 38,000; Irapuato, 21,000; Salamanca,
+20,000; and luxurious Guadalajara, 94,000.</p>
+
+<p>The mining of the precious metals is a leading industry
+over all the area thus described, which abounds also
+in the agricultural products of a gentle and temperate
+climate. The railroad is now running northward from
+the city of Mexico to Lagos, and is completed for three
+hundred and thirty-four miles from this lower end.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly in the chain of cities may be mentioned Queretaro,
+which has a population of 48,000. It is the site of
+flourishing cotton-mills, an aqueduct which is compared
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>with the works of the Romans, and it saw the final resistance
+and execution of Maximilian. Mexico itself has
+200,000 inhabitants. I have summed up here nearly a
+million of people; and it would seem that a railroad
+along the line of which are scattered such communities
+as these, grown to their present dimensions without even
+tolerable means of approach, need not lack for support.</p>
+
+<p>True, large numbers of the people are Indians and
+very poor; but I point to the example of Don Benito
+Juarez, the liberator of his country from the French, an
+Indian of the purest blood, and to numerous others accessible
+on every hand, to show that there is nothing inherent
+in the race itself to debar it from the highest development
+with increase of opportunities. And if any suppose
+that they do not like to travel, let him simply inspect
+the excursion trains where third-class cars are supplied
+to them in sufficient numbers.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>I made the trip over the section of the Central to the
+small city of Tula. Its principal feature is the passage
+through the great Spanish drainage cut, along one side of
+which it has been allowed to terrace its track. This cut—the
+Tajo of Nochistongo, before mentioned, designed for
+keeping the lakes from inundating the valley—was begun
+under the viceroys as far back as 1607, and continued
+for a couple of hundred years. Such mammoth earth-cutting—a
+ditch twelve miles long, a couple of hundred
+feet deep, and three hundred and sixty wide—was never
+seen elsewhere in the world; and it is said to have cost
+the lives of seventy thousand <i>peons</i>, or Indian laborers,
+in the course of construction. Why this should have
+been, and how they died—whether by slipping in and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>being buried, or under the exactions of cruel task-masters,
+and whether those who passed away simply of old age
+(for which it will be seen there was ample time) are included—does
+not appear.</p>
+
+<p>I went partly by construction train, dining in their car
+with a group of jolly young engineers, and partly on
+horseback over the <i>terre-plaine</i> (the graded road-bed),
+which makes an excellent surface for riding. The peons,
+swarming on the work, in white cotton shirts and drawers,
+have reddish skins, bristly black hair, and a sudden, wild-eyed
+way of addressing you. They have an analogy to
+the Chinese type. They got at this time two and a half
+reals (thirty-one cents) a day. They are very suspicious,
+and have absolutely no idea of trust, or waiting over the
+appointed time. Dangerous strikes have resulted from
+some slight putting off of the pay-day, which usually
+takes place once a week. In other respects they are
+very tractable.</p>
+
+<p>There were said to be thirty thousand of them at work
+on railroads at this date. The rate of wages, so favorable
+to the contractors at first, has been gradually rising
+under the active demand in the mean time, and I have
+heard, since my return, of a strike on one of the northern
+roads for as high as $1 a day. They buy gay clothes for
+Sunday, and <i>pulque</i>, and save nothing. Many will not
+even work steadily. Two such form a partnership to
+take a single place, and one works half the week and
+the other the rest. There were some who walked all Saturday
+night to spend Sunday at Queretaro, and returned
+Monday morning. On the haciendas they are generally
+in debt, and as they cannot leave when in debt, they are
+so far attached to the land, like serfs. Each gang has a
+<i>Cabo</i> (or head), who is simply an enterprising one of
+themselves, and gets an allowance of two cents extra for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>each man he controls.
+The Cabo is a great
+man among the railway
+laborers, and out of
+cabos arise the Benito
+Juarezes, and hopes indefinite
+for the evolution
+of the race.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp63" id="illus018" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus018.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE GREAT SPANISH DRAINAGE CUT.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>I spent the night at Tula. It was the capital of the
+Toltecs before the day of the Aztecs. I climbed the Hill
+of the Treasure, to inspect some ruins over which archæologists
+have made a stir. There are no sculptures nor
+carved stones, nothing but some opened cellars and heavy
+walls, with patches of a red plaster, as at Pompeii, adhering
+to them. But we stayed our horses, and looked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>down, from a thicket of organ-cactus and nopal, upon a
+lovely sunset over the valley of Tula. It is a little
+pocket of fertility in the hills, and it does not seem at
+all wonderful that the Toltecs stopped there in their
+migrations southward.</p>
+
+<p>My <i>mozo</i> pointed out a ruin in the thick woods, which
+he declared was Toltec, knowing that to be what I was in
+search of. It was picturesque enough, its walls having
+been split by an irrepressible vegetable growth; but it
+had the same style of battlements (a kind of Spanish
+horn of dominion) as the fortress-like church in the town,
+dating from 1553, and was much more modern.</p>
+
+<p>I went into this cool old church—vast enough for a
+cathedral—next day, when the temperature was warm
+without. It was entirely vacant. Fatigued with my
+journeying, I sat on a comfortable old wooden bench,
+and dozed till awakened sharply by the striking of a
+little cuckoo-clock. I seem to have dreamed that the
+numerous quaint figures of saints, in dresses made of
+actual stuffs, had somehow an every-day existence there,
+in addition to their sacred character, and that they were
+taking notice of the intruder, and offering audible comments.
+This is one of the ways, I suppose, in which very
+good miracles have been wrought before now.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, the place consisted of a plaza, with two
+or three <i>pulque</i>-shops; a shop of general traps, with the
+ambitious title of “Los Leones;” a <i>botica</i> (or drug-shop),
+kept by one Perfecto Espinoza; a Hotel de las Diligencias;
+and a little jail, at one corner of the plaza, where
+a couple of soldiers walked up and down, and the prisoners
+peeped out through a large wooden, grated door.</p>
+
+<p>And there was a good restaurant, kept by a little
+Frenchman, who moved on with it from time to time to
+the head of the line.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span></p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>The Mexican National, or “Palmer-Sullivan,” road is
+due to the same enterprise which established the successful
+Denver and Rio Grande system in Colorado and New
+Mexico. It is, like that, a narrow gauge, instead of a
+standard gauge, line, and a connection is to be ultimately
+established between the two. In some respects it may
+claim to be the pioneer in the modern movement, since
+its agent in Mexico, James Sullivan, had obtained a
+charter and begun to raise money in 1872, but was stopped
+in his project by the panic of the following year.</p>
+
+<p>The National takes a much shorter line to the capital
+than the Central, say eight hundred miles, as against
+thirteen hundred. Its initial point is Laredo, on the
+Texas frontier. It is running already into Monterey,
+the capital of Nuevo Leon, and built below Saltillo.
+Of the charms of the little city of Monterey, which has
+medicinal springs beside it, travellers begin to speak in
+the warmest terms. It touches San Luis Potosi and Celaya
+as well as the Central, and has along or near its
+course other cities, well peopled, though less known to
+fame, as Matchuala, the population of which is 25,000.
+Its eastern port is Corpus Christi, Texas, though it will
+have a branch also to Matamoras. Its westward extension
+(only less important than the main line) winds
+round about, through the cities of Toluca, Maravatio,
+Morelia, Guadalajara, and Colima, down to the port of
+Manzanillo.</p>
+
+<p>Four of these are capitals, and all are populous, and
+have wide, well-paved streets and handsome buildings,
+public and private. Toluca, at a great height, 8825 feet,
+above the sea, is often afflicted by a rather frigid temperature;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>Colima is distinctly in the tropics; but Morelia
+affords the happy medium, and its whole state of
+Michoacan has charms upon which the appreciative never
+have done expatiating. Humboldt speaks of the lake
+found at Patzcuaro as one of the loveliest on the globe.
+Madame Calderon de la Barca, in her journey here, could
+hardly refrain from regretting the lavishing by Nature
+of what seemed (so few were there then to enjoy it)
+almost a wasted beauty. “We are startled,” she says,
+“by the conviction that this enchanting variety of hill
+and plain, wood and water, is for the most part unseen
+by human eye and untrod by human footstep.”</p>
+
+<p>The route winds, too, on its way to Guadalajara,
+around the great lake of Chapala. Truly, it seems they
+are to be happy travellers, those of the immediate future,
+to whom the simple device of the railway is to open up
+so much of the wildness and loveliness of nature, combined
+with the quaintness of an old Spanish civilization.
+We are apt to forget, in our preconceived impressions,
+what an important part Old Spain played in the country
+during three hundred years, what treasures she spent
+there. She had made a beginning of some of these solid,
+regular cities, which surprise one like enchantment on
+emerging upon them from forests and wastes, a hundred
+years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
+Very little, in fact, has been added to what the Spanish
+domination left. The modern movement, since 1821, is
+to be credited with very little in the way of new buildings.
+Such compliments as are paid in the course of these
+descriptions to the architecture belong chiefly to that remaining
+from a much earlier date. The reputation of the
+republic is still to be made in all such matters when it
+shall have outgrown the ample legacies bequeathed it, and
+have need of farther accommodations peculiarly its own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span></p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>In all, the National has completed four hundred and
+sixty miles. It is said of late to have been sold to an
+English company. We need not forego our American
+pride in its early achievements, even if this be so. Perhaps
+such a transfer might be of benefit, in allaying the
+dread of an overweening American influence.</p>
+
+<p>It was not done even to Toluca in my time. It has to
+face its most arduous engineering difficulties at the very
+beginning, and fortunately goes far more smoothly afterward.
+No less than seventeen bridges, of solid construction,
+had to be thrown across the little stream of the
+Rio Hondo in two or three miles of its course.</p>
+
+<p>A pay-train on horseback started out from the central
+office every Saturday, to convoy the silver coin for the
+wages of the army of hands employed on the first section
+of twenty miles.</p>
+
+<p>“Ride with us!” its members often hospitably urged,
+and I more than once accepted the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>It is an all-day adventure, and a fatiguing one. Behold
+us at early morning clattering out of the court-yard
+to ride up into the fastnesses of the mountains, a curious
+cavalcade. The treasure is packed upon the backs of a
+dozen mules, which are placed in the centre. A troop of
+<i>Rurales</i> (the efficient force organized by Porfirio Diaz
+for the better protection of the rural districts) takes the
+van. A numerous retinue of armed <i>mozos</i> of the company,
+with ourselves, bring up the rear. The young
+engineers, paymasters, and contractors, well mounted,
+with long boots and revolvers, present a handsome, half-military
+aspect.</p>
+
+<p>We have presently lost sight of the city, and are upon
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>high rolling barrens, where the surface is volcanic and
+rent into an infinity of seams, and the only vegetation is
+that of nopal, or prickly-pear, as large as apple-trees with
+us. Here and there a cluster of white tents is seen at a
+distance, and cotton-clad peons delving in gulch or on
+mountain-side are like some strange species of white
+insects.</p>
+
+<p>The whole expedition wears a most un-nineteenth-century
+air. We might be some band of marauders returned
+from an ancient foray. The Rurales have something
+in their cut—the buff leather jackets, crossed by
+ample sword-belts, and wide, gray felt hats—of the troopers
+of Cromwell. Each has a rifle in his holster at the
+saddle-bow, and a gray-and-scarlet blanket strapped behind
+him. Nothing could be more spirited, in color,
+than these costumes, dismounted beside a cactus-tree, or
+thrown out against the blue of distant mountains. On
+the harness of some of the mules are embroidered in
+red and blue their names, or that of some hacienda, as
+“Santa Lucia,” to which they have belonged.</p>
+
+<p>It is understood that an individual with a crimson
+handkerchief around the back of his head, under his silver-bordered
+sombrero, is the titular <i>cacique</i> of San Bartolito
+by descent from ancient chiefs. He precedes us,
+being employed by the company to look out for plots
+and ambuscades. When we have passed what he considers
+the dangerous points—these are generally in the
+neighborhood of elevations, whence an intending bandit
+could spy the road for a distance in both directions, and
+where are ravines on either side for concealment and
+escape—he rejoins the troop, and converses upon the
+propriety of his receiving more salary for his arduous
+duties. No molestation has ever yet been offered these
+caravans, and there is hardly likely to be. From a considerable
+experience in remote parts of Mexico I am
+satisfied that, however prudent ample precautions may
+be in exceptional cases like this, the ordinary traveller
+runs little if any more danger of robbery than at home.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus019" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus019.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PAY CARAVAN ON THE MEXICAN NATIONAL ROAD.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span></p>
+
+<p>At the pay-stations we breast our way through crowds
+of the peons so thick that the horses can hardly be prevented
+from trampling upon them, always with their
+narrow foreheads, bristling hair, staring, wild eyes, and
+large, undecided mouths. Their money is jingled out to
+them through a pay-window into their shabby sombreros.
+Venders of small commodities and <i>pulque</i> wait for them,
+and profit by the new supply of funds.</p>
+
+<p>At these stations the engineers lead a kind of barrack
+life. The interior contains some beds, a dining-table, and
+a safe; outside is a storehouse of picks, shovels, and barrows.
+Whether here, in their construction-car, or tents,
+they extend the stranger a cheery hospitality. They are
+hearty, robust fellows—“not here for their health,” as
+their saying is. Many of them have seen service in war
+and in other climes, and their company is both amusing
+and instructive.</p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>The right of way usually given in all the concessions
+is for a width of two hundred and thirty feet. Material
+and supplies for the road, and connected telegraph line,
+are exempted from duty generally for the period of
+twenty years. Neither the concession, property, nor
+shares can be alienated to any foreign government, nor
+can a foreign government be admitted as a shareholder.
+The fear of foreign domination crops out everywhere in
+Mexican legislation; and perhaps the weakness of the
+nation, and the sad experience of its seizure by Napoleon
+on the pretext of debt, are sufficient excuse for such
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>nervousness. At any rate, all companies organized under
+its charters agree to be strictly Mexican, and to
+renounce all rights and exemptions as foreigners.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp65" id="illus020" style="max-width: 32.8125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus020.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>“NOT HERE FOR THEIR HEALTH.”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>There is no great vacant public
+domain, as with us, and the Government
+has not aided the new
+enterprises with land grants. Up
+to a recent period, however, it has
+attached to each concession a cash
+subsidy of $10,000 to $15,000 a
+mile. Both the Central and National
+are thus subsidized. In order that the burden
+may not fall too heavily upon an exchequer always weak,
+the payments are made to depend upon the pledge of six
+per cent. in the one case, and four in the other, of receipts
+at the custom-houses. Certificates for the several
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>amounts as they become due are issued to the companies,
+which must wait for collection till there are funds to
+meet them.</p>
+
+<p>The latest plan, affecting most of the great schemes
+still chiefly on paper, gives no subsidy with the charter,
+but gives, instead, certain privileges to atone for its absence.
+A less strict accountability to Government, with
+a much higher tariff of charges, is permitted. It has
+been questioned by some whether under these conditions
+a charter without the subsidy is not better than with it.
+It is to be borne in mind, however, so far as the matter
+of the higher rates is concerned, that between competing
+points the company which can afford to run at the
+cheapest rates gets the business. If but a tithe of the
+railroads now covering the map like a net-work be built,
+there need be no fear of the lack of a lively competition.</p>
+
+<p>The stocks and bonds of railroads are not bought on
+the word of a desultory traveller mainly in search of the
+picturesque—though I will admit, too, that they are often
+bought upon less. I am not afraid, therefore, to express
+a certain enthusiasm about the <i>ferro-carriles</i> of Mexico,
+which are in everybody’s mouth. It is the railways
+which have made the modern world elsewhere what it
+is, and why should they fail of the usual effect here?</p>
+
+<p>They may be overdone, and there may be panics and
+shrinkages, such as have occurred elsewhere, though this
+is not extremely probable, owing to the reasons for wariness
+which lie very much on the surface. The conditions
+to be conformed to must not be sought in a parallel situation
+of things in the United States, but rather in such
+countries, perhaps, as Russia and India, with a large
+peasant population to be developed, instead of a new
+population to be created. We have built railroads in
+advance of settlement, and depended upon immigration
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>to fill up in their wake. Mexico has but an infinitesimal
+immigration, and presents no great inducements to it at
+present. It must depend upon the local carrying trade
+and natural development of the industries and commerce
+of the country. It has a population per square mile but
+little less than that of the United States. These are
+of a natural intelligence, and capable of the stimulus of
+ambition when opportunities are opened. They are to
+be encouraged to be no longer satisfied with a bare subsistence
+for themselves, but to produce from their fertile
+lands a surplus, for which a market is now opened. They
+are to trade upon it and become amassers of wealth.</p>
+
+<p>No less than 10,000 miles of railways are spread over
+what were once the old Mexican provinces of California,
+Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada,
+Utah, and Texas. Railways have brought these out of
+the nothingness in which they recently lay so vast and
+desolate. What must they not inevitably do at last for
+Old Mexico itself, so fully peopled, and scattered with
+centres of trade and of the arts of civilized life?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII.<br>
+<i>THE QUESTION OF MONEY, AND SHOPPING.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>It is perhaps thought that the work of improvement is
+to be effected entirely from without, the Mexican himself
+remaining passive, and allowing everything to be done
+for him. The view is supported by the extent to which
+the business of the country is already in the hands of foreigners.
+The bankers and manufacturers are English.
+The Germans control hardware and “fancy goods.”
+French and Italians keep the hotels and restaurants;
+Spaniards the small groceries and pawn-shops, and deal
+in the products of the country. These latter have a repute
+for somewhat Jewish style of thrift. They are
+enterprising as administrators of haciendas, and often
+marry the proprietors’ daughters, and possess themselves
+on their own account of the properties to which they were
+sent as agents. Whether it be due to such rivalry or
+not, it is to be noted that there are few Jews in Mexico.
+Finally, the Americans build the railroads.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican proper is a retail trader, an employé,
+or, if rich, draws his revenues from haciendas, which in
+many cases he never sees, and where his money is made
+for him. These are on an enormous scale. The chief
+part of the land is comprised in great estates, on which
+the peasants live in a semi-serfdom. Small farms are
+scarcely known. For his fine hacienda in the state of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>Oaxaca ex-President Diaz is said to have paid over a
+million of dollars; on another the appliances alone cost a
+million. The revenues of Mexican proprietors have been
+heretofore devoted to the purchase of more real estate,
+or loaned out at interest; at any rate, “salted down” in
+some such way as to be of little avail in setting the
+wheels of industry in motion.</p>
+
+<p>Before adopting, however, the conventional view that
+this state of things is due to inferiority of race or enervating
+climate, considerations on the other side are to be
+looked at. In the first place is the revolutionary condition
+of the country, which until a recent date subjected
+the citizen who ventured to place his property beyond
+his immediate recall to a thousand embarrassments from
+one or another of the contending parties. Such immunities
+and advantages as there were, were enjoyed by foreigners
+alone, under the protection of their diplomatic
+representatives.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there have been peculiar inequalities of fortune,
+coming down from the old Spanish monarchical times.
+There has been at one extreme of society a class too abject,
+and at the other, one in too leisurely circumstances,
+to greatly aspire to farther improvement, and the middle
+class has been of slow formation. The difficulties in
+the way of travel and communication with foreign parts
+for the middle class, from the bosom of which financial
+success chiefly springs, have been of a repressive sort.</p>
+
+<p>The climate, of the central table-land at least, must not
+be considered enervating. One must lay his ideas of
+climate, as depending upon latitude, aside, and comprehend
+that here it is a matter of elevation above the sea.
+Individual Mexicans are to be met with who, under the
+stimulus of the new feeling of security, have embarked
+their capital, put plenty of irons in the fire, and appear to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>handle them with skill. The street railways of the capital,
+an extensive and excellent system, are under native
+management exclusively. It is as successful in mining.
+It was only when the great Real del Monte Company at
+Pachuca, formerly English, passed into Mexican hands
+that its mines became profitable.</p>
+
+<p>I should be strongly of the opinion that the backwardness
+of the Mexican is not the result of a native incapacity
+or lack of appetite for gain, but chiefly of the physical
+conformation of the country. The mule-path is traced
+like a vast hieroglyphic over the face of it, and in this is
+read the secret—lack of transportation.</p>
+
+<p>But the zealous advocate of race and “Northern energy”
+objects: “How long is it since we had no railroads
+ourselves? And yet did we not reach a very pretty degree
+of civilization without them?”</p>
+
+<p>But Mexico not only had no railways, but not even
+rivers nor ports. It was waterways which made the prosperity
+of nations before the day of steam. It is hardly
+credible, the completeness of the deprivations to which
+this interesting country has been so long subjected. The
+wonder is, to any experienced in the diligence travel, and
+the dreary slowness of the journeys, at a foot-pace, by
+beasts of burden, not that so little, but so very much, has
+been done. On the trail to the coast at Acapulco, for
+instance—in popular phrase a mere <i>camino de pajaros</i>
+(road for birds)—have grown up some charming towns,
+like Iguala, the scene of the Emperor Iturbide’s famous
+Plan, which, it seems to me, the Anglo-Saxon race would
+hardly ever have originated under such circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Commerce and trade in such a land naturally have their
+peculiar aspects. There is, in the first place, the complicated
+tariff, already referred to. Americans should not
+let a new-born enthusiasm for a promising market hurry
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>them into consignments without a thorough understanding
+of the premises. As to engaging in undertakings in
+the country itself, one who had done so held that the
+new-comer should make his residence there for six months
+or a year, and first acquaint himself with the people, their
+customs, and language.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp83" id="illus021" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus021.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MODERN SHOP-FRONTS AT MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“Better make it two years, on the whole,” he said,
+reflectively, “and then he will go home again and let it
+alone altogether.”</p>
+
+<p>Without sharing this saturnine view, the importance
+of some preliminary acquaintance cannot be too strongly
+insisted upon. The great inertia of customs and ways
+of looking at things so different from our own is appreciated
+more and more as time goes on.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span></p>
+
+<p>The most promising openings at present would seem
+to be, for capital, to work up into manufactures the raw
+material with which the country abounds. These opportunities
+will increase with the growth of transportation.
+Labor is cheap. The peons have little inventive but sufficient
+imitative talent, and make excellent mill-hands.
+They work for twenty-five and thirty-seven cents a day,
+and have no trades-unions nor strikes. There is little
+opening as yet for persons of small means. The government
+has taken but its first rudimentary steps toward the
+encouragement of immigration, and the path is beset with
+difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>A commercial treaty is now in the hands of the Senate
+of the United States. It will be adopted in some form
+before long, and may result in the improvement of local
+business opportunities, as it must in the volume of trade,
+between the two countries. What we want is such a reduction
+of duties as to put us on the same footing at least
+as England (in favor of which there is a certain discrimination),
+so that our goods and machinery can be sold in
+the country on reasonable terms. It is predicted that a
+trade which is now about $30,000,000 per annum (including
+both exports and imports) can be made $100,000,000.
+The Mexicans, on their side, desire admission for their
+sugar and hemp. The treaty has met with its chief opposition
+thus far from our Southern sugar-planters.
+Their fear of competition is hardly reasonable at present.
+Our own product seems more likely to go to Mexico
+at first. It is a matter of note that sugar has been
+selling at eighteen cents a pound of late at old Monterey,
+in the country which professes to raise it.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The total
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>value of the exports from Mexico for the past fiscal year
+has been $29,000,000. Of these $14,000,000 came to us,
+and $10,000,000 went to England. Our own exports to
+Mexico for 1881 were somewhat over $11,000,000.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>At present Mexico is perhaps the most difficult country
+in which to do business in the civilized world. A
+customer four or five hundred miles off, even on the best
+roads, is five or six days’ journey distant. In preparing
+for it it is not long since he was accustomed to first make
+his will. The merchant has friendly as well as commercial
+relations with his customer. He is more or less his
+banker at the same time, not for the resulting profit, but
+because it is expected of him. If he does not offer such,
+accommodation some other house will. Credits are long,
+and it is not expected that interest will be charged even
+on quite liberal overlaps of time.</p>
+
+<p>Payment is made in the bulky silver currency of the
+country; and this is sent in large sums by guarded convoys,
+the <i>conductas</i>, which converge upon the capital four
+times a year—in January, April, August, and November.
+There were but two banks issuing bills at this time, and
+these to but a small amount, and receivable only at short
+distances from the capital. One of these was a private
+corporation, the other the National Monte de Piedad, or
+pawn-shop.</p>
+
+<p>The visitor becomes early acquainted with the Mexican
+“dollar of the fathers,” to his sorrow. Sixteen of them
+weigh a solid pound. It is obviously impossible to carry
+even a moderate quantity of this money concealed, or to
+carry it at all with comfort. The unavoidable exhibition
+of it, held in laps, chinking in valises, standing in bags,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>and poured out in prodigious streams at the banks and
+commercial houses, is one of the features of life.</p>
+
+<p>Guadalajara, the supply from which unites with that
+from Zacatecas at Queretaro, is the northernmost point
+from which money is despatched by <i>conducta</i> to Mexico.
+A portion of that even from here is despatched to San
+Francisco, by the port
+of San Blas, just as a
+part of that from Zacatecas
+goes to Tampico
+through San Luis
+Potosi. The country
+north of San Luis to
+the east ships its funds
+to Matamoras; those
+of Durango are divided
+between Matamoras
+and Mazatlan;
+while Puebla, Oaxaca,
+and the rest of the
+south find their natural
+outlet at Vera
+Cruz.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp52" id="illus022" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus022.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE “PORTALES” AT MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The importance of
+the great <i>conducta</i> in
+these times is diminished
+by the growing safety of the transport of money
+by private hands. Its days are numbered with the
+progress of the railways, nearing so rapidly the central
+cluster of cities in which it has its origin. Even now it
+no longer came wholly to town, but took the Central train
+at the first feasible point, at Huehuetoca, the Spanish cut
+for the drainage of the valley. Its place as a spectacle is
+filled by the pay <i>conductas</i> of the railroads.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span></p>
+
+<p>A revision of these accounts is needed almost from
+moment to moment as I write, to keep pace with the rapid
+changes in affairs. A National Bank and banks of foreign
+incorporators have been established in the mean time, with
+authority to issue large amounts of but inefficiently secured
+paper. The Mexican National Bank may now issue
+bills to the amount of $60,000,000, upon a capital of
+$20,000,000. They are legal tender from individuals to
+the government, but not from the government to individuals,
+nor between individuals. One of the arguments in
+favor of this bank, our minister was assured, was that it
+would counteract in some sort the influence of the United
+States: the usual patriotic leaven cropping up, it will be
+seen; though how it should accomplish the purpose in
+view it is by no means easy to understand. A flood of
+depreciated paper is driving the solid coin out of circulation;
+so that, while the traveller may be now able to
+carry his money comfortably about him, there may be
+much worse in store for the Mexicans themselves than
+the handling of bags of unwieldy dollars. It is not
+pleasant to see also that the government shows some
+unusual pecuniary embarrassment. Its expenditures for
+the last fiscal year exceeded its revenues by ten per cent.,
+and a loan is talked of. Should a spirit of recklessness
+enter into the management of the finances, in all this
+whirl of novelties, complicated by the issues of paper, a
+crisis might be precipitated, which would, of course, have
+to be counted among the retarding influences on the railways.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Shops and shopping in Mexico follow much more European
+than American traditions. A fanciful title over
+the door of the shop takes the place of the name of a firm
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>or single proprietor. You have no Smith &amp; Brown, but,
+instead—on the sign of a dry-goods store, for instance—“The
+Surprise,” or “The Spring-time,” or “The Explosion.”
+A jeweller’s is apt to be called “The Pearl,” or
+“The Emerald;” a shoe-store, “The Foot of Venus,” or
+“The Azure Boot.”</p>
+
+<p>The windows are tastefully draped, after the way of
+shop-windows. Within stand a large force of clerks,
+touching shoulder to shoulder. They seem democratic
+in their manners, even by an American standard. They
+shake hands over the counter with a patron with whom
+they have enjoyed a slight previous acquaintance; ask a
+mother of a family, perhaps, after the health of “Miss
+Lolita” and “Miss Soledad,” her daughters, who may
+have accompanied her thither. One of them, they hear,
+is going to be married. Perhaps this is accounted for
+by the presence among the minor clerks of some of considerable
+social position—some of the class you meet with
+afterward at the select entertainments of the Minister of
+Guatemala, for instance. But a limited choice of occupations
+has been open to the youth of Mexico, and those
+who cared to work have had to take such places as they
+could. They apply now with great eagerness for the
+positions of every sort offering under the new enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>It was not etiquette of late for ladies of the upper class
+to do shopping in public, except from their carriages, the
+goods being brought out to them at the curb-stone. Now
+they may enter shops. A considerable part of the buying,
+as of furniture and other household goods, is still
+done by the men of the family. Nor was it etiquette
+for ladies to be seen walking in the streets, even with a
+maid, except to and from mass in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>The change in both respects is ascribed to the horse-cars.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>The point of ceremony, it appears, was founded
+somewhat upon the difficulty of getting about.</p>
+
+<p>Americanism now appears in the streets with increasing
+frequency, in the signs of dealers in arms, sewing-machines,
+and other of our useful inventions. Our insurance
+companies, too, are a novel idea, to which the
+Mexicans seem to take with much readiness. The principal
+shopping hours are from four to six o’clock of the
+afternoon. From one till three, or even four, little is
+done. Even the horse-cars do not run in the middle of
+the day. There is a general stoppage of affairs for dinner.
+It is but a short time since that enterprising person,
+the commercial traveller, was unknown in the country,
+but now he begins to flourish here as elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The profits of favorably situated houses, in the absence
+of keen competition, have been very large, and methods
+of doing business correspondingly loose. The Mexican
+merchant does not go into a fine calculation of the proportionate
+value of each item of a foreign invoice, but
+“lumps” the profit he thinks he ought to receive on the
+whole. Some articles, in consequence, can be bought at
+less than their real value, while others, in compensation,
+are exorbitantly advanced.</p>
+
+<p>It is the smaller trade, and that most removed from
+metropolitan influences, which is the gayest and most
+entertaining as a spectacle. How many picturesque market
+scenes does not one linger in! Each community has
+its own market-day, not to interfere with others. The
+flags of the plaza and market-houses, which are commodious
+and well built, are hidden under fruits, grains, cocoa
+sacks and mats, striped blankets and <i>rebosos</i>, sprawling
+brown limbs, embroidered bodices and kirtles, as if spread
+with a thick, richly colored rug. A grade above the open
+market is the <i>Parian</i>, a bazaar of small shops, in which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>goods, sales-people, and customers alike might all be put
+upon canvas only with the most vivid of hues.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp40" id="illus023" style="max-width: 20.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus023.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A “MERCERIA” AT PUEBLA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>I give some examples
+of the
+street architecture
+of the more important
+shops.
+The approach to
+many is under the
+welcome <i>portales</i>,
+shady in sunshine
+and dry in the
+wet. Not a few
+of the shops have
+been old Spanish
+palaces before being
+adapted to
+their present use.
+I transferred to
+my sketch-book a
+bit from the leading
+<i>merceria</i> (dry-goods
+store) of the
+important minor
+city of Puebla
+which I thought
+particularly interesting.
+It was
+called, after the
+prevailing fashion,
+“The City of Mexico.” The entire front—upon
+which still remained the carved escutcheon, showing that
+it had been the residence of a family of rank—was faced
+up between carvings, in a gay pattern in tiles, the figures
+glazed, the rest an unglazed ground of red.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX.<br>
+<i>SOCIAL LIFE, AND SOME NOTABLE INSTITUTIONS.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The persons who once lived in these old Spanish palaces,
+and descendants of the titles of nobility existing before
+the Independence, are still much esteemed in a certain
+small circle in the country. There are pointed out to you
+those who should by right be marquises and counts, and
+the titles are occasionally given them. The Mexican nobles,
+from the time of Cortes down, lived in magnificent
+style in their day. The Count of Regla, who has left his
+trace after him in many directions, must have enjoyed
+almost the state of royalty. A single hacienda of his in
+Michoacan was thirty leagues in length by seventeen in
+breadth, and, sloping down from the temperate plateau
+to the tropic, comprised in its extent the products of almost
+every clime. He fitted out two ships of the largest
+size, building them of mahogany and cedar, and presented
+them to the King of Spain. Inviting his majesty
+to visit the country, he assured him that his horse should
+tread on nothing but ingots of silver from the coast to
+the capital.</p>
+
+<p>A remnant of the old <i>noblesse</i> rallied around Maximilian
+when he came to assume the Emperor’s crown. With
+this, and what remains of Maximilian’s court, and some
+few other families of a peculiarly exclusive turn, a circle
+is constituted somewhat corresponding to the Parisian
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>Faubourg St. Germain. They are sometimes stigmatized
+as “Mochos,” literally hypocrites. They are rich, pass
+much of their time abroad, protest against the sequestration
+of the Church property, and exhibit a refined horror
+at the vandalism of these later times.</p>
+
+<p>“The government,” they tell you, “is in the hands of
+the <i>populacho</i>, the rabble; the <i>gente honrada</i>, respectable
+society, has nothing to do with it.”</p>
+
+<p>In a novel which I have by a Mexican writer, Cuellar,
+a secretary of legation at Washington, the scene is laid
+in this faction or clique. “Chona,” or Incarnacion, the
+heroine, or leading feminine character, “had been brought
+up from childhood more to abhor than admire. The conversations
+in the family continually turned upon the
+utter antipathy which the men and things of Mexico
+inspired.”</p>
+
+<p>“They had for visitors Church notables and those of
+the wealthy who still retained the parchments of their
+ancestry. If they made any new acquaintance it was
+some Spaniard lately come into relations with them
+through the business of their estates.”</p>
+
+<p>The fashionable men in the story have been educated
+at Paris, and become elegantly <i>blasé</i> there as well. In
+contrast to these is shown one Sanchez, a vulgar, pushing
+fellow, upheaved from the depths by the revolutions.
+He has the “gift of gab,” which he has utilized to make
+himself a figure in politics; has enriched himself with the
+spoils of the Church establishment, and secured a good
+place under government. He more than hints, however,
+when he is found to have finally lost it, that he is ready
+to engage in upsetting “Don Benito”—it is now under
+the <i>régime</i> of President Juarez that the scene is laid—or
+in any other convulsion that may promise to again mend
+his fortunes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I do not quite know which side the writer himself is
+on, in this satirical work; it is so bitter all around. It is
+certainly interesting as showing two such boldly distinct
+types, one of them at least picturesque, evolved out of
+the peculiar conflicts of the country. Let us hope that
+there are few of the dangerous Sanchez pattern in the
+present juncture of affairs. The Mochos cannot now be
+numerous nor dangerous, with the wholesale victory of
+middle or lower class republicanism around them. They
+have taken little part, voluntarily, in the successive revolutions
+since their own overthrow, leaving them rather to
+be fought out by professional soldiers of fortune. They
+temporize a little; attend, perhaps, the wedding of some
+rich railway contractor’s daughter, in order, as they say,
+not to draw upon themselves a direct enmity; but they
+do not open their own houses in return; they do not
+“entertain.”</p>
+
+<p>Don Sebastian Lerdo, spoken of as the most scholarly
+President the country ever had, is conceded to have been
+to a considerable extent “in society.” He was expelled
+by Porfirio Diaz, and is now in retirement at New York.
+The political class since that time has either not been
+well received in the circle spoken of, or, perhaps too busy
+with other affairs, has not greatly cared for it.</p>
+
+<p>Such being the case, there are few reunions, and these
+of an informal character. Nor do the officials give entertainments
+themselves. Social gayeties, as we understand
+them, can hardly be said to exist in Mexico. It is only
+under the neutral roofs of the foreign ministers that they
+take place with some satisfaction. I had the good fortune
+to be at the capital during the visit of General Grant, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>to see a social movement which, by the general testimony,
+was quite phenomenal. There was, among the rest, a
+fashionable wedding, attended by the President and his
+cabinet. A “reception” and banquet were given in the
+evening on the occasion of the signing of a civil contract
+between the parties. The religious ceremony took place
+at church next day. The interior courts of the house
+were wreathed with flowers, and lent themselves palatially
+to the festivity, as they always do. The banquet was
+spread along the bases of the columns of the arcade.</p>
+
+<p>The young Mexican women are still kept apart from
+the other sex, and made love to chiefly on their balconies
+in the good old-fashioned, romantic style. Their manners
+when met with in public, however, are not so unusual
+as might be expected. They seem neither more
+nor less diffident than elsewhere. They are allowed to
+take part at balls in a slow waltz called the <i>danza</i>—so
+slow as hardly to be a dance at all—which is chiefly an
+opportunity for conversation.</p>
+
+<p>The high-contracting parties to the marriage above-mentioned
+were by no means young, and in general the exceeding
+precocity of development and early age of entering
+into the marriage relation supposed to be characteristic
+of the tropics were not apparent. It was said that mercenary
+considerations were not frequent, and claim was laid
+to a good deal of simplicity and honest affection in the
+settlement of these matters; though how the parties get
+at each other, under the restrictive system, sufficiently to
+enter upon a simple and honest affection, is one of those
+things that remain a mystery. It is said that the young
+woman who remains single is not stigmatized for it in the
+common way as “old maid.” They say very charmingly
+instead: “She is difficult. She is hard to suit.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus024" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus024.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>INTERIOR COURT-YARD OF MEXICAN RESIDENCE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the country the match-making is often taken charge
+of by the village priest, who brings the parties together
+finally at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>As a general remark, the manners of the lower class of
+the country are much better than ours, and those of the
+upper are not as good—not as often based upon real
+kindliness of heart and genuine desire to be of service.
+The Mexican promises a hundred things which he has no
+intention, often no ability, of performing. The American
+is not without his faults—the more’s the pity—but
+in a general way he aims to do as he agrees. He will
+often make against the Mexican the reproach of a certain
+slipperiness—a lack of appreciation of the importance of
+adhering to his word.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Each considerable group of foreign residents, as the
+French, Germans, and Spaniards, has its handsome casino,
+or club-house, which is a standing resource for the diversion
+of members.</p>
+
+<p>A French traveller as far back as 1838 complains of
+the unsociable conduct of the Mexicans. If something
+of the kind be still observed, therefore, it is not new.
+“They abound,” he says, “in a superfluity of fine
+phrases, and it is in this easy way that they discharge
+themselves of their obligations.”</p>
+
+<p>All who know European life, however, are aware that
+the theatre and the café, with people of the Latin race,
+largely take the place of the social visiting and entertaining
+at home prevailing among Anglo-Saxons. Our next-door
+neighbors, after all, may only have followed, making
+a little more severe, the traditions of Old Spain. Ladies
+do not often appear at the cafés, but they are often
+at their boxes at the theatres, to which they subscribe
+by the season; and they would go more frequently yet,
+no doubt, were the pieces as a rule better worth their
+consideration. There are three large, well-built theatres,
+the Nacional, Principal, and Arbeu, and minor ones for
+the working-class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus025" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus025.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MEXICAN COURTSHIP.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span></p>
+
+<p>The entertainments esteemed of chief importance are
+those of the French opera companies which come over
+from Havana, on their rounds. A native Spanish opera-bouffe
+and ballet, called <i>zarzuela</i>, is much given at other
+times. For the rest, the theatrical pieces presented are
+the works, in prose and verse, of the Spanish dramatists
+current at home, or occasionally of some native dramatist,
+announced with an extra flourish which his production
+does not usually justify. They are all announced with
+a sufficient flourish, so far as that is concerned. There is
+always going on some especially <i>Gran Funcion</i>, as, for
+example:</p>
+
+<p>“The grand Drama of Customs, Entirely New, in
+three acts and verse, by the distinguished poet, D. Leopoldo
+Cano, author of the precious comedy, ‘La Mariposa,’
+entitled ‘<span class="smcap">La Opinion Publica</span>.’</p>
+
+<p>“This sublime work of the distinguished poet, D. Leopoldo
+Cano,” the bill goes on to say, “was received at
+Madrid with an astounding acclaim. The Spanish Press
+has lavished upon it a thousand eulogies.... In choosing
+it for the second subscription night, we feel that the
+public will know how to value it as it truly merits, and to
+value at the same time the skill of the Company in their
+most finished studies and essays.”</p>
+
+<p>I do not recollect any of this as very novel, or likely to
+be of interest if translated, apart from some portions depending
+upon such a difference of manners and customs
+as to be hardly intelligible to an American audience. My
+acquaintance with the theatre began with a piece at the
+Nacional, called “The First Patient.” There was a young
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>doctor on the stage, and an acquaintance of his had fallen
+in love with his wife, and put a note in her work-basket
+by way of telling her so. The note was conveyed to the
+husband, who, instead of shooting the imprudent writer,
+took occasion presently to assume a look of horror, and
+pretend that the latter had gone blind. Before the Lothario
+could protest, a bandage was clapped over his eyes,
+medicaments given to make him believe in his own misfortune,
+and he was put under a course of onerous treatment.</p>
+
+<p>After a series of absurd situations he was finally released,
+persuaded by degrees that he was cured. The
+patient raised the bandage. “<i>Veo! veo!</i>”—“I see!”—he
+exclaimed, in wild delight.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, then—see that!” said the husband, thrusting
+the offending letter under his nose.</p>
+
+<p>This was amusing enough, but I was quite as much
+amused all the time with the studious efforts of a companion
+who had come with me—the French engineer sent
+out to examine mines, before mentioned—who proposed
+to turn the theatre into a school of languages. He
+grasped at every word a semblance of which he seemed
+to catch, and dived for verifications of it into his grammar
+and dictionary. He resented in his ambition any
+interpretation of passages which he did not himself originate,
+and constructed such a theory of the play as its
+author would by no means have recognized. When the
+<i>dénouement</i> came, in the bold “<i>Veo!</i>” he seized upon it
+with avidity.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>‘Veo,’ c’est bien trouvé ça—‘veo,’</i>” he said, reflectively,
+digesting it at his leisure. “<i>Je vais le retenir ce
+‘veo;’ vous-allez voir.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>And so he did, and proceeded to use it vigorously in
+the restaurants and the like on the following day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span></p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>Though so much more be still proposed, there are certainly
+some reasons for self-complacency in the country
+even from the American point of view. Education is
+found to be provided for in a manner that awakens admiration
+and surprise. The primary schools are least looked
+after, but the pupils who pass through these with a disposition
+to go farther have an array of advantages open to
+them at the capital superior to anything of a parallel sort
+in the United States. The Government maintains national
+schools respectively of engineering, law, medicine,
+agriculture, mechanic arts, and trades (for both sexes), a
+conservatory of music, an academy of fine arts, and a
+library, provided with an edifice that New York well
+might envy. It maintains a museum, institutions for
+blind, deaf and dumb, and insane, for orphans, and young
+criminals, and a long list besides of the usual charities of
+enlightened communities. The schools are open without
+money and without price to all, and there are even funds
+to provide board, lodging, and pocket-money for students
+from a distance, who are selected on certain easy conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The students in agriculture pass some months of the
+year at the haciendas to observe different crops and climates.
+The graduates of the School of Arts and Measures
+go out into the world prepared to make their living
+as carpenters, masons, photographers, electro-platers, and
+at numerous other trades. Before an opinion is passed
+upon Mexican civilization the accommodations and neat
+uniforms of the pupils of the blind institute should be
+seen; the noble building erected in the last century for
+the School of Mines; the beautifully clean, wide corridors,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>sunny class-rooms, embroidery-rooms, dormitories, and
+drawing-rooms of the <i>Viscaynas</i>, the national college for
+girls; and the arcades and charming central garden of
+the National Preparatory School (in the professions) for
+young men.</p>
+
+<p>There was a fountain spouting among tropical plants
+in the garden of the Preparatory School the day I went
+there, and by the fountain was a young panther, or lion,
+of the country, as they call it, confined in a cage. The
+students, young fellows, who did not differ so greatly from
+Yale and Harvard undergraduates in aspect, except for
+the dusky Indian complexions among them, came now
+and then and stirred up the lion a little, making him play
+with a ball in his cage. They seemed to prepare their
+recitations walking around the garden or sitting in the
+ample corridors.</p>
+
+<p>The principal text-books are studied in French or
+English, in which languages they are apt to be written,
+and the recitations are conducted in the same languages;
+so that, what is so rare with us, graduates emerge from
+these schools very tolerable linguists without ever having
+been out of their own country.</p>
+
+<p>All these institutions are housed for the most part in
+the vast ancient convent edifices, which furnish ample
+quarters to whatever is in need of them—to barracks,
+hospitals, post-offices, prisons, railway stations, iron founderies,
+and cotton-mills.</p>
+
+<p>Each state of the republic, again, has its free college.
+Judging from that of the state of Hidalgo, however,
+which I saw at Pachuca—its internal arrangements in a
+very filthy condition—all do not follow very closely the
+example of the capital.</p>
+
+<p>In the department of jails, unhappily, there is a deficiency.
+As at present arranged, they can present but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>moderate terrors to evil-doers. The really fine penitentiary
+at Guadalaxara is the only one in which modern
+ideas of penal discipline are followed. There is by law
+no death penalty at present. The number of nefarious
+criminals is kept down by semi-official lynchings, shooting
+on capture, into which nobody ever inquires. Others
+are transported to Yucatan. There still remain enough,
+however, to make one look with uneasiness on the slightness
+of the means of restraint employed. The bolts and
+bars are often only lattices of wood instead of iron. At
+the city prison of Belen some two thousand persons are
+confined. It seemed to me that a large part of them
+must be much more comfortable than at their own squalid
+homes. They made a strange spectacle indeed, looked
+down upon in their large courts. Of all ages, and for
+sentences of all durations, they eat, sleep, and work at
+various light occupations together. No attempt is made
+to prevent their communicating or staring about. They
+have good air, light, and food, and are allowed a part of
+their own earnings. They take a siesta at noon, play
+checkers, gossip, and even bathe luxuriously in a central
+tank.</p>
+
+<p>The liberality toward education spoken of is the more
+creditable since the Mexican treasury is not flourishing,
+and a yearly deficit is more common than a surplus.
+These expenses appear to be regarded as essential, whatever
+else may suffer. It is the more creditable, too, since
+the heads of the government do not indulge themselves
+in expensive surroundings. The American legislator is
+not himself without his marble colonnades and his furniture
+of black walnut upholstered in Russia leather; but
+President and Cabinet ministers here walk upon threadbare
+carpets in the National Palace. The chamber of the
+Senate is a modest little hall; and the Deputies sit in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>shabby quarters in another part of town, which were once
+simply a place of amusement, the Theatre Iturbide.</p>
+
+<p>The museum, chiefly of Aztec antiquities, to which one
+turns with interest, is not of the extent or informing
+character that may have been expected, and is under by
+no means brilliant management. Its greatest attraction
+is the arrangement of some of the larger fragments, particularly
+the great sacrificial stone from the ancient temple
+of the war-god, in the court-yard. There is a setting
+of shrubbery and vines about them, and the sunlight
+striking in among these upon the gray old remains, produces
+some charming effects.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="X">X.<br>
+<i>THE FINE ARTS AND LITERATURE.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The school of fine arts, on the other hand, the Academy
+of San Carlos—which was to celebrate with a special
+exhibition the one hundredth anniversary of its foundation—produces,
+both in its collections and the ability of
+its directing professors, a most satisfactory and agreeable
+impression. You enter galleries which carry you back
+again to the Louvre and Uffizi. They used a great deal
+of bitumen, the old painters here. In its darkening it
+has left now and then only isolated lights upon a face or
+bits of drapery to glimmer out of a midnight gloom. It
+is an artificial taste, no doubt, to like it, and “caviare to
+the general;” but like it one does, at its most artificial,
+after a long absence from anything of the kind.</p>
+
+<p>The walls recall such galleries as that of Bologna in
+the liberal scale of the works displayed. With such
+models before them, there is no reason why students
+should fall into a niggling and petty style. As a matter
+of fact, they do not. They seem to excel in a bold, large
+composition and the rendering of grandiose ideas. This,
+rather than color, is their strong point. If our New York
+schools of art are able to equal the portfolio of drawings
+I saw as the result of a fortnightly exercise, they are certainly
+not in the habit of doing so. Nor were they at all
+equalled by those of the prize competition of the students
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>of the British Royal Academy which I saw in the first
+year of the presidency of Sir Frederick Leighton. This
+devotion to large academical ideas—the fortunes of Orestes,
+Regulus, and Belisarius—it is true, is a source of
+weakness rather than strength from the money point of
+view. The market of the time demands a domestic,
+<i>genre</i>, realistic, and not a grandiose art. The market for
+art of any kind in Mexico is extremely small. There are
+no government commissions farther than an occasional
+portrait or two, and enlightened patrons hardly exist.
+There are no pictures of consequence in the best Mexican
+houses. The predictions at Havana were not verified.
+The abundance of native talent receives little encouragement.
+Many a bright genius is forced to paint
+his inventions on the walls of <i>pulque</i> shops, and finally
+to quit the profession for lack of support.</p>
+
+<p>The subjects are, for the most part, severely religious,
+in consonance with the taste of the wealthy convents, the
+patrons of art for whom they were originally painted.
+The series is in a declining order of merit chronologically.
+The earliest Mexican masters are the best. They
+came from Europe, contemporaries of Murillo, Ribera, the
+Caracci, trained in the splendid Renaissance period at its
+acme, and they left here works which do it no discredit.
+Mexico was a hundred years old already, and it was high
+time that art should arise when Baltazar Echave began,
+somewhat after the year 1600. There is a romantic tradition
+that it was his wife who first taught him to paint.</p>
+
+<p>The genius of this early school is very decorative, and
+marked at once by refinement of sentiment, breadth, and
+vigor. It delights in rich stuffs and patterns, in the
+glitter of plate and weapons. It fills up all portions of
+the canvas symmetrically, and colors with a subdued
+richness. I recall a St. Ildefonso, by Luis Juarez, as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>an exquisite work. The saint, in a rich red mantle, by
+a praying-desk and chair, both draped in the same color,
+is receiving from angels the paraphernalia of a bishop.
+The mantle of the nearest angel is in burnt sienna, and
+these warm red hues, relieved by cool whites, are repeated
+throughout. There is a group of six angel heads composed
+in an ellipse, and, in the air, a Virgin, with that
+bevy of fluttering angels about that take the place of
+clouds in landscape. The minor heads, painted chiefly
+from the same model, are full of sweetness and intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Arteaga has a noble St. Thomas; José Juarez, a quaint
+couple of child martyrs, Saints Justo and Pastor, who
+trudge along hand-in-hand like a pair of burgomaster’s
+children (the scenes of their martyrdom shown in the
+background), while angels rain down upon them single
+pinks, roses, and forget-me-nots, carefully painted. A
+younger Baltazar Echave, and Juan and Nicolas Rodriguez,
+are of almost equal force.</p>
+
+<p>A second period begins with Ibarra and Cabrera—the
+latter very much the better—at the end of the same century.
+They are without the same distinction. Their
+figures have a bourgeois air. They aim to be pictorial
+instead of decorative. The crude red and blue garments
+with which we are monotonously familiar in religious art
+come in with them; and the draperies, in smooth, large
+folds, are apparently made up out of their heads.</p>
+
+<p>The foreign gallery boasts many excellent works of the
+school of Murillo, and an original each of Murillo, Ribera,
+Carreño, Leonardo da Vinci, Teniers the elder, and
+Ingres, with also probable Vandycks and Rembrandts.</p>
+
+<p>A collection has also been formed of works of merit,
+contributed to the regular biennial exhibitions, and purchased
+by the Academy to illustrate modern Mexican<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>
+art. The religious tradition still prevails to a large extent,
+though the subjects are now taken from the Scriptures
+instead of the Bollandists. They are Hagar and Ishmael,
+the good Samaritan, the Hebrews by the waters of Babylon,
+and Noah receiving the olive-branch, and the like.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus026" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus026.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE DEATH OF ATALA. [By Luis Monroy.]</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is in this contemporary work the general fault
+of an over-delicacy and smoothness of painting, and a lack
+of realism, while the design is excellent. These voyagers
+in the ark have not experienced the woes of a deluge,
+and the shepherds have the complexion of Lady Vere de
+Vere. Rebull, who studied at Rome under Overbeck,
+repeats here the dove-colors, violets, and lemon-yellows
+of the modern decorations of the Vatican done under
+that school.</p>
+
+<p>The works of the latest period, under the able direction
+of Señor Salome Pina, a pupil of Gleyre, are much
+more virile, and the subjects more secular. We have
+now Bacchus and Ariadne; the death of Atala; the slaying
+of the sons of Niobe; an arch and dainty Cupid poisoning
+a flower, by Ocaranza; a charming fisher-boy, by
+Gutierrez. Some of the artists have had the advantage
+of study also abroad. The strongest of them all, Felix
+Parra, now enjoying a grand prize of Rome, produced
+the masterpiece, a great canvas representing the friar
+Las Casas protecting the Aztecs (from slaughter by the
+Spaniards)—a work in sentiment, drawing, and color
+worthy to hang in any exhibition in the world—before
+he had seen any other country than his own.</p>
+
+<p>Velasco has set a powerful lead in landscape. He is
+especially a master of great distance. His favorite theme
+is the curious, sienna-colored Valley of Mexico, which he
+paints to the life.</p>
+
+<p>There are some scattered works of the early school,
+besides, in the houses of a few <i>dilettanti</i> at the capital
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>and Puebla; and some few in the cathedrals of the same
+places, though scarcely to be seen, from their disadvantageous
+positions. Good pictures need not be looked for
+in the churches. No doubt they were once numerous,
+but they have been sacked from the country by invaders
+and others, and found a profitable market abroad.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>In sculpture there is talent corresponding to that in
+painting. The stately system of burial, in the <i>panteons</i>,
+lends itself to sculpture and furnishes opportunities which
+with us are relegated to the commonplace tombstone-makers.
+The <i>panteon</i> is a solid city of the dead, walled
+in, paved, and with courts and arcades like a city of the
+living. The monument of greatest note is that, by Manuel
+Islas, at the Pantheon of San Fernando, to Benito
+Juarez, “the second Washington” of his country, old
+Padre Hidalgo having been the first. His effigy in
+marble, so realistic and corpse-like that it seems to have
+been modelled from an actual cast in plaster, lies upon
+a mausoleum, with a figure of Fame bending over it.
+The realism of the principal figure is almost repulsive,
+but it is redeemed by the grace of the angel, and nobody
+can deny to this large work great vigor and dignity.</p>
+
+<p>The bodies are not buried, but sealed up in mausolea,
+or in niches in a wall, which present somewhat the aspect
+of a Roman columbarium. Some of the monuments are
+of the lovely Mexican onyx, with letters in gilt. I noted
+one bearing only the initials M. M. They were alluring
+to the curiosity, and on inquiring I found that it was that
+of Miramon, general-in-chief of Maximilian, who fell by
+the executioners’ bullets, with his master, and General
+Mejia, at Queretero.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span></p>
+
+<p>There were no flowers on this one to-day, but the
+tombs of the patriots were elaborately decked, for it was
+the great festival of the Cinco de Mayo.</p>
+
+<p>I walked out and stood in the round-point by the
+colossal bronze statue of Charles IV. The Paseo de la
+Reforma and the causeways glittered with bayonets; the
+cadets were coming down from the Military School back
+of Chapultepec, and the garrison from the Citadel, to join
+in the procession. The troops were reviewed in front of
+the National Palace—as troops in smaller numbers seem
+always being reviewed there. They are mainly of Indian
+blood, and small in stature. The cavalry especially had
+a rusty look in their outfit, and did not compare with the
+dashing <i>Rurales</i>. The officers, on the other hand, are
+trimly uniformed and quite French in aspect. There
+were patriotic speeches in the Zocalo; the main thoroughfare
+was strung with lanterns; and our Iturbide hotel was
+very picturesque, with its three tiers of balconies draped
+in the national colors—green, white, and red.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time, as the procession moved, cannon
+were fired in the Plaza, and the bells of the cathedral
+turned over and over, like the wheels of machinery. I
+never saw a better-conducted crowd. There was no fighting,
+no inconvenient elbowing, no drunkenness. In the
+evening the lanterns were lighted, and the great square
+was filled with venders of fruits and knick-knacks, around
+little bonfires of sticks, where they would bivouac for the
+night. Later, red lights were kindled in the towers of
+the cathedral, and every detail within stood out upon a
+lurid ground as if they were burning. One could imagine
+the camped venders in the square to be the ancient
+Aztecs resting upon their arms, in order to attack Cortez
+in his quarters on the morrow.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Scarcely the same improvement is to be got from Mexican
+literature as from Mexican art, but it is not without
+its interest, both in itself and as an aid to knowledge of
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>Journals are very numerous. They are started upon
+slight provocation, and as easily disappear. They attain,
+as a rule, but a circulation of a few hundred copies. It
+is thought that the <i>Monitor Republicano</i>, by far the most
+important, may circulate from six to eight thousand. The
+problem of existence for many of them would be difficult
+without government aid. Subventions are given,
+without public objection, so far as I have observed, to
+the greater part of those managed with ability. The
+system of subventions to the press was begun by our old
+friend of school history, Santa Anna, and has been continued
+ever since by governments which could not afford
+to have anything more than the truth told about them,
+at any rate. It is an encouraging sign, however, that the
+<i>Monitor</i> is not a subventioned organ, yet speaks its mind
+temperately and without apparent malice.</p>
+
+<p>There is no efficacious law of libel, since extreme violence
+of language is often indulged in by the periodicals
+in their controversies with each other and outsiders. The
+duel, which still survives, is somewhat of a corrective
+upon this. The newspaper is about such a one in appearance
+as at Paris, and includes a daily section of a serial
+story. A Sunday edition is published, with literary selections,
+and particularly poems, in large supply.</p>
+
+<p>Actual literature as such is poorly paid. The reading
+public is small. A thousand copies is a good edition even
+for a popular book. The chief literary lights are found,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>as a rule, not of the shy, scholastic order, but possessed of
+talent for oratory and bustling affairs. They take posts
+in Congress, and are appointed as cabinet ministers.
+General Riva Palacio, Juan Mateos, Prieto, Paz, Altimirano,
+Justo Sierra, Peza, are deputies; Payno, a senator;
+Cuellar, who wrote under the pseudonym of “Facundo,” a
+secretary of legation. These are the native writers whose
+works are more frequently in the hands of the public
+than any others.</p>
+
+<p>Prieto, who is chiefly a poet, however, has written a
+book of his travels in the United States, in which some
+amusing things will be discovered. He finds that with
+us “the totality [<i>lo colectivo</i>] is grand and admirable, but
+the individual egoistic and vulgar.” He saw Booth’s
+Theatre, which is all of white marble (<i>el Teatro de Both,
+todo de marmol blanco</i>); and, besides our hotels, the establishment
+which we call a “Boarding” (<i>el Boarding</i>).
+The Hudson and East rivers, he says, are two arms of the
+sea, which freeze in winter, and even the immense quantity
+of ice collected from these does not suffice for the
+demands of the summer.</p>
+
+<p>The poetical talent, of which we had a premonition in
+Cuba, is that which principally abounds. There is plentiful
+skill in versifying, with here and there a strain
+of something very much higher, in the volumes of the
+numerous authors. Prieto, above-mentioned, is found
+principally a poet of “occasions.” He writes for the
+unveiling of statues, to steam, electricity, and the like.
+Juan Mateos strikes a fierce patriotic note. Altimirano,
+a fiery Indian orator, who models himself in Congress
+rather after Mirabeau, chooses as his themes for poetry
+bees, oranges, poppies, morn, the pleasures of rural life.
+They are excellent subjects in themselves, but it is an
+artificial, and not a real, existence he describes. He
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>would like to be Horatian, summons nymphs to disport
+with him in the shade, and abounds in florid terms, without
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>Carpio is inspired more or less by Biblical subjects, as
+Pharaoh and Belshazzar. In De Castro, Zaragoza, Gustave
+Baz, and Cuenca are found charming conceits, of
+pensive cast, and bits of description of a limpid purity.
+Jewellers in words they may be called at their best, affiliated
+to the Venetian school.</p>
+
+<p>The argument of Zaragoza’s “Armonias” (Harmonies)
+is briefly as follows: “When the flowers are dead, and
+spring is over, the swallows take their flight; and when
+again the flowers of spring adorn the mead, they, too,
+return, bringing blessings on their wings.</p>
+
+<p>“But when the illusions depart and leave behind them
+only the thorns of the passions, in vain we invoke and
+wait for them to return. The illusions, the swallows of
+the heart, return, alas! never.”</p>
+
+<p>So Gustave Baz, brooding in the sere winter over some
+heavy sorrow, reflects upon the return of spring. But
+the very contrast of its joyousness, the fresh rippling of
+the brooks and melody of the birds, will but render his
+sadness the heavier. “Then most keenly,” he laments,
+“will break forth my grief. Then weightiest will the
+air be laden with my sighs.”</p>
+
+<p>The gem of the Lyra Mexicana is undoubtedly a certain
+fugitive sonnet, “A Rosario,” by an unfortunate
+young man, Acuña, who ended by taking his own life.
+The poem expresses the charming ideals in love and the
+bitterness of its disappointment, in a youth of fine and
+sensitive nature. It has a poignancy and realism which
+have, perhaps, never been surpassed. He returned from
+a long journey, as the story is told, and found his betrothed
+the wife of another. The shock proving unendurable,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>he committed suicide, leaving to the faithless
+one the poem, a part of which may be thus rendered:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, I have to say that I love you still, that I
+worship you with all my being. I comprehend that your
+kisses are never to be mine, that into your dear eyes I am
+never to look.... Sometimes I try to sink you into oblivion,
+to execrate you.... But alas, how vain it is! my
+soul will not forget you. What will you, then, that I
+should do, oh, part of my life? What will you that I
+should do with such a heart?... Oh, figure to yourself
+how beautiful might have been our existence together!...
+But now that to the entrancing dream succeeds the
+black gulf that has opened between us—farewell! love
+of my loves, light of my darkness, perfume of all flowers
+that bloomed for me! my poet’s lyre, my youth, farewell!”</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>If one try to select the most obvious trait in the native
+fiction it is undoubtedly patriotism. This patriotism
+is rampant in the press, and in the forms of official life.
+The authorities are Citizen President, Citizen General,
+and the like, as in the first French Republic, and they
+conclude their official documents with the formula:
+“Liberty In The Constitution.” The usurpation of
+Maximilian served to bind the country into a certain
+unity and awake this feeling to its utmost.</p>
+
+<p>Two romancers, General Riva Palacio, and Juan Mateos,
+have made use of the events of the French invasion
+in a curious class of bulky novels, to call them so,
+which have scored a popular success. “The Hill of Las
+Campañas,” and “The Sun of May,” of Mateos, are respectively
+more or less authentic accounts of the final
+defeat and execution of Maximilian, and the defence of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>Puebla, slightly disguised. The “Calvary and Tabor,”
+Riva Palacio, treats of the career of the Army of the
+Centre in the same wars. Numbers of the characters
+therefore are persons actually living, to be met with
+every day, which gives to this fiction a singular effect.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in “El Sol de Mayo,” Manuel Payno, Altimirano,
+and Riva Palacio himself are mentioned and their
+manners described in the debate on the financial measure
+which brought on the Intervention. Lerdo, long since an
+exile, resident in New York, was at that time “<i>el profeta
+inspirada de nuestra nacionalidad</i>” (the inspired
+prophet of our nationality).</p>
+
+<p>I pick out from the same book this paragraphic mention
+of our own civil war: “And Edmundo Lee shone
+like a star in the victories of Springfield and Bull Run.”
+Perhaps the friends of General Robert E. Lee would
+have some difficulty in recognizing him under such a
+description.</p>
+
+<p>These novels are printed with each sentence as a separate
+paragraph, for easier reading. They first began to
+rival somewhat the popular Fernandez y Gonzalez, by
+some called “the Spanish Dumas,” whose works are
+printed in the journals, together with translations of those
+of Gaboriau and Dickens. Another flimsy series, in
+covers of green, white, and red, called “<i>Episodios Nacionales</i>,”
+aim to sugar-coat a didactic exhibition of the
+events of the War of Independence. One individual
+after another tells a long, dreary narrative about what
+happened; these fall in with somebody else who tells
+more, and so it goes.</p>
+
+<p>These stories are read chiefly by the middle and lower
+classes, the upper class, as in most provincial states of society,
+preferring books from abroad. Their favorable
+reception may be accounted for in part by the lack of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>regular histories and of newspaper intelligence, so that
+the populace may to some extent be getting their information
+for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>Riva Palacio has written also, with Manuel Payno, a
+large work appropriately called <i>El Libro Rojo</i> (The Red
+Book). It gives an account (and graphic illustrations)
+of the heroes and other notables in Mexican history who
+have come to violent ends. This is a fate that has overtaken
+aspirants to distinction quite regularly, and the
+plates from the book, hung up at the book-stalls in the
+Portales, are a ghastly chamber of horrors. The three
+fighting curates of the early insurrection, Hidalgo, Morelos,
+and Matamoras begin the series; and Maximilian,
+Mejia, and Miramon, standing with bandaged eyes at the
+Hill of las Campañas, for the present conclude it.</p>
+
+<p>Several minor writers have feebly essayed the Aztec
+material for fiction. Riva Palacio has availed himself
+also of the picturesque life under the Spanish viceroys.
+Of him it is to be said that, though of the sensational
+school, and careless in plan, he has, not unfrequently,
+passages of genuine force, and unhackneyed incidents
+that enchain the attention.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI.<br>
+<i>SOME TRAITS OF PECULIAR HISTORY, AND THE MEXICAN “WARWICK.”</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>It would seem that history in Mexico might be a somewhat
+confusing study; and so, in fact, it is. There have
+been fifty-four Presidents, one regency, and one Emperor,
+in fifty-six years, and a violent change of government
+with nearly every one.</p>
+
+<p>Picking up the little volume by Manuel Payno, used
+in the schools, and opening it at random, I find—</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Question.</i>—What events followed?</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Answer.</i>—Truly imagination is lost, and memory confounds
+itself, among so many plans and <i>pronunciamentos</i>;
+but we will follow the thread as best we can.”</p>
+
+<p>The period referred to is that of the revolt of Texas,
+which proceeded to constitute itself “The Lone Star Republic.”
+Looking a little farther with interest to see how
+this is accounted for, we find:</p>
+
+<p>“The settlers were North Americans, a portion, as we
+have said, colonized by Stephen Austin. They set up
+the pretext that they were not permitted to sell their
+lands, and, later, that the Federal Constitution had been
+violated; and they rose against the Government. The
+latter felt it necessary to put down the rebellion, and
+took measures to assail that remote and sterile State.”</p>
+
+<p>These dispositions, as we know, ended in the defeat and
+capture of Santa Anna at San Jacinto. There is always a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>fascination in being behind the scenes, and I confess that
+this little opportunity of finding out what was thought
+of itself by a country which has jarred so much with our
+own was one of the attractions of being in Mexico. The
+American war is accounted for as a wicked attempt to
+sustain and annex the revolted province of Texas; and
+equally good solutions are found for the various other
+invasions by foreign powers.</p>
+
+<p>What! is there no absolute right? Are all combatants
+alike striking for their altars and their fires, and resisting
+wanton aggression? Will not these Mexicans even yet
+admit, though beaten, and though it has passed into history,
+that they terrorized our frontier, and oppressed an
+industrious and enterprising province? Why, then, perhaps
+both sides were wrong; and let us aspire for the
+day when all such quarrels may be settled by an international
+arbitration.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>The young Mexican learns first about his Aztec ancestry,
+the mild semi-civilized aborigines, who built cities
+and temples, and were ruled by luxurious Montezuma and
+scholarly Nezhualcoyotl. The latter, at Texcoco, was a
+maker of verses and stoical maxims like another Marcus
+Aurelius.</p>
+
+<p>Cortez conquered the Aztecs in 1519. Then followed
+a government of nearly three hundred years by sixty-four
+Spanish viceroys. A rebellion, of eleven years’ duration,
+marked by many of the features of a servile uprising,
+drove out the Spaniards in 1821. Grasping and inconsiderate
+in their colonial management as their way has
+always been, the Spaniards had probably only themselves
+to thank for it.</p>
+
+<p>Iturbide, who commanded the revolt at the end, made
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>himself briefly Emperor. His generals, notably the irrepressible
+Santa Anna, who first here comes into view,
+rose against him, and proclaimed a Federal Republic.
+Santa Anna, when the opportunity offered, made himself
+Dictator, and changed the Federal Republic to a centralized
+republic, and the states to departments. Santa
+Anna had numberless ups and downs, having obtained
+possession of the supreme power no less than six times,
+with intervals of overthrow and banishment.</p>
+
+<p>The Federal Republic was reconstituted in time, with
+twenty-seven states, one territory and a federal district,
+pretty much on the model of our own, and it still retains
+this form, as it is likely to. There is no doubt
+about the democratic tendency of the people, but perhaps
+it is something in the impulsive blood of the Latin race
+which has prevented the leaders from conceiving a republic
+on the Anglo-Saxon plan. They have been inspired
+almost without exception by a craving for the sweets of
+power. Their rampant patriotism has been like the religion
+of those persons who would die for a cause, but will
+not live in accordance with the least of its dictates. There
+seems to have been no conception until lately of that
+larger patriotism which educates the people in their duties,
+and constitutes a state of society where the rights of
+all are guaranteed and people go about their avocations
+without interference.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Would you recall, by-the-way, what became of Santa
+Anna? He, who had so indignantly shaken off the yoke
+of Iturbide, wrote a missive of congratulation, while living
+in banishment in the West Indies, to Maximilian, and
+endeavored to take service under him. His aid was rejected,
+whereupon he turned to Juarez, only to be repulsed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>again. In a rage at both sides, he fitted out an
+expedition on his own account, landed in the country, and
+was well-nigh being shot, after the model, and almost on
+the same ground, as that Iturbide whom he had pronounced
+against forty-two years before. The court-martial,
+however, spared his life, “in consideration of the
+ancient services done to his country in Texas, at Tampico,
+and Vera Cruz,” and sent him again, superannuated
+and poor (for he had squandered an ample fortune in this
+attempt), to finish his days in banishment.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot forbear going a little farther into the questions
+and answers of the little history. Of the gallant
+generals who fought so well for the Independence, Victoria
+was the first President. Bravo pronounced against
+him, and was exiled to South America. Guerrero, defeated
+as a candidate for the succession by Pedraza, took
+up arms and seized it by force. He repelled, while in
+office, a new attempt by the Spaniards to recover the
+country.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Question.</i>—I suppose that with this triumph the government
+of Guerrero was firmly established?</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Answer.</i>—This was to have been hoped, but that
+happened which always happens in Mexico—just the
+contrary.”</p>
+
+<p>Bustamente, in fact, pronounced against Guerrero; and
+when the latter would have returned to the capital from
+an expedition designed to put down the revolt, he found
+it closed against him, and in favor of Bustamente also.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Q.</i>—What end had this revolution?</p>
+
+<p>“<i>A.</i>—The most terrible that can be imagined. The
+Government at Mexico, feeling that it could not overcome
+Guerrero ... bought over, for $70,000, a Genoese
+named Picaluga, who commanded a vessel anchored
+in the harbor of Acapulco. Picaluga invited Guerrero
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>to dine on board, and this manifestation of hospitality
+was accepted in good faith. When they had dined the
+Genoese signified to Guerrero that he was a prisoner, and
+set sail with him to the port of Huatulco and delivered
+him into the hands of his enemies. This great and
+good man, valiant and worthy of the respect and gratitude
+of the nation ... was shot in the puebla of Cuilapa,
+on the 15th of February, 1831.”</p>
+
+<p>It was not till 1848, for the first time, that the
+Presidency was transferred without violence, and under
+the law. The incumbent was General Herrera, and he
+was succeeded peaceably by General Arista. These two
+administrations “will forever place themselves before
+historians, both Mexican and foreign,” says the history,
+“as models of honor, economy, and order.” But Arista
+was deposed in two years, and in the next three months
+there were four Presidents, the last of them Santa Anna,
+on one of his periodic returns.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the turmoil of revolutions has continued down
+to recent times. A certain Don José Maria Gutierrez
+Estrada directed a letter to the authorities in 1840, proposing,
+as a measure of relief, that a monarchical government
+should be established in Mexico; and the idea, in
+the distracting state of things we have seen, cannot be
+considered wholly without reason. It caused great scandal
+nevertheless, but Gutierrez Estrada stuck to it tenaciously,
+and, by a very singular coincidence, he was one
+of those who, twenty-four years after, went to Miramar
+to present the imperial crown to the Archduke Maximilian.</p>
+
+<p>If I cite a number of such events from the past it is
+not for the purpose of being disagreeable or arguing
+that the same state of things is to last. It is partly
+because they are amusing, and partly to obtain a more
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>encouraging point of view for the present. It will be
+seen that the later administrations, though not without
+their faults, are a vast improvement upon their predecessors,
+and do not constitute a declining ratio.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="illus027" style="max-width: 20.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus027.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ, EX-PRESIDENT OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>General Porfirio Diaz occupied unmolested a full term,
+from 1876 to 1880, and handed over the place to General
+Manuel Gonzales, who holds it at present in the same
+security. Diaz began the current career of improvement
+by his liberal chartering of railroads, and Gonzales follows
+in his track. Both must be considered to have
+made a most exemplary and promising use of their
+powers. But, since we have arrived at “Don Porfirio,”
+let us see how he entered upon office in the beginning.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span></p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>Since he is, by general admission, the power behind the
+throne, the Mexican “Warwick,” the President who has
+been, is, and is to be, let us inquire a little also who he
+was. “His influence in the country,” says the <i>Monitor</i>,
+“is decisive, incontestable. Something more than Benitez
+in the past, he is not only the great commoner, but
+the one man of the present.”</p>
+
+<p>Porfirio Diaz was born in Oaxaca, in 1830. His family
+destined him for the law, but he took to soldiering instead.
+Beginning as a private, he entered the city of
+Mexico as general-in-chief of the forces which wrested it
+from the French. Once in these wars, when a prisoner
+at Puebla, he let himself down by a rope from a tower
+and made his escape. His career is studded with romantic
+incidents, but the career of what Mexican leader
+is not?</p>
+
+<p>The Latin race admires the military type, and “Don
+Porfirio,” or more familiarly “Porfirio,” as the people delight
+to call him, bethought him to turn his prestige in
+the field to account. He offered himself for the Presidency
+against Juarez, on the platform of no re-election,
+in 1871. Lerdo de Tejada, Chief Justice of the Supreme
+Court, was also in the field as a third candidate. Let the
+figures in this remarkable election be noted, as an indication
+of the acute interest the Mexican voters take in their
+own balloting. In a population of 8,836,411 a total of
+only 12,361 votes were cast. Juarez received 5837, Diaz
+3555, Lerdo 2874, and 95 are recorded as “scattering.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Q.</i>—Relate to me what happened thereafter.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>A.</i>—General Porfirio Diaz issued, from his hacienda
+of La Noria, a manifesto, hence called the <i>Plan of La
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>Noria</i>, repudiating the existing powers, and proposing to
+retain military command until the establishment of a new
+order of things.”</p>
+
+<p>A bloody war of more than a year followed, in which
+the Porfiristas were utterly routed. Diaz, amnestied, presented
+himself at the capital, and was affably received
+by Lerdo, who assured him, on the part of the Government,
+that he might live tranquil without fear of persecution
+or harm. “Nothing,” breaks forth our historian,
+in enthusiasm about these times, “gives a better idea of
+the constancy and elevation of the Mexican character, a
+heritage from its Spanish ancestry, than what passes in
+our wars, both civil and foreign. It appears that defeats
+but serve as stimulus and fresh aliment to the fray.”</p>
+
+<p>Upon what possible theory these ambitious chiefs have
+always made their partisans so ready to be slaughtered for
+them, is a speculation which I shall not go into. Porfirio
+now remained quiet till 1876, when he issued the <i>Plan of
+Palo Blanco</i>, and rose against Lerdo, who had succeeded
+Juarez. He captured Matamoras by a bold stroke of
+strategy; was himself captured on shipboard; and escaped
+from the Lerdists by leaping into the sea, through
+the connivance of the French captain, whom he afterward
+made consul to St. Nazaire. After a series of such-like
+adventures his persistence won the day, and Lerdo
+took to flight. “Don Sebastian” Lerdo is spoken of as
+probably the most scholarly and accomplished President
+the republic ever had. He had been a school-master,
+however, and tried to govern the country in the pedagogue
+spirit to which he had been used. He lost favor,
+too, by his lack of military talent, and fled when his fortunes
+were by no means desperate. The country people
+were strongly on his side at first, but this singular thing
+happened—that, finding him unable to protect them
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>against the roving bands of revolutionists favoring Diaz,
+they joined them in disgust, and went on with them to
+the capital.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon such original guarantees that the authority
+which Porfirio has devoted to the extension of law and
+order and the benefits of civilization reposes.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>The subject of these remarks is a person neither talkative
+nor taciturn. He is of commanding height, a
+swarthy, half-Indian complexion, a figure stalwart but
+not heavy, and of a military yet somewhat nonchalant
+bearing, all of which may form a part of his attraction.
+He knows how to utilize the arts of peace as well as
+war. Perhaps he believes a little in the motto, “Let me
+make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its
+laws;” for the ballad-singers at Santa Anita, on the Viga
+Canal, whither the populace swarm on Sundays to indulge
+in dancing, <i>pulque</i>, <i>tamales</i>, and flowers from the floating
+gardens, have many a long-drawn refrain to the praises of
+Don Porfirio Di-i-i-az. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to suggest
+that these are subsidized, since they may rest upon
+pure admiration of his merits, after all.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican law prohibits re-election, except after an
+interval of four years, and Porfirio Diaz was too ardent
+a one-termer to be able to overstep this prohibition with
+any consistency. He has placed his friend and fellow-soldier
+Gonzales in office as his <i>locum tenens</i>. He will
+assume it himself for the next term, dating from 1884.
+After that—so the plan is supposed to be arranged—he
+will give it to General Treviño, his companion in arms
+and strong auxiliary in his pronunciamentos. Treviño
+has married the daughter of an American general, Ord,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>and it may be supposed that American interests will not
+suffer in his hands.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="illus028" style="max-width: 20.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus028.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>GENERAL MANUEL GONZALES, PRESIDENT OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Porfirio is romantic even in his Machiavellianism.
+The only source from which he might have had anything
+to fear was perhaps a lingering Lerdist sentiment.
+It represents, or represented, a conservative element, of
+better social position than the rude democratic force in
+power. He set to work to conciliate this Lerdist sentiment.
+He has been able to take of late the effectual
+means of marrying into the very midst of it, having
+chosen for his third wife the daughter of Senator Romero
+Rubio. Romero Rubio was the right-hand man of
+Lerdo, and his companion in exile. He is now president
+of the Senate, and the official who is empowered by law
+to call and control a new election, in case of a vacancy in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>the Presidency of the nation. Gonzales suffers from an
+old wound, received at Puebla, and it has been thought
+by some that Diaz might need to be called to the chair
+even before the appointed limit of time.</p>
+
+<p>Nor could he have had any personal repugnance to
+overcome in this match. His usual good-fortune attends
+him. The young lady is under twenty, accomplished,
+and of a high-bred air. She will be recollected by Americans
+as among the prettiest of the belles who took part
+in the round of festivities given in honor of General
+Grant at his last visit. This, too, will be pleasing to the
+people. Don Porfirio means that the people shall be
+pleased. When General Grant, on his first visit to the
+country in his tour around the world, was the curiosity
+and hero of the hour, Porfirio was his inseparable attendant
+and courteous host. A certain resemblance was
+traced between them. Both had been illustrious generals,
+both presidents. When Grant returned a second
+time, and was now less popular, on account of his interest
+in the railway concessions, and a jealousy which had
+meantime arisen of American aggression, Don Porfirio
+was unfortunately obliged to be far distant, distributing
+charity to sufferers on the northern confines of the republic.</p>
+
+<p>The work of conciliation has long been going on. Old
+functionaries have been reinstated in place; veteran army
+officers have been approached and offered new commands.
+One of these latter told me that President Gonzales had
+sent for him, after having kept an espionage on his conduct
+for some time, and asked him, in a bluff way,</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you continue to talk against the Government,
+and pass your time in idleness—you who were
+once so good a soldier?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sir,” he replied, “you know my sentiments, and the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>cause for which I fought. I cannot deny that I hold
+them still. I take the consequences. I have pawned
+my valuables and clothing for food. If I rust in idleness
+it is because I have no occupation to turn to.”</p>
+
+<p>“I admire your manliness,” the President replied.
+“Here is your appointment to the command of a regiment.
+Your cause is dead, as you know, and cannot be
+revived. I ask of you no political services. I ask of
+you only to be as before—a soldier.”</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to say that after this there was at least
+one Lerdist the less.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to be understood as finding fault with
+this policy of astute conciliation; far from it. The hammer-and-tongs
+method has been so long in vogue that it
+is a delightful relief. The chicanery of matrimonial alliances,
+and assumption of frank and soldierly manners,
+will be welcomed by all the foreign capital in the country
+as a great improvement upon throat-cutting.</p>
+
+<p>From vast estates in Oaxaca, which with a commendable
+economy he has amassed meantime, the Mexican
+Warwick, controls the destinies of his country with an
+ease like moving one’s little finger. He pleases himself
+in the interim to be governor, and commander of the
+forces, of this fighting state. In the absence of any
+efficient electoral system the country is under his absolute
+dictatorship; while, with the ostensible division of
+powers, there is no way of tracing the responsibility to
+its source.</p>
+
+<p>Not that there is the least danger of anybody’s trying
+to do so. There are apparent Brutuses in both Houses
+of Congress, orators and poets who have turned off many
+a diatribe and many an ode to freedom on the best classic
+and French republican models, but they have nothing to
+say against this Cæsar. They are not very free agents,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>to tell the truth. They are really sent by the governors
+of the respective states, and these governors have been
+manipulated in advance. Porfirio can undoubtedly make
+threats as well as promises; and an unlucky representative,
+if content to forego a better place, may even lose
+the one he has. He cannot depend upon adequate support,
+either, should he have a notion to resist. The
+“boys” are much given to “going back” on one another
+in Mexican history.</p>
+
+<p>I shall be found fault with by some persons, as likely
+as not, for undue severity. He is a beneficent Cæsar,
+after all, compared with former times; he has brought
+back something like a Golden Age; he oppresses nobody,
+at least, not the foreigners, and gives a stimulus to every
+worthy enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>So be it; and probably there is no more genial government
+than a Cæsarism of the beneficent sort, fairly
+established. But it is too full of dangers. Porfirio is
+doing nothing to educate the nation. “In effect,” one
+of his own papers says to him, “it is not alone with railways
+that a nation so disorganized as ours can reconstitute
+itself; not alone the locomotive and the telegraph
+that can make us happy. There should emanate from
+the regions of power something like an impulse of obedience
+to the law and observance of the institutions upon
+which the social and political well-being of the country
+rests.”</p>
+
+<p>It is not probable that there will soon again be serious
+disturbances. “All the grabbers have got places,” say
+some critics of a cynical turn, “and there will be no more
+revolutions.” A better saying, however, is current: “A
+bad government is preferable to a good revolution.”
+There is a weariness of fighting. The country seems to
+savor the little-known luxury of peace with a positive
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>gusto. The railways diminish the chance of trouble by
+for the first time furnishing ample employment to the
+idle, who formerly occupied themselves in plunder and
+were ready to follow the banners of insurgent chiefs.
+They will be a potent military engine in enabling the
+Government to mass its forces at points of danger. The
+fear, too, may be present of interference by foreign governments,
+should the enterprises of their citizens be
+threatened with serious damage by new upheavals.</p>
+
+<p>Still, there are great administrative abuses. The civil
+service is notoriously corrupt. Opportunities for galling
+oppression are open to the governments, both federal
+and state, and, most ominous of trouble, redress by the
+ballot is not possible. The anomaly is presented of a
+republic in which there is no census nor registration of
+voters, no scrutiny of the ballot-box except by the party
+in power. There is hardly a ray of interest in the political
+machine by the people themselves. The number of
+votes cast at elections is pitifully small, as we have seen.
+It is not considered worth while to vote. The lower
+classes read no informing journals, have no public speakers.
+No organized opposition exists. Such opposition
+as there is is purely personal. All contests for office are
+personal, and not a matter of principles. The Government—that
+of the centre influencing the states, and these
+in turn the communities—sustains and counts in what
+candidates it pleases. There are no data for objection,
+since nobody can point to the real number of voters in
+a given place, nor their names.</p>
+
+<p>When this is understood it seems to account for almost
+all that has happened. There is absolutely no remedy
+for oppressive domination but in rebellion. With the
+best of dispositions, the most entire patience, what has
+happened in the past may happen again.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span></p>
+
+<p>If there be any statesmanship in Mexico, may we not
+hope to see some champion arise to remedy this, instruct
+the masses in their rights, enumerate and register them,
+and insure them the first essential of a free government—an
+accurate and unfettered suffrage?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII.<br>
+<i>CUATITLAN, AND AROUND LAKES XOCHIMILCO AND CHALCO.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The saying is current that “Outside of Mexico all is
+Cuatitlan.”</p>
+
+<p>It shows that the capital entertains a true Parisian esteem
+for itself, and a corresponding contempt for the rest
+of the country. Cuatitlan is a little village twenty-five
+miles to the northward, reached by a narrow-gauge railroad,
+built by Mexicans, but purchased by the Mexican
+Central. It was at Cuatitlan that I saw my first bull-fight.
+It is one of the two places in the vicinity where
+the capital thus amuses itself, the sport being prohibited
+in town. In some states, as Zacatecas, it is abolished entirely.</p>
+
+<p>There were five bulls killed that day, and three horses,
+but no men—unfortunately, the novice in these cowardly
+and disagreeable representations is inclined to think.
+Each bull came in ignorant of the fate of his predecessor,
+and ran at the streamers with a playful air. You felt
+like scratching his back and calling him “good old fellow,”
+instead of waiting to see presently his pained astonishment
+and torture, his glazing eye and staggering step,
+and death like that of an actor in melodrama. The horses
+were wretched hacks, allowed to be gored purposely as a
+part of the spectacle. They were driven around the ring
+afterward till they dropped, and their life-blood poured
+with an audible noise, like the spatter of a rivulet. Upon
+which the boisterous youth of Mexico, of the lower class,
+cried “<i>Bello!</i>” “<i>Bellissimo!</i>” in frenzied delight.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus029" style="max-width: 40.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus029.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>ENVIRONS OF MEXICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span></p>
+
+<p>The gray old walls of the parish church, immense, and
+of excellent design (as they all are), rise above the amphitheatre.
+Within are figures of saints grotesquely adorned,
+or realistically horrible, in the usual style. The devout
+Indians are not archæologists, and have no idea of paying
+honor other than as they understand it. I have it on
+authority that when left to themselves they have been
+known to equip the Saviour of the World in a twenty-dollar
+hat, <i>chaparreras</i> (a kind of riding breeches), spurs,
+sabre, and revolver, sparing no expense to make him a
+cavalier of the first fashion.</p>
+
+<p>The houses of the town, built of concrete or adobe,
+sometimes plastered and tinted, are of one story. There
+are some small portals for the use of out-of-door merchants,
+a few <i>pulquerias</i>, and thread-needle shops, and a <i>meson</i>,
+or inn, “of the Divine Providence,” where enormous-wheeled
+wagons are corralled in line, and muleteers sleep
+upon their packs, as in the times of <i>Don Quixote</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This is Cuatitlan, this the Mexican village, which can
+be dreary enough to one who does not look at it with the
+fresh interest of a new-comer. You cannot take as much
+comfort in the lower class of people as you would like,
+on account of their habits. There is no denying that in
+the neighborhood of Mexico at least they are very dirty.
+They do not clean up even for their festivals. I saw
+them dancing at a public ball at the Theatre Hidalgo,
+which, among other amusements, the municipality provided
+for them free, on the national festival of the 5th
+of May. There were charcoal dealers and such persons,
+with their women, and they had not taken the pains to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>remove a single smudge of their working-day condition.</p>
+
+<p>Cuatitlan was the birth-place of the simple peon Juan
+Diego, who in 1531 saw the miraculous apparition of the
+Virgin of Guadalupe. He was passing the barren hill
+where her elaborate pilgrimage church now stands, and
+she gave him roses which had flowered where no flower
+had ever been seen before. A banner with the image
+of this miraculous Virgin was carried all through the wars
+of the Independence. Guadalupe is still one of the spots
+to be visited, and you buy such sacred knick-knacks there
+as at Lourdes or Einsiedlen, but the church is stripped of
+its treasures now, and the surroundings have a shabby
+aspect.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>At San Angel, Tlalpam, and other similar points in the
+vicinity of the capital, there was formerly an extensive
+villa life. It has curiously decayed, even while the security
+of living in such a way has increased. There are no
+fierce heats, however, to drive people to the country. It
+is always comfortable in town. No watering-places nor
+summer resorts in our sense of the word exist. People
+who go to their haciendas visit them more to look after
+their business interests than in need or love of country
+life. Bills are up in the grated windows of the long,
+low, one-storied villas at San Angel, and the fruits fall
+untasted in the orange and myrtle gardens. The villagers
+endeavor to atone for this neglect of them by
+feasts of flowers, and little fairs, which last a week at
+a time. On these occasions, among other attractions,
+existing ordinances against gambling are set aside, and
+their small plazas are filled with games of hazard.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus030" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus030.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SUNDAY DIVERSIONS AT SANTA ANITA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Viga Canal, as far as Santa Anita, is a livelier and
+more unique resort. Santa Anita is the St. Cloud or
+Bougival of Mexico. Thither go, especially on Sundays,
+lively persons to disport themselves on the water and
+pass a day of the picnic order, taking lunch with them,
+or depending on such cheap viands as the place offers.
+The wide yellow canal is more Venetian than French at
+first. A mouldering red villa or two on its banks, with
+private water-gates, might belong to the Brenta. Afterward
+lines of willows and poplars are reflected in the
+water, and then it is French again.</p>
+
+<p>Flat-boats coming on, piled up with bales of hay and
+wood, echo each other peacefully from distance to distance.
+Swift, small <i>chalupas</i> (dug-outs) follow, managed
+by the Indian master in poses for a sculptor, while his
+wife—or it is as often an Indian woman alone—is ensconced
+among flowers and vegetables, with which it
+overflows. This is the region of the <i>chinampas</i>, the
+gardens from which the markets of Mexico are most
+liberally supplied. They are formed by the division of
+what was once a marsh, by narrow branch canals, into
+small oblong patches. The patches are so small that the
+owner passes around the borders in his canoe, and keeps
+all portions moist with water, which he throws out upon
+them with a calabash. By this care, and the rich character
+of the redeemed soil, luxuriant crops are produced.</p>
+
+<p>The houses of the village are generally of bamboo, and
+without windows, sufficient light penetrating through the
+interstices. The first business of the participants in the
+Sunday festivities here is to provide themselves with large,
+thick wreaths of lovely poppies and blue and white cornflowers,
+which are sold for the merest trifle. They wear
+these upon their heads, in their caperings, with a highly
+classic effect. A general frizzling sound is heard, where
+eatables, of which peppers form a large ingredient, are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>prepared on little charcoal furnaces without and primitive
+fire-places within. “Come in!” the busy venders
+cry; “come in, señors, señoras, and señoritas, and be
+seated! <i>Aqui los niños!</i> Here is the place for the children!
+Here is the place where they are appreciated, and
+by no means considered a nuisance!”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Tamales calientitos!</i> dear little <i>tamales</i>, very nice
+and hot!” they cry. In the same caressing way a cabman
+in want of a job will call you <i>patroncito</i>, “dear little
+patron,” though you may be as large as a grenadier.</p>
+
+<p>They decorate their little stands with turnips and radishes
+cut into ingenious shapes of flowers, and with a
+profusion of little birds in wax, and the Mexican Goddess
+of Liberty astride of an eagle. A swarm of flat-boat men
+cluster at the edge of the canal, bidding for your patronage.
+Dancing is going on in almost every court-yard;
+the ballad-singers strike up lazy refrains; and in the Carcel,
+in a dirty little plaza, by a fountain, a single prisoner
+monotonously rattles his wooden grating, and glares out
+at the gayety like a madman. No self-respecting American
+prisoner could be induced to stay in a place so easy
+to escape from. But there is no accounting for tastes.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>But are there no real <i>chinampas</i>, no gardens that actually
+float, according to the tradition? Was all that, then,
+a myth?</p>
+
+<p>Not at all. The soil hereabouts is solidified now, anchored
+down, as it were; but it has in its time floated,
+and in that condition borne crops. Farther on whole
+expanses are found only kept in position by stakes, with
+four feet of water below, and yet strong enough to sustain
+grazing cattle. An expedition was organized, in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>which I was privileged to set off, under the hospitable
+guidance of the Director of the Drainage of the Valley,
+to witness these marvels in person. We had a large
+row-boat, rowed by five oarsmen; and in our party was
+an amiable English traveller, who has written a book
+about Mexico,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> and described, among others, this very
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p>We started about seven o’clock in the morning from
+the garita of La Viga, an old Spanish water-gate, at which
+toll is taken from the market boats. The current was
+against us. The canal of La Viga, a stretch of about sixteen
+miles, is the outlet of Lake Xochimilco into Texcoco.
+Chalco and Xochimilco are practically the same lake, being
+separated only by a narrow causeway of ancient date,
+which is open at the centre and spanned by a little bridge.</p>
+
+<p>There are numerous hamlets along the way, built like
+Santa Anita, and each with a few venerable palm-trees in
+its plaza. The Jefe Politico of one embraced our Director
+of the Desagüe and kissed his hand. At another a solid
+little bridge had lately been thrown across the canal, and
+we heard of a banquet that had been given on the occasion.
+The orator of the day had delivered a resounding
+address on human progress, and declared that he was
+proud to be a resident of a village which could accomplish
+such a feat. We lunched at a fort-like hacienda
+at Ixtapalapa, the point where the canal issues from the
+lake, and there found horses awaiting to take us to the
+top of the Hill of the Star. Upon this eminence, according
+to Prescott, were rekindled the extinguished fires
+and the beautiful captive sacrificed at the end of each
+of the cycles of fifty years, when the Aztecs thought the
+existence of the world was to be terminated.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span></p>
+
+<p>We found nothing on the summit but a few heavy
+foundation stones, possibly remains of a sacrificial altar.
+Our horses had to be walked actively about, to prevent
+their taking serious cold from the rapid evaporation. It
+is chiefly memories that are found on such places. I
+plucked there, however, to send in a letter, a dark-red
+common flower, and pleased myself with the fancy that
+it might have drawn its sanguinary hue from the ground
+so steeped in slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>Though at the entrance of the lake, no shining expanse
+of water was visible. The greater part of the surface,
+in fact, is covered with a singular growth of entwined
+roots and <i>débris</i>, supporting a verdant meadow. Passage
+through it is effected by canals and shifting natural
+channels, which change with the wind.</p>
+
+<p>Two of our men after a time got out and towed the
+boat. The ostensible <i>terra firma</i> sank under their weight
+like the undulations of “benders” in thin ice. Now and
+then one floundered and went in waist-deep, whereat the
+others laughed. The margins are kept in place along the
+permanent channels by pinning them down with long
+stakes.</p>
+
+<p>We fell in with wandering strips of growing verdure,
+called <i>cintas</i> (ribbons), and larger ones, <i>bandoleros</i> (bandits),
+drifting about at their own sweet will. Our host
+told us, though this he would not guarantee as of his own
+experience, that in the earlier times a garden of flowers
+and vegetables was now and then wrecked along-shore
+after a gale of wind, as if it had been a bark. Contrabandists,
+robbers who occasionally beset the market-boats,
+and political refugees have sometimes found this a favorable
+place of refuge, and escaped pursuit by diving under
+the illusive area and coming up elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>We dined <i>al fresco</i> at Mas Arriba, a place named quite
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>in the American style, literally Farther On. The margins
+were full of yellow water-lilies, and the clear spaces reflected
+distant mountains. Evening drew on, and then
+night. The frogs and crickets waked up their lonesome
+refrain, and fire-flies twinkled brightly in the morass.
+A few drops of rain fell, which increased in time to a
+shower.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>We reached the long causeway between the two lakes
+late at night, in pitch darkness and torrents of rain, and
+screened ourselves a while under the little bridge, which
+barely accommodated the boat. Here was Tlahuac, an ancient
+island town or village, at the centre of the causeway.
+Waiting was useless. We landed in the rain, bought
+candles at a wretched <i>tienda</i> kept by Indians as solemn
+as statues, and set out in search of a lodging. A mozo
+preceded us, like a great fire-bug, sheltering a burning
+candle under a straw mat as best he could, to aid us in
+keeping out of the deeper puddles.</p>
+
+<p>We were recommended to the Padre, as the only person
+capable of entertaining visitors of our distinction, and
+found him in an ancient Dominican convent looming up
+in the darkness. He received us with many apologies,
+gave us a good supper, manifested an interest in the late
+gossip of Mexico, and put us to sleep on the church carpets
+on the floor of a vast, bare room, provided with a
+few old religious pictures and bits of furniture.</p>
+
+<p>Any temporary discomforts of this night of adventure
+were amply atoned for by the beautiful bright morning
+of the next day. We found Tlahuac a kind of Venetian
+island, a Torcello, as it were, on which some population of
+New Zealanders might have put up their thatched huts.
+The church rising in the centre had one of the usual shining
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>tiled domes, and was preceded by a court and arched
+gate-way. Its outer walls were covered with a large pattern
+of quatre-foils in red and yellow. I do not recollect
+just such a design again till I came later to the
+old Spanish mission of San Juan Capistrano, in Southern
+California. The island has sunk, or rather the lake has
+risen, in course of time, and the bases of the columns in the
+church are some four feet below the level of the ground.</p>
+
+<p>Near by was the village school, and, as we got under
+way, we heard the shrill little voices of the children reciting
+their spelling in concert. All the shock-headed
+adult residents, in their garments of white cotton, looked
+as stupid as possible; but it is not always safe to judge
+by appearances.</p>
+
+<p>From here the view of the two great snow-clad volcanoes
+is uninterrupted and glorious. We were told to
+feel with the oars at one place in the canal the pavements
+of a submerged Aztec city. Cortez mentions such
+a one in his letters. In 1855 the rumor of a new Pompeii
+spread abroad, based upon the finding of a few submerged
+Aztec huts in Lake Chalco, but no remains of
+any real importance have ever come to light.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>On this day, in Lake Chalco, we took our mid-day meal
+at the base of Xico, a little island volcano now extinct.
+It is of solid granite, without so much as a blade of grass
+externally, and the ascent is smooth and difficult. The
+boatmen sometimes see “Will-o’-the-wisps” on its summit,
+which, they say, are kindled by the witches. We
+climbed it, notwithstanding, and found a gently sloping
+crater, filled with maize-fields, which could easily have
+been approached from the other side.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span></p>
+
+<p>The water began to be charmingly clear, and the bottom
+was full of a red weed like coral. We gathered
+ferns, lilies, the fragrant little white flower of St. John—<i>flor
+de San Juan</i>, sold in large bunches in the market—and
+other flowers, yellow, purple, and vivid scarlet, of unknown
+names.</p>
+
+<p>The clouds still hung threateningly about, and gave us
+now and then a slight sprinkle of rain. But as we drew
+near to Chalco and the end of our two days’ voyage they
+cleared away.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect from this point is the subject for a landscape
+painting of the grand order. The town of Chalco,
+with an ancient and noble church edifice, supplies the
+element of human interest. In front is the blue water
+in spaces, with their reflection, and a wealth of marsh
+plants, arrow and lance heads, ferns, and flowers. In the
+distance is the great snow-clad mountains, upon which
+wreathing mists throw changing lights and shadows.
+Ixtacihuatl, the White Woman, though the lesser, I continually
+find the more picturesque of the two, in its sharp
+and rugged outline. Popocatepetl, in the more perfect
+symmetry of its cone, is a little monotonous, like Orizaba.</p>
+
+<p>We came, by a short branch canal, to the station of La
+Compañia, on the Morelos railway, and took the train
+back to town. We were just in time to hear of a disturbance
+near by by General Tiburcio Montiel, and his
+arrest by the Government forces. It was said that he
+had headed a communistic uprising of Indians for the
+recovery of their lands. He declared through the press
+afterward that he had but gathered a posse to aid him
+in the execution of some legal process. Quaint risings of
+a communistic sort, however, have not been uncommon.
+Demagogues have more than once told the simple-minded
+peons that the lands of the country were theirs—had been
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>wrested from their ancestors by the Spanish conquerors—and
+it was high time to get them back. An ingenious
+hacendado, waited upon by such a delegation, admitted
+their view, but met it with another.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said he, “the Spaniards took your lands, it is
+true; but before that you Aztecs took them from the
+Toltecs. Find me first, therefore, some Toltecs; I will
+yield my title only to them.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII.<br>
+<i>TO OLD TEXCOCO.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>My next journey was by lake across Texcoco to the
+old capital of that name. I had hoped to take <i>El Nezhualcoyotl</i>,
+which lay in the mud by the Garita of San
+Lazaro, when I went to make preliminary inquiries.
+There would have been a certain fitness in approaching
+the ancient capital in a boat named after the sovereign
+who made it illustrious; but it was not its day for sailing.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Nezhualcoyotl</i> was clipper-built, as it were, a long,
+rusty, gondola-like scow, devoted exclusively to passenger
+traffic. We took instead a freight-boat of much larger
+and heavier build, <i>La Ninfa Encantadora</i>, or “the Enchanting
+Nymph.” She would have been called the <i>Mary
+Ann</i> or <i>Betsy Jane</i> elsewhere, but such is the difference
+in the tropical imagination.</p>
+
+<p>A cabin sheltered the passengers and some budgets of
+goods which were done up in the inevitable <i>petates</i>, rush
+mats, and included two bags of silver. There were a
+couple of young women going to <i>pasear</i>—take a little
+vacation—at Texcoco. “It will be <i>triste</i>, of course,”
+they said, “like everything out of Mexico; still, we are
+going to try it for a while.” They offered a part of
+their lunch, as travelling companions were continually
+doing wherever I went, and the skipper offered us <i>pulque</i>.
+Two older women, in blue rebosas, sat like statues, holding
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>their parcels and an Indian baby in their laps, from
+one end of the long journey to the other.</p>
+
+<p>The canal of San Lazaro on this side extends about a
+league to the lake. It is very much less attractive than
+that of Chalco. Its terminus in the city is the point
+of a most animated and Venetian-like market scene, but
+one earns his pleasure in dealing with this canal at the
+expense of many a bad odor. Six men put a sort of harness
+on themselves and dragged us along, plodding on
+the tow-path, as Russian peasants drag their boats in
+some of their rivers. A man on horseback with a tow-rope
+also assisted, on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>The water, shoal in the beginning, shoaled more as we
+went on, till we were aground on flats in the edge of the
+lake. The city sewage was aground with us. Still, the
+situation was relieved by the striking prospect. The teocalli-like
+Peñol, where there are warm baths, was close
+at hand. Sky and water were of an identical blue; the
+shallow expanse reflected the circuit of dark and purplish
+foot-hills and great snow-peaks beyond as perfectly as if
+it had been as deep as they were high.</p>
+
+<p>Our crew walked for an hour in the mud, pushing
+against long poles projected from the sides, before we
+could be said to be fairly afloat. Then they came
+aboard and poled the rest of the way. They walked up
+an inclined plane, carrying the poles over their heads, and
+came down, pushing, with them supported against their
+shoulders, in a bold and striking motion. It was eight
+o’clock when we set out, and four when we reached the
+mouth of the short branch canal which makes up to Texcoco.
+The distance must be about thirty miles. A cross
+arose out of the lake half way over, and our polemen
+stopped at it and shouted three times, with startling effect,
+“<i>Alabo al gran poder de Dios! Ave Maria
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>purissima!</i>”—“Hail to the almighty power of God! Hail,
+Mary the purest!”</p>
+
+<p>Unexpectant of anything of the sort, I hurried out
+from the cabin, taking it to be some defiance at enemies,
+or disturbance among ourselves. We met other packets
+like our own, loaded with people. A considerable part of
+the cargoes was the fine large red earthen jars and dishes
+we saw at Mexico, which are made at Texcoco. The
+piled-up bales and pottery, the strange figures, and the
+flashing poles of one of these craft, coming on, make it
+a highly original and spirited subject.</p>
+
+<p>Then we fell in with one of the curiosities of the
+lake—disbelieved in by some—swarms of the <i>mosca</i>,
+a little water-fly, so thickly settled on the water that we
+took them for flats and reefs. They resemble mosquitoes,
+but neither sting nor even alight on the boat. They are
+taken in fine nets and carried to Mexico, as food for the
+birds; and they have eggs, which are sold in the market
+and made into tortillas, which are said to be very palatable.</p>
+
+<p>The shores are encrusted with native alkali, which has
+its share in the production of the disagreeable odors.
+Peasants gather the crude product and load it upon donkeys,
+to carry to a salt and soda works, and a manufactory
+of glass, situated at Texcoco.</p>
+
+<p>Was it in this same branch canal that Cortez launched
+his brigantines for the destruction of the naval power of
+the Aztecs? There is water in but a part of it now; and
+traces of substantial locks are found, where grass is growing
+and cows feeding.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus031" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus031.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CREW OF “LA NINFA ENCANTADORA.”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I spent nearly a week at Texcoco assimilating the quiet
+interior life of the country. I dined at the Restaurante
+Universo, both cheaply and better as a rule than at Mexico,
+and found a chamber with the keeper of the principal
+<i>tienda</i>, there being no inn. I even became something
+of an expert in <i>pulque</i>. The true connoisseur takes
+it <i>mitad y mitad</i>: half of <i>agua miel</i> newly from the
+maguey field, and half the stronger beverage of longer
+standing. I made the acquaintance of the Jefe Politico,
+a polite, youngish man, said to be a terror to evil-doers.
+He had made the roads safe. He had a way of shooting
+at brief notice, and transporting to Yucatan, or if he contented
+himself with a mere fine it was a sounding one.
+The <i>pulquerias</i> must be closed at six o’clock, and other
+shops at nine. One day the Deputy returned from his
+seat in Congress, and was given a characteristic reception.
+A troop of twenty or so of his constituents mounted on
+horseback, and preceded the omnibus in which he was
+drawn, from the railway station back into the town, at
+the top of their speed, shouting and firing pistols. Crackers
+and pistols were fired also from the omnibus.</p>
+
+<p>I made the acquaintance also of the local druggist, an
+intelligent person, who had a collection of antiquities.
+He was of the pure Indian race, and professed himself
+proud of being an Indian, and proud of being a Texcocan.
+He had lately brought out a very strong distillation
+of <i>pulque</i>, a kind of patent medicine, and asked my advice
+about introducing it in the United States. He evidently
+thought we were made of money, for I am sure
+we never should have been willing to pay so much a
+bottle.</p>
+
+<p>The place has now about six thousand people. Its
+churches are immense. It has a long, shabby plaza, with
+a market arcade on one side, and an Alameda, also in
+poor condition. The Jefe Politico might extend his protection
+next to a few internal improvements. Hamlets
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>cluster near together in a fertile area round about. I
+noted one day two peons soberly carrying on their shoulders,
+among the magueys, what appeared to be a dead
+body. It proved to be instead the saint of the village
+church, which they were quaintly conveying, as a loan, to
+one of the others, to assist in a festival of the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>In the hamlet of Santa Cruz the population are potters.
+Each has a little round tower of a furnace attached
+to his house, works on his own account, and sets out
+the large, ruddy jars on his roof to dry. He could acquire
+a competence if persevering, but the moment he
+has a dollar ahead he stops work till it is spent. In other
+houses persons were seen at looms weaving blue cotton
+stuffs for apparel.</p>
+
+<p>Numbers of ancient carven stones occur, let into the
+church walls and pavement, and set up in the Alameda.
+Remains of teocallis are also numerous, as they might
+well be in a place once the seat of the Augustinian age of
+Aztec culture. They are treated with no respect at all.
+They are worn down into mere knolls, and planted with
+crops. From the site of one now levelled a proprietor
+was said to have taken out a treasure. What with its
+age, the destruction of haciendas in the wars, and the
+practice of the Indians, still prevailing, of burying their
+money in the ground, there ought to be treasure-trove in
+Mexico, if anywhere. Certain it is that my host at the
+<i>tienda</i>, Señor Macedonia, had in his till some beautiful
+old Spanish coins, which he displayed to the gossips who
+came in the evening to sip beverages and play dominos.</p>
+
+<p>Among the gossips thus sociably <i>tomando copas</i> (taking
+cups) at the <i>tienda</i> there was one, a certain “Don Santiago,”
+who told me that he was pulling down, in his
+garden, the largest pyramid of the place, to sell the material
+for building purposes. This was of real interest.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>Going thither, his pyramid was found to be indeed of
+imposing size. It was laid up in regular courses of
+sun-dried brick, and there were vestiges of a facing and
+superposed pavements of cement, as at San Juan Teotihuacan.
+There was present in the place with me an
+archæologist—a newspaper archæologist, I should call him.
+He termed himself an “expedition;” he had an omnivorous
+taste for unearthing things, without knowledge of the
+language, or apparent acquaintance with any previous researches
+or theories; and his discoveries were intended
+principally to redound to the fame of a journal which
+had sent him out. Between us we brought to light a section
+of a great bass-relief which now occupies a place in
+the National Museum at Mexico. It was probably seven
+feet in its longest dimension and five in the other, and
+must have been a quarter or so of the whole work. It
+contained a calendar circle, no doubt establishing the
+date, and part of the figure of a warrior in elaborate regalia,
+possibly that of old Nezhualcoyotl himself. The
+archæologist, whom perhaps I unfairly disparage for the
+auspices under which he appeared, set to work with a
+will, and soon had half a dozen natives taking the surface
+off the rest of the soil in the vicinity, for the remaining
+fragments, but without success. It was the
+fierce practice of the Spaniards to break the religious
+emblems of the conquered pagans, to prevent them, as
+far as possible, from returning to their idolatrous practices,
+and most likely they rolled down one fragment of
+the great stone one way, and another another, to separate
+them as widely as possible; so that they will be found
+on different sides of the pyramid. All day long it was
+“Don Santiago!” here, and “Don Santiago!” there, as
+the excavators plied their labors; while I spent some part
+of it, shaded by an impromptu awning of mats, noting
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>down in a drawing the peculiarities of the “find” we
+had made. I do not profess myself an archæologist,
+except from the picturesque point of view. It is my
+private surmise that a great deal of good investigation is
+lavished upon these matters which had much better be
+spent upon the present; but here was a case in which the
+sentiment of the picturesque was amply gratified. There
+was a genuine pleasure in being one of the first to salute
+this interesting fragment of antiquity after its long sleep,
+to tenderly brush the dirt from it and trace its enigmatic
+lines.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus032" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus032.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE “FIND.”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>There is a decided resemblance, to this day, in looks
+and habits, between the Mexican peon and the Chinaman.
+Writers on the subject have generally represented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>America as originally peopled from Asia, the Asiatics
+having crossed over, perhaps, at Behring’s Straits, and
+made their way south. One Mexican writer stoutly
+maintains that Mexico was the cradle of the race, and
+the migration was in the opposite sense. This accords,
+at any rate, with Buckle’s general theory, that the thickly
+settled portions of the earth were at first those where
+climate and a natural food-supply made the maintenance
+of life easy. In these places, too, civilization began.
+The warm and fertile area of Central America, therefore,
+would have teemed with humanity before the waste
+North was peopled. There may have been sculptured
+cities, one upon another, long before even Uxmal and
+Palenque, the origin of which was lost in obscurity to
+the Aztecs.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, the Aztecs themselves, whether
+descendants of a race expatriated from the South and
+become rugged in the North, or having crossed over from
+Asia, came down from the colder regions, like the Goths
+and Vandals upon Italy. The tradition on this point is
+clear. One day two leading personages, Huitziton and
+Tecpultzin, in their far-off northern regions, wherever
+they were, heard a small bird singing in the branches
+<i>ti-hui! ti-hui!</i>—let us go! They listened intently and
+took counsel together. “This is really very singular,”
+we may suppose Huitziton saying, while Tecpultzin sagely
+laid a finger beside his nose and listened again. One
+would like a historic picture by some competent humorist
+of these two simple worthies deciding the fate of their
+nation. <i>Ti-hui! ti-hui!</i> piped the little songster inexorably,
+and that there seemed nothing for it but that the
+Aztec people should move southward, which they proceeded
+to do.</p>
+
+<p>They overwhelmed the civilized Toltec capital at Tula
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>in their progress. They had a farther oracle saying that
+they were to stop when they should arrive where an
+eagle was sitting on a nopal plant; and this they found
+at Mexico, on the very spot which now is the plaza of
+San Domingo. The whole district became filled in time
+with small kings and princes tributary to the Montezumas.
+The most refined and peaceable type of them
+all arose at Texcoco.</p>
+
+<p>In the Cerro of Texcocingo, some ten or twelve miles
+back of the town, remain extensive vestiges of an architectural
+magnificence which show that the accounts of
+the historians are not made of whole cloth. We had a
+trooper appointed us, as an escort and guide, by the Jefe
+Politico, and rode out to visit them.</p>
+
+<p>Ascending the hill, of perhaps two thousand feet in
+height, overgrown with hardy nopal and maguey, you
+come to excellent flights of steps cut in the solid rock,
+giving access to aqueducts, bathing tanks, cisterns, and
+caverns, heavily sculptured within and without, which are
+remains of temples and palaces.</p>
+
+<p>Our trooper had little ambition in these matters, and
+after showing us a part declared that there was no more,
+and went comfortably to sleep. It was only by climbing
+alone to the top that I found the principal display. Here
+the philosophic Nezhualcoyotl, in his retirement, hung in
+the air, above the wide prospect of his capital, the lake,
+and his rival of Mexico. And here, in the deserted mountain,
+with a guide who had gone fast asleep below, his
+ghost might be half expected to be met with wandering
+in the still sunshine, but unfortunately it was not. He
+wrote poems of a pensive cast. He reflected even in his
+time as to whether life is worth living, and his general
+theme was the vanity of all things mortal.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is Chalchintmet, the Chicameca?” he asks.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>“Mitl, the venerator of the gods; Tolpiltzin, last of
+the Toltecs; and the beautiful Xinlitzal—where are
+they?”</p>
+
+<p>These no doubt once famous personages can be the
+better spared now, on account of their unpronounceable
+names, but to the writer they represented something very
+tangible and solid.</p>
+
+<p>“Very brief is the realm of flowers,” he continues,
+“and brief is human life.... Our careers are like the
+streams, which but run on to excavate their own graves
+the more surely.... Let us look, then, to the immortal
+life.... The stars that now so puzzle us are but the
+lamps that light the palaces of the heavens.”</p>
+
+<p>Such, if he be properly presented by Spanish adapters,
+were the sentiments of this early monarch. Truly the
+latent capacities even of the natural man are not so far
+below the surface; and it may be that no agency will
+be found so potent to awaken them with a rush as the
+modern facility in railway transportation.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>On the return we visited a country residence, combined
+with large mills for making paper and grinding grain.
+It was called the Molino del Flores, and belonged to the
+wealthy Cervantes family of Mexico. One of this Cervantes
+family was the subject, in 1872, of a celebrated
+exploit by the <i>plagiarios</i>, or kidnappers. He was seized
+while coming out of the theatre at night, a cloak was
+thrown over his head, and he was bundled into a cab.
+He was buried a long time under the floor of a house, just
+enough food being given him to sustain life. The <i>plagiarios</i>
+did not secure the large ransom they demanded,
+after all, but were finally apprehended, and shot—three
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>of them—against the wall of the house, the Callejon Zacate,
+No. 8, where they had detained their victim.</p>
+
+<p>The Molino del Flores was not only charming in itself,
+but may serve as a text for mentioning the very different
+sentiment thrown around anything in the shape of a manufactory
+from that prevailing with us. Mills, residence,
+granaries, and chapel, terraced up into a steep hill-side
+from a little entrance court, are constructed upon the
+same <i>motif</i>, and form a single establishment. It is set in
+a striking little gorge. The water-power, after turning
+the mills, is utilized for lovely gardens, in which there
+are a hundred fantastic jets and surprises. There is an
+out-of-door bathing tank, for instance, at the end of a secluded
+walk, screened by shrubbery. The disrobing seat
+is managed in a small cave in the cliff, and the shower,
+on pulling a ring, falls from the summit, forty feet above.
+It is a place that might have served for such an adventure
+as that of Susannah and the Elders.</p>
+
+<p>In the novel of “Maria,” one of the most charming of
+stories, with which I first made acquaintance in Mexico,
+though its scene is laid among similar customs in South
+America, the heroine is represented as preparing the bath
+for the hero in such a tank by scattering fresh roses into
+it with her own fair hands.</p>
+
+<p>A rustic bridge, on which La Sonnambula might have
+walked, is thrown across the cataract to a quaintly frescoed,
+rock-cut mortuary chapel, where, among others, the
+last titled ancestor of the house lies buried. He had ten
+distinct surnames—was Marques de Flores, a General of
+Brigade, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Captain
+in Iturbide’s Guard, Cavalier of the Order of Guadalupe,
+Regidor, Governor, <i>Notabile</i> under Maximilian,
+and more; from which it will be seen that the pomp of
+the hidalgos well survived in Mexico.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span></p>
+
+<p>The same caressing way of looking at industrial establishments
+here noticed is universal, and is, in part, no
+doubt, due to their rarity and a thorough appreciation of
+their usefulness. I recollect everywhere the sugar haciendas,
+“beneficiating” haciendas, or ore-reducing works,
+and cotton-mills treated in similar fashion.</p>
+
+<p>One voyage across Lake Texcoco was quite sufficient
+of its kind, and I returned by diligencia to the junction
+point of the since completed railway, and thence by rail
+to the capital. The pulling-gear of our diligencia was a
+thing of shreds and patches. A boy ran beside the mules
+all the way to mend the broken ropes and supplement,
+with whistling and flapping, the exertions of the driver.
+The houses in the villages are of unwhitewashed adobe,
+with palings of organ-cactus. It was like riding through
+a brick-yard. Fine irrigating canals, fed from the mountains,
+frequently crossed our course, indicating the substantial
+scale on which agricultural works are conducted.
+More than one monumental ruined hacienda, too, showed
+that they had formerly been on even a more elaborate
+scale than now.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV.<br>
+<i>POPOCATEPETL ASCENDED.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>I do not know whether I advise everybody to climb
+Popocatepetl. There it is always on the horizon, the
+highest mountain in North America, and one of the few
+highest in the world—a standing inducement to the adventurous.
+Few accept it, however, though among those
+who have done so are said to be ladies. I should somewhat
+doubt this, but, even if so, there seem to be some
+features of this ascent which make it uncertain whether
+the effort “pays” quite as well as Alpine mountaineering.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, if one will go, let him have all the particulars
+and the necessary outfit in advance, at the capital
+itself. Little aid or comfort will be found elsewhere on
+his way. The proper preliminary for ascending Popocatepetl
+is to find some one who has been there and
+knows all about it, and to bear in mind besides the few
+following points, for his informant will be sure to have
+forgotten them.</p>
+
+<p>The feet are to be kept dry and warm, for there are
+hours of climbing in wet snow. This is, perhaps, best
+accomplished by superposed pairs of stout woollen stockings.
+The guides usually recommend strips of coarse
+cotton cloth, to be bound around in Italian contadino
+fashion; but this is a delusion and a snare, and they
+mean it to be so. They consider, very justly, that if the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>traveller can be made so uncomfortable as to quit the
+ascent before it is half accomplished they shall collect
+the price agreed upon and be saved a great part of their
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>There should be shoes provided with some arrangement
+of spikes in the soles, against the painful slipping
+backward. There should be a supply of food and warm
+covering for camping-out, since absolutely nothing is to
+be had, and the temperature is very cold at the shelter
+of Tlamaca, where probably two nights will have to be
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>I accomplished the ascent with two companions. We
+had in the beginning such assurances of special assistance
+that it seemed about to be robbed of all its terrors. The
+volcano is regularly owned, and worked as a sulphur
+mine, by General Sanchez Ochoa, Governor of the Military
+School. We were put in charge of one of his superintendents,
+who was to see that we had every convenience,
+and that the <i>malacate</i>, or windlass, was put in
+order for us to descend into the crater. I surmise that
+this particular superintendent did not greatly care to encounter
+the needed hardships on his own account, for
+certain it is that in the sequel we were left short of many
+elementary necessities, and there was no <i>malacate</i> for the
+descent, nor any reference to it.</p>
+
+<p>You arrive at Amecameca, forty miles from Mexico,
+by train. Everybody should go there. It is one of the
+loveliest of places, and has inns for the accommodation
+of visitors. Amecameca will one day be frequented from
+many climes, if I am not much mistaken. It has features
+like Interlaken. Cool airs are wafted down to it from
+the mountains, and its site resembles an Alpine vale.
+There are points of view in the vicinity whence a sharp
+minor peak separates itself from the main snow mass of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>Popocatepetl, like the Silberhorn from the Jungfrau, at
+Interlaken. The streets are clean, and the houses almost
+all neatly lime-washed in white or colors. The market-place
+is a scene for an opera—a long arcade, full of bright
+figures; behind this is a group of churches and court-yards;
+behind these the vast snow mountains, as at Chalco,
+but nearer. A little hill at the left, across a strip of
+maize-fields, is called the Sacro Monte, and has a sacred
+chapel of some kind. I climbed thither while the negotiations
+for horses and guides were in their first tedious
+stage, and found a quaint Christ in the chapel, and a most
+engaging view from its terrace.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>We set off with a captain, or chief guide, who called
+himself Domingo Tenario; a peon guide, Marcellino Cardoba,
+who had worked for three years at sulphur-mining
+in the volcano. He also acted as muleteer. We had four
+horses and a mule—the whole for eight dollars a day.
+Domingo Tenario would also ascend the mountain for a
+dollar more. We were to be gone three days, the greater
+part of which the expedition consumes.</p>
+
+<p>The first part of the way wound among softly undulating
+slopes, yellow with barley, out of which projected
+here and there an ancient pyramid, planted with a crop
+also. By the roadside grew charming white thistles,
+tall blue lupines, and columbines. We crossed <i>arroyos</i>,
+brooks, and <i>barrancas</i>, gorges. The aspect changed to
+that of an Alpine pasture. There were bunch grass, tender
+flowering mosses, and cattle feeding. An eccentric
+dog, who was attached, it seemed, to one of the horses,
+and had the ambition to ascend the mountain also, instead
+of saving his strength for it, here ran up and down and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>bit at the heels of the herds in the most wasteful manner.
+It seems a small detail of an enterprise of pith and
+moment to mention, but “Perro,” as we called him, for
+want of acquaintance with his name, if he had one, contrived
+a score of sage and amusing devices to attract an
+attention to himself beyond his deserts. The horses
+were frescoed on the flanks with a kind of Eastlake decoration
+made up of the brands of successive owners.</p>
+
+<p>The English landed proprietor in our small party occupied
+himself with collecting specimens, and soon had a
+kind of geological and botanical pudding in his satchel.
+The American engineer took observations with his barometer
+and thermometer. Crosses are set up at intervals
+along the way. These indicate places where a death by
+violence has occurred, but not always a death by the hand
+of man. Did the custom prevail of setting up a cross
+in New York, for instance, wherever a violent death had
+occurred, we too should have a liberal share of these
+emblems.</p>
+
+<p>We entered the deep, solemn pine-woods; the night
+came on, and a sharp cold seemed to penetrate to the
+marrow. Buildings appeared in the gloom, with red
+flames dancing merrily through the windows. Aha! the
+rancho of Tlamaca, with hospitable fires made up, no
+doubt, expressly for our reception!</p>
+
+<p>What a disappointment! The buildings proved to be
+but some shelters of rough boards, with plentiful interstices,
+and not a whole pane of glass. The cabin devoted
+to the uses of the superintendent contained but a single
+cot. The dancing flames were those from the process of
+smelting the crude sulphur, which is done in brick furnaces
+in the principal structure. Two Indian boys stirred
+the fires, and coughed in a distressing way all night long.
+We threw ourselves down to sleep among the sulphur-sacks.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>One was choked by the fumes, if near the furnaces,
+and penetrated by the draughts through crevice
+and broken window-pane, if remote. Tlamaca is itself
+12,500 feet above the sea, and its thermometer ranges
+about 40° Fahrenheit. Without other covering than a
+light rubber overcoat—for I had not been instructed to
+bring other—it was impossible to sleep. I went out and
+paced the yard, sentry fashion, at three o’clock in the
+morning, as the only resource for keeping the blood in
+circulation. It was moonlight, and I had the partial compensation
+of studying the volcano, bathed in a lovely
+silver radiance.</p>
+
+<p>Mountains are rather given to making their poorest
+possible figure. Here we are, at this point, already 12,500
+feet above the sea, and this is to be subtracted from the
+total. Shall we ever meet with a good, honest mountain
+rising its whole 19,673 feet at once, without these shuffling
+evasions? I fear not. They are only to be found in the
+designs of tyro pictorial art.</p>
+
+<p>I say 19,673 feet, because so much General Ochoa insists
+that Popocatepetl is, by a late measurement with the
+barometer of Gay-Lussac. He even estimates 1700 feet
+more for the upper rim of the crater, which has never
+been scaled. I do not know that this has ever passed
+into any official form, but I had it from his own lips.
+The latest Mexican atlas makes it but 5400 metres, or
+17,884 feet, which coincides with the measurement of
+Humboldt. I much prefer to rally to General Ochoa,
+for my part, and to believe that I have climbed a mountain
+of 21,373 feet, instead of one of a mere 17,884.</p>
+
+<p>The barometer of our own expedition, unfortunately,
+stopped at 17,000 feet, the limit for which it was set—a
+limit which barometers are not often called upon to
+surpass.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>We left the Rancho, at six in the morning, on horseback,
+and rode three hours toilsomely over rocks of
+basalt, and black sand. The poor animals suffered painfully,
+but we needed all our own strength for the later
+work, and could not spare them. They were left at a
+point called Las Cruces, where a cross tops a ledge of
+black, jaggedly-projecting volcanic rock. The lines of
+composition in this part of the ascent were noble and
+magnificent, the contrasts startling. Across the vast,
+black undulations, on which our shadows fell purple-black,
+appeared and disappeared in turn the rich red castellated
+Pico del Fraile, and the dazzling white breadths
+of the greater mountain engaging our efforts.</p>
+
+<p>Backward from Las Cruces lay a dizzy view of the
+world below. Across was the height of Ixtacihuatl, the
+White Woman, keeping us company in our ascent. The
+valley of Mexico could be seen in one direction, the valley
+of Puebla, and even the peak of Orizaba, 150 miles
+away, in the other. Against the mysterious vastness
+stood the figures of our men and horses on the ledge of
+volcanic rock, as if in trackless space.</p>
+
+<p>It was here that “Perro” charged down the slope after
+crows, which tantalized him and drifted lazily out of his
+reach, and so wasted his forces that he was obliged to
+abandon the expedition. Las Cruces was 14,150 feet up.
+The climb now began on foot, in a soft black sand. One
+of the leading difficulties of the climb is said to arise
+from the exceeding thinness of the air, which makes
+breathing difficult. I cannot say that I discriminated between
+this and the shortness of breath due to the natural
+fatigue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span></p>
+
+<p>Isolated pinnacles of snow stood up like monuments
+in the black sand, as precursors of the permanent snow-line.
+The cool snow-line was a luxury for the first few
+moments. We sat down and lunched by it, and from
+there took our last views backward. Cumulus clouds
+presently filled up the valley with a symmetrical arrangement
+like pavement. Such bits as appeared through furtive
+openings recalled the charming lines of Holmes’s, in
+which a spirit, “homesick in heaven,” looks back on the
+earth it has left:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“To catch perchance some flashing glimpse of green,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Or breathe some wild-wood fragrance, wafted through</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The opening gates of pearl.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Up to this point—a little higher, let us say—the effort
+is rewarded. A view of “the kingdoms of the world and
+the glory thereof” has been had which could not be got
+elsewhere. But above this it has little more reward than
+that of being able to boast of it to your friends. A few
+steps in the snow, and imperfectly protected feet were
+sodden, numb with cold, and not to be dried again till the
+final descent. There was a painful slipping and falling
+in the snow, and blood-marks were left by ungloved
+hands. The grade is excessive, the top invisible. Who
+can estimate when he shall attain it? The prospect consists
+of jagged snow-pinnacles without cessation, an endless
+staircase of them reaching up into the sky. Sometimes,
+in the sun, all the pinnacles glitter; again, thick
+fogs, like a gray smoke, gather round. There is no more
+casting yourself down now in warm scoriæ and sand. If
+you sit you are chilled. Yet rest you must continually.
+Every step is a calculation and an achievement. You
+calculate that you will allow yourself a rest after ten,
+after twenty more. The snow is not dangerous; there
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>are no crevasses to fall into, as in the Alps; it is only
+monotonous and fatiguing. I seem to have gone on for
+an hour after farther endurance was intolerable. The
+guides encourage you—when they find that you really
+mean to go up—with the adjuration, “<i>Poco á poco</i>” (little
+by little); so that we paraphrased our mountain as
+“Poco-a-poco-catepetl.”</p>
+
+<p>Finally, with sighs and groans of labored effort, instead
+of the lightness with which one might be expected to salute
+a point of so extreme high heaven, we staggered over
+the edge of the crater at about two o’clock in the afternoon.
+I had doubted at one time whether the English
+landed proprietor would be able to reach it. He had
+grown purple in the face. Perhaps I had even hoped
+that he might need a friendly arm to assist him down
+again on the instant; but he said, with the true British
+tenacity,</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, <i>bless</i> you, I am going to the <i>top</i>, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>And so he did.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>It was a supreme moment. One seemed very near to
+eternity. It seemed easy to topple through the ice minarets
+guarding the brink, and down into the terrific chasm.</p>
+
+<p>There is no comfort at the top when reached. It is
+frigidly cold. None of the expected heat comes up from
+the interior. An elemental war rages around, and it is
+no place for human beings. There is a kind of fearful
+exaltation. A slope of black sand descends some fifty
+feet to an inner edge, broken by rocks of porphyry and
+flint, which the imagination tortures into fantastic shapes.
+Hence a sheer precipice drops two thousand feet, a vast
+ellipse in plan. There was snow in the bottom of the
+crater. Jets of steam spouted from ten <i>sulfataras</i>, or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>sources, from which the native sulphur is extracted. The
+hands who work there are said to live in the shelter of
+caves, and remain for a month at a time without exit.
+They are lowered down by windlass, on a primitive contrivance
+they call a <i>caballo de minas</i>—horse of the mines.
+The sulphur is hoisted in bags and slid down a long
+groove in the snow to the neighborhood of the rancho.
+It takes the palm in purity over all sulphurs in the
+world. A company has been formed, it is said, for the
+purpose of working the deposits more effectually and
+utilizing the steam-power in the bottom for improved
+hoisting machinery.</p>
+
+<p>The men were on strike at the time, as it happened,
+and the windlass was not in place, and was not adjusted.
+If it had been, and we had descended, we might have
+found the warmth for which we were well-nigh perishing.
+Snow began to drive from the heavy cloud-banks.
+When it snows the crater within is darkened, roarings
+are said to be heard, and strange-colored globules and
+flames play above the sulfataras.</p>
+
+<p>“What if there should be an eruption?” suggested
+the alarmist of the party, as we began to beat our retreat
+from the untenable position.</p>
+
+<p>“There has not been an eruption for at least seven
+thousand years,” said the scientific member, with contempt.
+“A certain kind of lignite in the bottom, requiring
+that length of time to form, establishes it.”</p>
+
+<p>“So much the more reason, then,” said the alarmist:
+“it is high time there was another.”</p>
+
+<p>With that we slipped and floundered down the snow-mountain
+with the same celerity with which Vesuvius is
+descended. We crossed again the black volcanic fields,
+mounted our horses, and spent once more the night at
+Tlamaca, having learned by experience how to make it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>slightly more comfortable than the other. The next day
+we rode back to Amecameca.</p>
+
+<p>When Señor Llandesio, Professor of the Fine Arts at
+Mexico, made this ascent, as he did in 1866, he says that
+he found two attempts necessary before he succeeded. I
+have the pamphlet in which he describes it. “The guide
+and peon whispered together continually,” he says, “which
+made me think they were going to play us some trick.”</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough, they did. After a good way up they
+represented that it was perilous, impossible, to go farther.
+He descended, and had taken his seat in the diligencia to
+return to Mexico, when he met another party, with more
+honest guides, and, turning back with them, this time
+succeeded. He describes a young man so fatigued on
+the mountain that he desired, with tears in his eyes, to
+be left to die. Another succumbed owing to the singular
+cause, that he had fancied that ardent spirits would
+have no effect in the peculiarly attenuated atmosphere,
+and had emptied nearly a whole bottle of brandy.</p>
+
+<p>Señor Llandesio was told by the Indians that they believed
+in a genius of the mountain, whom they called
+Cuantelpostle. He was a queer little man, who dwelt
+about the Pico del Fraile, helped the workmen at their
+labors when in a good humor, and embarrassed them as
+much as possible when in a bad. They said, also, that
+presents were offered by some to propitiate the volcano,
+for the purpose of obtaining rain, and the like. These
+were buried in the sand, and the places marked by a flat
+stone. This practice may account for some of the discoveries
+of Charnay, who unearthed about the foot of the
+mountain much interesting pottery.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV.<br>
+<i>A BANQUET, AND A TRAGEDY, AT CUAUTLA-MORELOS.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>When I saw Amecameca again it was to pass it on board
+a gala train going down to celebrate the completion of
+the Morelos railway to Cuautla, in <i>Tierra Caliente</i>. The
+Morelos railway is a native Mexican work. It was built
+under the auspices of Delfin Sanchez, a son-in-law of President
+Juarez, was rushed forward with great expedition,
+in order to secure valuable premiums, added to the regular
+subsidy by Government, and there was much defective
+work in its construction. It is laid to the narrow gauge,
+and projected ultimately to reach Acapulco, but this latter
+need hardly be looked for in any predicable time. At
+present it reaches about seventy-five miles—to Cuautla-Morelos,
+capital of the state of Morelos.</p>
+
+<p>All official and distinguished Mexico was aboard that
+day—the President, the justices of the Supreme Court,
+generals, senators, <i>littérateurs</i>, and, greatest of all, Porfirio
+Diaz. “Porfirio” wore a felt hat with a tall top, and
+his manner with his friends was easy and unpretentious.
+Had the accident of a week later happened that day instead,
+the Republic of Mexico would have needed to be
+reconstructed from the bottom upward.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus033" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus033.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>IN TIERRA CALIENTE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span></p>
+
+<p>A locomotive <i>exploradora</i>, a lookout engine, went on
+ahead of us to see that all was safe. Every little place
+had its music and firing of crackers, and the local detachment
+of <i>Rurales</i> reined up at the station. At Amecameca
+there were as many as fifty of the latter, with drawn
+swords, all on white horses, which the firing made plunge
+with great spirit. At Ozumba was a battalion of mounted
+riflemen, under command of a handsome young officer in
+an eye-glass, who might have come fresh from the military
+school of Saint Cyr. The Indian populations, who
+could never have seen the locomotive before, maintained
+nevertheless, as their way is, a certain stoicism. There
+were no wild manifestations of surprise, no shouts; they
+even fired off their crackers with a serious air.</p>
+
+<p>The line is a congeries of curves without end, to overcome
+the three-quarters of a mile grade perpendicular
+from Amecameca to Cuautla. Cuautla has seven thousand
+people. For the ten years, up to this time, there
+had not been even diligence communication with it, and
+the railway was an event indeed. The enterprise was carried
+through chiefly by the exertions of a Señor Mendoza
+Cortina, who has great sugar estates in the neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>The streets were decorated with triumphal arches, and
+borders of tall banana-plants. They were shabby, and
+the place more squalid than is the rule in the temperate
+climates above. The Indians had an apathetic look.
+Few young and interesting faces were seen among them,
+but an extraordinary number of hags. I found in use
+some very pretty pottery, which I was told was made at
+Cuernavaca, forty miles away. Simple bits of stone and
+shell were impasted in the common earthen-ware with an
+effect like that of old Roman mosaic. There was a distinctly
+Indian Christ in the parish church. In the plaza in
+front stands a great tree, somehow connected with a <i>noche
+triste</i> of the patriot Morelos. Like Cortez at Mexico, he
+was forced to retreat one night in 1812, after a gallant
+resistance of sixty-two days to a siege by the Spaniards.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>The extremely civilized company pouring down to this
+shabby little place had a grand banquet in an old convent
+now adapted to the uses of a railway station, and
+plentiful speech-making afterward. There were a number
+of merry young journalists of the party, and they
+comported themselves as merry young journalists are
+apt to. They rapped on the table and called “otro!”
+“otro!”—another!—with pretended enthusiasm, even
+after the dullest speeches. It seemed typical of something
+curiously illogical in the Mexican mind that in festoons
+about the banqueting hall were set impartially the
+names of the presidents and other great men of the past,
+from Iturbide down to Manuel Gonzales. Iturbide adjoined
+Bravo and Guerrero, by whom he was shot as a
+usurper and enemy of the public peace; and Lerdo Porfirio
+Diaz, by whom he was ousted as traitor and tyrant.
+In the same way these personages, alternately one another’s
+Cæsars and Brutuses, are honored impartially in the
+series of portraits in the long gallery of the National
+Palace.</p>
+
+<p>There was naturally prominent here the portrait of the
+Padre Morelos, with the usual handkerchief around his
+head, and bold air of bandit chief. It is curious that
+priests should have taken such a share in the early insurrection.
+They recall those warrior ecclesiastics of the
+Middle Ages, who used to put on quite as often the secular
+as the spiritual armor. Probably the oppressions of
+the Spaniards were often too intolerable even for ecclesiastical
+endurance. Morelos, strangely enough, when the
+revolt broke out, was curate under Hidalgo at Valladolid,
+in Michoacan, and followed him to the field. He came,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>in his turn, to be generalissimo of the Mexican forces,
+and to have the name of Valladolid changed to Morelia
+in his honor. He had undoubtedly the military gift.
+His defence of Cuautla is considered one of the most
+glorious deeds of Mexican history. It was the third in
+the trio of priests, Matamoras, his intimate and lieutenant,
+who broke the siege with a hundred horse and aided
+his retreat when it finally became necessary.</p>
+
+<p>Matamoras in due course was taken and shot, at Valladolid,
+by no other than Iturbide, the future liberator.
+Iturbide, then in the Spanish forces, “had signalized
+himself,” to quote our history again, “by his repeated
+victories over the insurgents, and the excessive cruelty
+of which he made use on frequent occasions.” He routed
+Matamoras at Puruapan, took him prisoner, and put him
+to death, as has been said. To repay this, Morelos butchered
+two hundred Spanish prisoners in cold blood. So
+the strife of incarnate cruelty went on. Morelos himself
+was made prisoner by an act of treachery, and shot, after
+the customary fate of Mexican leaders, at San Cristobal
+Ecatapec, at four o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st of
+December, 1815.</p>
+
+<p>Iturbide’s account, in his minutes, of the insurgent
+chiefs whom he was so active in exterminating is very
+far from flattering. And here they are all apotheosized
+together. Verily it seems as if some high court of inquiry
+and review should be constituted for apportioning
+out a little the relative merits and defects of the past. The
+Mexican national anthem, a stirring and martial air, invokes
+among other things the sacred memory of Iturbide.
+But if Iturbide really deserved to be shot on setting foot
+on shore after his banishment, it seems much as if Americans
+should invoke the sacred name of Benedict Arnold.
+Arnold, too, rendered excellent services to his country.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>Nobody was a braver or better soldier than he before he
+attempted to betray it to the British.</p>
+
+<p>Well, I suppose the Mexicans understand it, but I don’t.
+Are they content with such a mixed ideal of good? Can
+a person have been such a patriot at one time that no
+subsequent crimes can weigh against him? One very
+simple lesson from it all would seem to be a less impatience
+with the ruling powers, on the one hand, and much
+less haste with powder and shot, on the other.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>I stayed a couple of days at Cuautla, to visit the sugar
+haciendas. The sugar product is large, and the district
+one of the most convenient sources of supply for central
+Mexico. A week afterward the newly inaugurated road
+was the scene of an accident unequalled, I think, in the
+annals of railway horrors. Five hundred lives were lost,
+in a little barranca, an insecure bridge over which had
+been washed out by the rain. A regiment in garrison at
+Cuautla was ordered to Mexico, and started in a train of
+open “flat” cars, there not having been passenger cars sufficient
+for the purpose. On other flat cars was a freight
+of barrels of <i>aguardiente</i>. The start was made in the afternoon.
+There was delay on the track. The shower
+came on, the night fell, and the men, pelted by the storm,
+without protection, broke open the <i>aguardiente</i>, and drank
+their fill. Some say that the engineer reported the road
+unsafe, but was forced by an exasperated officer to go on
+with a pistol at his head. They came to the broken
+bridge, and the train went through. The soldiers who
+were not mangled and incapacitated outright—drunk, and
+crazed with excitement—stabbed and shot one another.
+The barrels of <i>aguardiente</i> burst and took fire; the cartridges
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>in the belts exploded; the swollen torrent claimed
+its own; and the fury of a tropical storm, in a night as
+black as Erebus, beat down upon the writhing mass of
+horror.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this price that the extra subventions for
+speedy completion of the work were earned. A whitewashing
+report was made afterward, I believe, but the
+Government caused the road to be put in order before
+it was again opened; and the case may serve as a needed
+lesson to all railway builders in Mexico.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XVI">XVI.<br>
+<i>SAN JUAN, ORIZABA, AND CORDOBA REVISITED.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The impressions of the first journey upward from the
+coast are too vague to satisfy, yet it is better to push on
+to the capital and not take off the edge of the novelty
+by dallying on the way. The intervening places are
+returned to afterward.</p>
+
+<p>How different the feeling now! The things that had
+seemed so formidable are harmless enough. You take
+now with gusto the <i>pulque</i>, handed up at Apam. You
+understand the motley figures, the interiors, the flavors
+of the strange fruits and cakes, the proper expressions to
+use, and prices to pay. The helpless feeling of standing
+in need of continual directions is got rid of, and travel
+has become a matter of confidence and pleasure. Our
+Mexicans of the lower class are not over-quick in the
+matter of directions, to tell the truth. I recollect, as an
+example, asking a small shop-keeper, one day, the way
+to a neighboring street.</p>
+
+<p>“There it is,” he said; “but” (insisting, in a flustered
+way, on being puzzled by my accent, though he had comprehended
+what I meant) “<i>no hablamos Americano aqui</i>”—“We
+don’t speak American here.”</p>
+
+<p>I found a lodging at a tienda at San Juan Teotihuacan,
+the ancient city of the dead. The owner had before entertained
+Americans. He had a dog to which he had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>given, in pleasant recollection of one of them, as he
+said, the remarkable name of “Lovis,” which afterward
+proved to be “Lewis.” Adjoining was a barracks of
+<i>Rurales</i>, whose bugles sounded a cheerful <i>réveille</i> in the
+morning. The central plaza is perhaps three miles from
+the station. On the way you cross a handsome stone
+bridge built by Maximilian. The river San Juan had
+vanished from under it and left a mere gulch, as is the
+way with most of the streams in the dry season.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants have their houses, gardens, and all,
+often above the cement floors left by the extinct race,
+and the edges of these floors crop out beside the road,
+worn down through them. Nobody has framed a satisfactory
+theory of the place, but it is supposed to have
+been a great pantheon, or burial-place, for the dead of
+importance. Maximilian encouraged excavations, and a
+great Egyptian-looking head, unearthed in his time, is
+seen. Charnay dug there later, and so did my friend of
+the newspaper expedition. Probably a commission ought
+to be issued by the Government for tunnelling, without
+impairing their form, the two pyramids, to ascertain if
+there be not something of importance within. It is at
+present both conservative and apathetic in such matters.
+The larger pyramid, that of the Sun, has an excellent zigzag
+plane approaching its summit. A long road, called
+the “Street of the Dead,” strewn on both sides with
+heaps of weather-worn stones, indicating constructions,
+extends from it to that of the Moon. Both are now
+grown with scrubby nopals and pepper-trees.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of children ran out from a cottage at the foot
+of the Pyramid of the Sun, to sell “<i>caritas</i>,” the little
+antiquities, the day I approached to climb it. From the
+top you see other villages, as San Francisco, Santa Maria
+Cuatlan, San Martin. The inhabitants of San Francisco
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>have erected a cross here, where an idol, with a burnished
+shield, once stood to catch the first rays of the
+rising sun, and come in procession each year, on the 3d
+of May, to conduct a religious ceremonial and drape it
+with flowers. The white summit of Popocatepetl barely
+shows itself above the intervening range of the Rio Frio.
+The officiators at the pagan altar may have hailed it sparkling
+afar, like another sacrificial fire. The country round
+about is garden-like, abounding in maize and maguey,
+sheep and cattle. I observed some large straw-ricks,
+fashioned by leisurely employés, in the prevailing taste
+for adornment, into the form of houses, with a figure of
+a saint chopped out in bass-relief. It was a calm, lovely
+Sunday. A fresh breeze played, though the sun was
+warm; cumulus clouds piled themselves up magnificently;
+and the tinkle of the church-bells came up from the
+surrounding villages.</p>
+
+<p>The clouds—“luminous Andes of the air,” as a poet
+has aptly called them—are of especial impressiveness, I
+think, above this great plain. I noted them again with
+great pleasure at Huamantla, in the state of Tlaxcala. It
+is a shabby place of unpainted adobe, out of which rise
+the fine domes and belfries of a dozen churches, as if
+they were enclosed in a brick-yard. Thither Santa Anna
+retired for his last futile resistance, after the Americans
+under Scott had taken the capital; and there, according to
+the school history, “the terrible American guerilla, Walker,
+was killed in personal combat by an intrepid Mexican officer,
+Eulalio Villaseñor.” Near by is Malinche, a mountain
+dubbed with a nickname given by the Aztecs to
+Cortez, which is a feature of all this part of the country.
+It is not of great height, but of peculiar, volcanic shape.
+It is a long slope, made up of knobs and jags, reaching
+to a central point as sharp as an arrow-head. Peons are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>ploughing, with oxen and the primitive wooden plough,
+in fertile ground around its base, and its dark mass is
+thrown out boldly against dazzling banks of cloud.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>At Orizaba you are down in the tropics again, but not
+tropics of too oppressive a kind. A young friend from
+Mexico was making a visit there in a family to which I
+was admitted, and I was glad to see something of the
+place in a domestic way. It has, say, fifteen thousand
+inhabitants. The Alameda, with its two fountains, stone
+seats, orange-trees, and other shrubberies, is very charming;
+so is the little Zocalo, by the Cathedral. There
+grows in the gardens here the splendid tulipan, a shrub
+in size like the oleander, the large flowers of which glow
+from a distance like scarlet lanterns. Tall bananas bend
+over the neatly whitened houses. My Hotel de Diligencias
+was white and attractive. Next to it a torrent tumbled
+down a wild little gorge, amid a growth of bananas,
+and, passing under a bridge, turned flouring and paper
+mills. I had this under my eyes from my window; and
+I had also an expanse of red-tiled roofs, gray belfries and
+domes, and the bold hill of El Borrego beyond. The city
+is enclosed by a rim of hills. It was now the season when
+the rains were growing frequent; and a humid atmosphere,
+and wet clouds, dragging low and occasionally
+dropping their contents, kept the vegetation of a fresh,
+vivid green.</p>
+
+<p>At the hotel <i>table d’hôte</i> a couple of young men of
+very Indian physiognomy—lawyers, I should judge, by
+profession—talked pantheism and such-like subjects in
+the tone of Victor Hugo’s students. A lady whose husband
+was a general officer told me that she had been in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>the United States—at New Orleans—accounting thus for
+a little knowledge of English. That meant that she had
+shared her husband’s exile there. One comes to understand
+and smile at it after a while. “<i>Tomo el rumbo á
+la costa, y salio de la Republica, embarcandose para Orleans</i>”—“He
+took the road to the coast and sallied from
+the Republic, embarking himself for New Orleans”—has
+passed almost into a formula in the accounts of public
+men, New Orleans having always been a notable place
+of temporary refuge and plotting for their return.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp71" id="illus034" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus034.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE HILL OF EL BORREGO, AT ORIZABA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span></p>
+
+<p>There was a gay party, of station, who had come down
+to <i>pasear</i> a little, in a private car, and were taking back
+with them a great supply of the flowers and fruits of the
+tropics. Shall I reluctantly admit that they all ate with
+their knives, and with the sharp edge foremost? Our
+waiter gave us, smilingly, soup without a spoon, this and
+that other dish without a fork, and hastened off for long
+absences; or he would apathetically say, “<i>No hay</i>”—“There
+is none”—of a dish, but would bring it if it were
+insisted on with decision. A fellow-guest informed me
+at dessert that he had been in New York, and that the
+American fruits and <i>dulces</i>—sweets—were all alike and
+insipid. This shows that there is a natural equilibrium
+in things, for it is precisely the complaint that visitors
+from the North first make of those of the tropics.</p>
+
+<p>My acquaintances in the place were the family of the
+Licenciado—let us say—Herrera y Arroyo. The names
+of both masculine and feminine progenitors are thus
+usually linked together by the “<i>y</i>”—and. They told
+me that there was very little formal entertaining done.
+They occupied themselves with embroidery, studying
+English, and domestic matters. Their house was roomy,
+but had little furniture. The rocking-chair can never
+again be called a peculiarly Yankee feature by anybody
+who has seen it in the lower latitudes. The typical Mexican
+parlor, or living-room, has, like the one here, a mat
+spread down in the centre, on a brick floor, and two cane
+rocking-chairs on one side and two on the other, in which
+the inmates spend much of their time.</p>
+
+<p>We had a kind of picnic one day to the Barrio Nuevo,
+a very pretty coffee-and-milk-like cascade of the Rio Orizaba.
+Boys ran out from thatched cottages in the edge
+of town to pick flowers and offer them to the señoritas,
+expecting to be rewarded, of course, with a little consideration.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>There is another cascade, even prettier—the
+Rincon Grande.</p>
+
+<p>The next day we went to the sugar <i>ingenio</i> of Jalapilla.
+A fine wide avenue of trees stretched up to it. The locusts
+were singing in them. The grass and trees were
+exquisitely green. The snow-peak of Orizaba, hidden at
+the town itself, here rises above intervening hills. There
+were arcades, and monumental gateways, and a massive
+aqueduct on arches, which brings the water from a fine
+torrent. In the sunless green archways of the old aqueduct
+the señoritas found with rapture specimens of rare
+and delicate ferns growing. Ox-wains brought the cane to
+the mills. We watched it through the processes of crushing
+in the machinery, and tasted the pleasant sap when
+first expressed, and later at some of the stages of boiling
+down. <i>Aguardiente</i> is also made on a large scale. The
+peasants along the road sell you a draught of it in its
+unfermented state, with tamales. The residence attached
+is a large, two-story white house, with a high iron gate
+between white posts. It was loaned to Maximilian as a
+country retreat by the conservative owners at one time.
+At present it is shabby and unfurnished, but a single
+room being occupied by the proprietor, who has the
+rough-and-ready tastes of a ranchero, and little taste for
+display.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>At one of the theatres at this time was playing, by a
+Zarazuela, or “variety” company, “La Torre de Neslo
+ó Margarita de Borgogno;” at the other, by a juvenile
+company, “La Fille de Madame Angot.”</p>
+
+<p>Whoever would thoroughly enjoy Mexico must have
+the taste for old architecture. There is no end to it, and
+it is often the only resource. It is of that fantastic rococo
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>into which the Renaissance fell, in the luxury and
+florid invention of its later stages; but even where least
+defensible, from the point of view of logic and fitness, it
+is redeemed now by its mouldering, its time-stains, and
+superposed layers of half-obliterated colors. Little can
+be said, except in this way, for the carvings and various
+detail, but the masses are invariably of a grand and noble
+simplicity. The material is generally rubble-stone and
+cement, and cannot be very expensive. The principal
+lines of the style are horizontal. The dome, semi-circular
+in shape, plays a great part in it. I have counted not
+less than eight, like those of St. Mark’s, at Venice, on a
+single church. The dome is built, if I mistake not, of
+rubble and cement also, on a centring of regular masonry,
+perhaps even of wood. It is a reminiscence of the Moors.
+These edifices were put up three hundred years ago, by
+builders in the flush of the Byzantine influence, which
+radiated from Granada, then lately conquered. I know
+of no school in which the niggling, petty, and expensive
+character of our own efforts in this line could be better
+corrected. <i>Vamenos!</i> Will not some of our leisurely
+young architects with a taste for the picturesque travel
+here, with their sketch-books, and bring us back plans
+and suggestions from this impressive work, for use among
+ourselves?</p>
+
+<p>Some of the old churches take an added interest from
+their present fate. It would have been monotonous to
+have them all alike in full ceremonial, and now they are
+pathetic. I used to linger to hear the buglers practise in
+the cloistered church of Carmen, used as a barracks. It
+is stripped of everything, the pavement broken, the walls
+full of bullet-holes, and painted with the names of detachments,
+as 18º <i>de Infanteria</i>, 7º <i>Compaña de Grenaderos</i>,
+which have occupied it. In the smoke-stains, the damp,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>to which patches of gilding still adhere, and the vestiges
+of scaling fresco, dim, mysterious visions are made out.
+The bare chancel daïs, still surviving, gives to the interior
+the aspect of some noble throne-room. In our own
+country such a monument would be inestimably prized,
+and would become a pilgrimage-place from far and near;
+but here it is simply one of a great number.</p>
+
+<p>In the little public plaza outside a few convicts were
+repairing the paths. A pair of them would bring some
+dirt, about an ordinary wheel-barrow full, on a stretcher,
+dump it in a leisurely way, and go back for more, all with
+plentiful deliberation. They might have been laborers,
+engaged by the city aldermen, on a New York boulevard.
+A couple of soldiers with muskets lounged on the stone
+benches to guard them as they worked. The punishment
+of the prisoners could hardly have been in what they did,
+but principally in the exposure—unless, indeed, they were
+taken from a different part of the country. I wondered
+if their friends came here sometimes and watched them;
+and what a pain it must have been for the sensitive to
+work thus, hedged round by an invulnerable restraint and
+infamy, in sight of the homes where they had lived and
+all the ordinary avocations of life in which they had
+engaged.</p>
+
+<p>An important cotton-factory at Orizaba has a fine architectural
+gate-way, and a statue of the founder, Manuel
+Escandon (1807 to 1862), in the court, after the practice
+heretofore adverted to. Paper is also made here. A series
+of fines is prescribed, in printed rules, for the hands
+coming late in the morning and falling into other misdemeanors.
+The sum of these makes up a fund for charitable
+use among themselves. A savings-bank department
+is also conducted for the benefit of the operatives. To
+encourage savings an extra liberal interest is paid when
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>the amount on deposit has reached fifty dollars. To
+avoid in part the interruption of the frequent church
+holidays, a dispensation had been obtained from the ecclesiastical
+authorities, allowing work to go on, on most
+of them, as usual.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>From Orizaba the next stage was to Cordoba. Cordoba
+is in the full tropics, and there I first made acquaintance
+with the coffee culture, the leading industry of the
+place. The plant is less striking in aspect than I had
+expected. It is a bush, with small, dark, glossy leaves,
+its stem never over six or seven inches in diameter, even
+at an age of fifty years. It is twelve feet high at most,
+but usually topped and kept lower for greater convenience
+in harvesting the product. It bears a little axillary
+white flower, fragrant like jasmine, and the green berries
+at the same time. A coffee plantation has not the breadth
+of the <i>platanaras</i>, the fields of towering bananas; but it
+needs shade, and large oaks are left distributed through
+it which accomplish this purpose. If left to the sun
+wholly it yields large crops at first, then dies. The coffee
+plant should bear after the fourth or fifth year, and
+yield a half-pound yearly for fifty or sixty years. It
+should have cost, up to the time of beginning to bear,
+about twenty-five cents. This is supposing a high cultivation.
+By the more shiftless method commonly found
+in use here it costs but half as much, but, on the other
+hand, yields no more than three ounces on an average.</p>
+
+<p>Some few Americans, and other foreigners, have established
+themselves at Cordoba, and lead a dreamy existence
+in the shade. At one time it was the scene of an extensive
+coffee-planting by ex-Confederate generals, but these
+attempts were not successful. I was fortunate enough
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>to be conducted about by an old gentleman, of German
+birth, who had lived here forty years. He had the tastes
+of a naturalist and farmer, and the existence pleased him.
+He took in his hand a <i>machete</i> from the wall, and we set
+forth for a walk, with much improving discourse by the
+way, in the fields and plantations. The <i>machete</i>, a long
+half cleaver, half sword, opens you a path through a thicket,
+cuts you a coffee or an orange stick, lops an orchid
+from its high perch on the rugged tree-bark, or brings
+down a tall banana, and splits open its covering to serve
+as a protection to a budget of botanical specimens. Some
+small grandchildren of the house begged to accompany
+us. They had hardy, out-of-door habits, and ran by our
+sides with merry clamor, finding a hundred things to
+interest them along the way.</p>
+
+<p>My genial guide had planted coffee himself. Much
+money has been lost at it, it seems, and it cannot be
+very profitable except under economical processes and an
+improved market. When transportation becomes cheaper
+we shall have introduced into the United States from
+Mexico also many choice fruits, notably the fine Manilla
+mango, not now known. The fruits of the country
+grow on you with experience. To my taste the juicy
+mango, which at its best combines something of the melon,
+pine-apple, peach, and pear, is the most delicious of
+them all. Other fruits are the chirimoya, guava, mamé,
+granadita (or pomegranate), zapote, chazapote, tuna, aguacate,
+and many more, the distinctive peculiarities of which
+I could not describe in a week.</p>
+
+<p>The best soil for the coffee is that of virgin slopes, capable
+of being well manured. It should be manured once
+in two years. The planting takes place in the rainy
+season, and the principal harvest is in November and
+December. Women and children cut off the berries,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>which are then dried five or six weeks, and barked; or
+are barked earlier by a machine. The chief labor consists
+in destroying the weeds, which must be done from
+two to six times a year. The plants are set in squares,
+at a distance of about seven feet apart. The trees recommended
+for shade are the fresno, or ash, cedro (cedar),
+the huisache, aguacate, maxcatle, cajiniquil, and tepehuajé,
+the characteristics of which I could hardly explain, more
+than those of the fruits, except that they are generally
+dark and glossy-leaved, and many of them as large as our
+elms. There is a theory, too, in favor of shading by bananas,
+and plantations are found where the two grow
+together.</p>
+
+<p>But a native proprietor with whom I talked objects to
+this. “The platano is a selfish and grasping plant,” he
+says, indignantly. “It draws twice and thrice its proportionate
+amount of nourishment from the soil. Is it not
+beaten down, too, in every storm? And the ravaging
+hedgehog comes in search of it, and, while he is about
+it, destroys the coffee as well. No, indeed, no combination
+of platano and coffee for me!”</p>
+
+<p>The poor platano! However, it can stand abuse. How
+quickly it grows! Its great leaves, more or less tattered
+by friction, flap and rustle above your head like banners
+and sails as you walk about in the tropical plantation. It
+is called the “bread of the tropics.” An acre of land
+will produce enough of it to support fifty people, whereas
+an acre in wheat will support only two. If the tropics
+had had a good deal harder time in getting their bread,
+by-the-way, they would not have been in so down-trodden
+and slipshod a condition.</p>
+
+<p>I will not say that we had the better coffee at our hotel
+for being in its own country. It is the old story of “shoemaker’s
+children” again, I suppose. On the contrary, I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>recollect it as especially poor. The hotel—possibly it has
+improved by this time—was wretchedly kept and served.
+They gave us half a dozen kinds of meat in succession,
+without ever a vegetable, in such a luxuriance of them.
+The waiters were sunk in apathy, the management even
+more so. They seem often to say to you, with an ill-concealed
+aversion, at a Mexican hotel, “If you <i>will</i> stay,
+if you will insist on bringing your traps in, we will do
+what we can for you, but we are not at all anxious for it.”</p>
+
+<p>Pack-mules were kept in the court, and under a cloister
+at one side women and girls were stripping tobacco.
+Your room, at a provincial hotel, opens upon a gallery in
+which mocking-birds are hung in wooden cages—always
+one at least. It is the practice of the Mexican mocking-bird
+to sleep continuously throughout the day, so as to be
+in health and spirits for the exercise of the night. He
+begins at midnight, and continues his dulcet ingenuity of
+torture till daybreak. Naturalists have had much to say
+of the mocking-bird, comparing him to a whole forest full
+of songsters, and the like. It may be unwise to set up in
+opposition to so much praise, but there are times when
+a planing-mill in the vicinity, or a whole foundery full
+of trip-hammers, would be a blessing and relief in comparison.</p>
+
+<p>Should the mocking-bird have injudiciously impaired
+his strength during the day, so as to allow of a brief
+respite, the interval is filled in by the shrill, quavering
+whistles of the street watchmen, who blow to each other
+every quarter of an hour during the night, to show that
+they are awake and vigilant.</p>
+
+<p>You leave Cordoba at 4.30 in the morning; that is, if
+you go by the up-train. I was awakened an hour too soon
+at my hotel, which, having to call me, wanted it over as
+soon as possible. I had leisure while waiting to collect
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>the views of one of these watchmen. He showed me
+the Remington rifle with which he was armed. He said
+that he went on duty at 7 <span class="allsmcap">P.M.</span> and finished at 5.30 <span class="allsmcap">A.M.</span>,
+and received three and a half reals—forty-two cents—a
+day, which he did not think enough. There are no cabs
+at Cordoba. It is a tram-car, making a total of two
+trips a day, that takes you, bag and baggage, two dark
+miles or so to the station.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>But I did not leave before first visiting the Indian
+village of Amatlan. I do not insist that erudition of
+incalculable value has been brought to light in these
+travels, but they were a succession of excursions into
+the actual heart of things. I was pleased when I could
+find something unmodified by the innovations of railway
+travel, and witness the familiar, every-day life of the
+people. Perhaps we never thoroughly understand anybody
+until we learn his routine. A stimulus to what we
+usually neglect, and take as a matter of course, is aroused
+abroad. Law-making, education, buying and selling, eating
+and drinking, marriage, and the burial of the dead, all
+yield entertainment. The traveller who spreads before
+us only the <i>outré</i> and startling that he has seen may still
+leave us very much in the dark about where he has been.
+In Mexico, however, almost everything is <i>outré</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To Amatlan and back is a comfortable day’s excursion.
+We found saddle-horses for hire, and a young Indian as a
+guide, and set off. My companion on this excursion was
+a commercial traveller, a sprightly young American of
+Spanish origin. Commercial traveller in machetes and
+other cutlery: such was his profession. The machetes
+were of American make. I have one hanging in my room
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>at this writing which came from Water Street, in New
+York. This agent had taken his last order (having canvassed
+the little store-keepers in the plaza under my own
+view, as if they had been those of Kalamazoo, Aurora,
+or Freeport), and was awaiting the sailing of his steamer
+from Vera Cruz. Having nothing more to do, he entered
+into the examination of manners and customs for their
+own sake with a certain zest, though perhaps comprehending
+for the first time that such things could be
+worth anybody’s notice.</p>
+
+<p>Amatlan is the richest Indian village in—well, one of
+the richest of Indian villages. Its plantations of pine-apples
+are the finest in the state of Vera Cruz, to which all
+this territory from Orizaba down belongs, Orizaba being
+its capital. The pines grow about sixteen inches in height,
+and should last ten years. They are set in narrow lines,
+and the general aspect of the field from a little distance
+is that of large sedge-grass. You will buy three of them
+sometimes for a <i>tlaco</i>, one cent and a half. We met natives
+driving donkey-loads of them to market. There
+were some fields of tobacco, of fine quality, in flower.
+The Peak of Orizaba is magnificently seen from all this
+district. It is lovelier and bolder than at first upon familiar
+acquaintance. Church, the painter, finds the preferable
+point of view farther up the railroad, using the wild
+gorges of Fortin as a foreground. The village proved to
+be composed chiefly of wooden and cane huts, shingled
+or thatched, and the population to be exclusively Indian.
+They do not wish any others to join them. They display
+everywhere the same clannish disposition. If persons of
+European origin who might come to remain could not
+be got rid of by churlishness, it is thought that severer
+means would be resorted to.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian race, as a rule, is patient and untiring in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>certain minor directions. They make long, swift journeys,
+for instance, acting as beasts of burden or messengers,
+so that, seeing their performances, the words of Buffon
+come forcibly to mind: “The civilized man knows
+not half his powers.” But in the greater concerns of life,
+those requiring forethought for a permanent future, they
+are very improvident. Perhaps, however, those of Amatlan
+differ from others, or perhaps the general reputation
+may not be wholly deserved, for the Cordobans tell you
+that Amatlan is even richer than Cordoba.</p>
+
+<p>There are said to be a number of native residents worth
+from $50,000 to $80,000 each. They buy land, and bury
+their surplus cash in the ground. It may well enough be
+that the lack of savings-banks, or any more secure place
+of deposit for money than the ground, has something to
+do with the improvidence complained of. The alcalde,
+the chief of them, was estimated as worth a million,
+though this I should very much doubt. He had no large
+ways of using his wealth, but was said to incline to avarice
+and delight in simply piling it up. There was a
+project at one time to build a tram-road hence to Cordoba,
+the capital to be supplied in part by the Indians,
+but it fell through. Some of the well-to-do send their
+sons to good schools, and even to Mexico, to take the
+degree of licentiate. These favored scions, on their return,
+must put on the usual dress, and live in no way
+differently from the rest. The daughters, on the other
+hand, are never educated, but set, without exception, to
+rolling tortillas and the other domestic drudgery.</p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>We dined at an open-air shanty posada, with dogs and
+pigs running freely about under our feet. Coffee, without
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>milk, sugar, and pine-apples were all supplied by the
+fields about. Some few spectators were interested, but
+not very much, in a slight sketch I made of their buildings
+and costume. My commercial traveller, by way of
+arousing greater enthusiasm in this, represented that it
+was to be “put in a machine” afterward, and showed,
+by a dexterous chuckle and twist of the thumb, how it
+would then be so improved that you would never know
+it. But even this stirred them only indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>We visited the alcalde in his quarters. He was
+bristly-haired, clad in cotton shirt and drawers, and bare-legged,
+like the rest. Official business for the day was
+over, but he showed us the cell in which on occasion he
+locked up evil-doers. He was said to administer justice
+impartially to the rich and poor alike, and with a natural
+good-sense. But for occasional perversions of justice effected
+by a Spanish secretary he was obliged to employ,
+he himself being illiterate, it was thought that his court
+averaged well with the more pretentious tribunals of the
+country.</p>
+
+<p>We rode back by a different way, through a large, cool
+wood. It abounded in interesting orchids, and there was
+an undergrowth of coffee run wild, the glossy green of
+its leaves as shining as if just wet by rain. There was
+not that excessive tangle and luxuriance supposed to be
+characteristic of the tropics; our own woods are quite as
+rampant. All that is found, you learn, in Tehuantepec, for
+instance, and Central America. There tree-growths seize
+upon a dwelling, crunch its bones, as it were, and bear up
+part of the walls into the air; and it is vegetable more
+than animal life that is feared. We forded three pretty
+brooks, and came to an upland where cows were pasturing,
+and the steeples of Cordoba were again in sight.
+Our young guide lassoed a cow, led her to a shed where
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>tobacco was drying, and offered us the refreshment of a
+draught of new milk.</p>
+
+<p>Being asked if this were quite regular and correct, he
+answered that the cows were there at pasturage in charge
+of his uncle. I trust that this was so.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XVII">XVII.<br>
+<i>PUEBLA, CHOLULA, TLAXCALA.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>You turn off from the junction of Apizaco, on the Vera
+Cruz railway, to go to the large, fine city of Puebla. It
+is the capital of the state of the same name, and has a
+population of about seventy-seven thousand. Many prosperous
+<i>fabricas</i> (factories) are seen along the fertile valley
+of approach; then the forts, attacked and defended
+on the great Cinco de Mayo, appear on the hills, looking
+down, like Mont Valerien and Charenton above Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly everything out of Mexico is not Cuatitlan.
+Puebla is very clean, well paved, and well drained. The
+streets are not too wide, as many of them are at the capital.
+I thought our hotel, De Diligencias, which was very
+well kept, by a Frenchman, much better than the Iturbide.
+It had been a palace in its day, and had traces yet
+of armorial sculptures. Our rooms opened upon a wide
+upper colonnade, where the table was spread. It was full
+of flowers, which shut out whatever might have been
+disagreeable to the eye below. I am bound to admit that
+the remorseless mocking-bird sang all night among them.
+I have mentioned heretofore the tiled front of a shop,
+“La Ciudad de Mexico.” A picturesque mosaic-work in
+tiles of earthen-ware and china upon a ground of blood-red
+stone abounds. Sometimes it is a diagonal pattern,
+covering a whole surface; again only a broad wainscot or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>frieze. Plaques, representing saints, which you take at
+first for hand-bills, are let into walls. These tiles are
+made at Puebla, where there are as many as ten <i>fabricas</i>
+of them, the best in the country. I visited one of these,
+found the manufacture cheap, and brought away some
+specimens. The workmanship is rude and hasty, but the
+effect artistic and adapted to its purpose. The most liberal
+example of their use, and one of the most charming
+interiors I have ever seen, was that of what is now the
+<i>Casa de Dementes</i>, or lunatic asylum for men, of the state
+of Puebla. It was formerly a convent of the nuns of
+Santa Rosa, and was decorated after their taste. Entrance,
+vestibule, stairs, central court, and cloisters, with
+fountain in the centre; balustrade, benches, tanks and
+bath-tubs, kitchen furnace, and numberless little garden
+courts, are all encrusted with quaint ceramics. It is like
+walking about in some magnified piece of jewelry. The
+blue-and-yellow fountain in its court is as Moorish as
+anything in Morocco.</p>
+
+<p>There are forty-two patients in this institution, with an
+attendant appointed to each ten. The rich among them
+pay $16 a month, the rest nothing. Another one, San
+Roque, contains thirty-two women, also maintained by the
+state. The general hospital, of San Pedro, another large
+ex-convent, with a nice garden, was clean, cool, and well
+ordered; and—curious feature to note—departments for
+allopath and homœopath arranged impartially side by
+side. These governments take, officially, no sides with
+either, but give them both a showing.</p>
+
+<p>The Cathedral at Puebla is equal in magnificence to
+that at Mexico. There is the usual Zocalo, full of charming
+plants, before it. The large theatre, “De Guerrero,”
+entered by a passage from the portales, had but a scant
+audience on the evening of our attendance, but was itself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>worthy of inspection. It had four tiers of boxes and a
+pit; the decoration was in white and gold, upon a ground
+of blue-and-white wall-paper, the whole of a chaste and
+elegant effect. The peasant costumes of women in each
+of the provinces vary in colors and material, though the
+same general shapes are preserved. At Cordoba, white
+and striped cotton stuffs were in order; at Mexico,
+Egyptian-looking blue-and-black woollen goods. Those
+in all this part of the country I thought particularly
+pleasing; and the great market and gay Parian, or bazaar,
+where they are principally displayed, were not soon
+exhausted as a spectacle. The men are usually bare-legged,
+and in white cotton. In the warm part of the
+day they carry their bright-colored serapes folded over
+one shoulder, and when it is cooler put them on, by simply
+inserting their heads through the slit.</p>
+
+<p>Now comes by a woman in white, with a red cap and
+girdle; now two girls of fourteen, all in white, hurrying
+swiftly along under heavy burdens. Here are women in
+embroidered jackets, others in chemises, with profuse
+bands of colored beads, or rebosos of rayed stuff, like the
+Algerian burnous. Skirts are of white blanket material,
+with borders of blue, or blue with white, or yellow.
+The principal garment is a mere skirt of uncut goods,
+wrapped around the hips and kept in place by a bright
+girdle. Above this is whatever fantastic waist one
+pleases, or a garment with an opening for the head, after
+the fashion of the serape. To all this is added a profusion
+of necklaces of large beads, amber, blue, and green,
+and large silver ear-rings, or others of glass, in the Mexican
+national colors, green, white, and red. There is a
+universal carrying of burdens. The men accommodate
+theirs in a large wooden cage divided into compartments.
+The women tie over their backs budgets done up in a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>rug of coarse maguey fibre. Often they carry a child
+or an earthen jar in it; or, when full, pile a large green
+or red water-jar on the top.</p>
+
+<p>Affording so abundant material for the artist, they
+were excessively suspicious of any attempt to turn it to
+account. There were traditions among them that bad
+luck would be encountered should they allow pictures to
+be taken. It was to take away something from themselves,
+and they would be left incomplete—probably to
+waste and die. Nor could their costumes be bought from
+them except with great difficulty. Much as still remains,
+there has been a great change, and disappearance, since
+the close of Maximilian’s empire, of local peculiarities in
+dress. There has been a disappearance, too, with the advent
+of machinery and imported notions, of many pretty
+hand-made articles that formerly adorned the markets.
+Among these were carvings in charcoal, once of a peculiar
+excellence. Of those that remain still of great interest
+are life-like puppets, in wax and wood, of figures
+of the country, costumed after their several types.</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of May 19th, as we sat at dinner in
+the hotel corridor, down came the rain in the court. In
+a few moments a row of long gargoyles were spouting
+streams which were white against the blackness, and
+crossed one another like a set display. “<i>Va!</i> for the
+rainy season!” said the host. It usually begins by the
+15th. “<i>Voilà!</i> ten months past in which we have had
+scarcely a drop!”</p>
+
+<p>As almost any desired climate can be had by varying
+more or less the altitude, the rainy season is of variable
+date in different parts of the country. At Mexico it is
+very much later. I did not find it, either here or elsewhere,
+so incommoding as might be fancied. It rains principally
+at night, and the succeeding day is bright and clear.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>In Mexico, as in California, the rainy season means that
+in which rain falls about as with us, while the dry season
+is that in which there is none at all.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>Have any forgotten the tragic advent, and preliminary
+agitations, of the entry of Cortez into the sacred city
+of Cholula? He assembled the caciques and notables in
+the great square, and at a given signal, turned his arms
+upon them and slew them, to the number of three thousand.
+He had discovered an artful plot among them for
+the destruction of his army, and it was his aim in this way
+to strike such a terror into the country that he should
+have done with such things once for all. The god worshipped
+at Cholula was a far milder one than the bloody
+war god at Mexico—the peaceful Quetzalcoatl, God of the
+Air. He instructed the people in agriculture and the arts.
+His reign was a golden age. Cotton grew already tinted
+with gorgeous dyes, and a single ear of maize was as
+much as a man could carry. To his honor the largest of
+all the teocallis and temples was erected. He was represented
+with painted shield, jewelled sceptre, and plumes
+of fire. Could Cortez have waited till now (such are the
+changes of time) he might have gone into Cholula from
+Puebla, to the foot of this very pyramid, in a beautiful
+horse-car. A tramway, ultimately to be extended, and
+operated by steam, reached to this point, a distance of six
+miles, and our conveyance was a horse-car with a glass
+front (New York built) which I have never seen equalled
+elsewhere. The driver of it was a Tennessee negro, who
+had married an Indian maid and settled, much respected,
+in the country. He had formerly been body-servant of a
+Mexican general, had travelled with him in the United
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>States and Europe, and picked up several languages. He
+called upon us afterward at our hotel, to politely inquire
+our impressions of his tramway.</p>
+
+<p>The principal features of the trip were exquisite views
+of Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl across yellow grain-fields;
+a dilapidated convent turned to an iron foundery; an old
+aqueduct crossing the plain; a Spanish bridge, sculptured
+with armorial bearings, across the river Atoyac;
+and a fine grist-mill; and farther on a cotton-mill, turned
+by the water-power of the same river.</p>
+
+<p>There has been a controversy as to whether the great
+mound was natural or artificial in origin. I do not see
+how there can be doubt about it now, for where numerous
+deep cuts have been made in it, for roads or cultivation,
+the artificial structure of adobe bricks is plainly visible.
+Such a place as it is to lie upon at ease and dream and go
+back to the traditions of the past! You may cast yourself
+down under large trees growing on the now ragged slopes,
+or by the pilgrimage chapel on the crest, where the God of
+the Air once reared his grotesque bulk. There is a sculptured
+cross, dated 1666, at the edge of the terrace, and
+rose-bushes grow out of the pavement. I know of no
+prospect of fertile hill and dale, scattered with quaint villages,
+in any country that surpasses it. An American
+was there that day with the purpose of buying a hacienda,
+if he could find one suitable, and I for one thought
+there were many plans much less sensible.</p>
+
+<p>Cholula had four hundred towers in its pagan times,
+and it may have had round about it almost as many spires
+when the Christian domination succeeded. Let me recite
+the names of a few of the villages seen from the top
+of the great pyramid, all with their churches, by twos
+and threes, or more: San Juan; San Andres; Santiago;
+Chicotengo; La Santissima; La Soledad; San Rafael;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>San Pablo Mexicalcingo; San Diego; La Madalena;
+Santa Marta; Santa Maria; San Isidoro; San Juan Calvario;
+San Juan Tlanutla; San Mateo; San Miguelito
+(Little Saint Michael); Jesus; San Sebastian.</p>
+
+<p>One of the old churches lying deserted in the fields
+might be purchased, no doubt, and utilized for the basis
+of a picturesque manor-house. Suppose we should take
+yonder one, for instance, down by the Haciendita de
+Cruce Vivo—the Little Hacienda of the Living Cross?
+A cloud is just now passing over, marking the place
+with a dark patch. A brook is leaping white through
+the meadow, trees stretch back from the walls, and the
+rest lying in strong light is divided by patches of an exquisite
+cultivation with the regularity of market-gardens.</p>
+
+<p>We dined, at Cholula, at the clean Fonda de la Reforma,
+in a large, brick-floored room, invaded by flowers
+from a court-yard garden. No people can fashion such
+charming homes without excellent traits; so much is positive
+beyond dispute. We were admitted, I think, to the
+residence portion of the house, the owner of which was a
+doctor, and we examined, while waiting for our repast, a
+lot of his antiquated medical books, some dating from
+1700.</p>
+
+<p>The plaza is as large as at Mexico, but grass-grown—for
+the place is of but modest pretensions now—and lonely,
+except on market-day, when the scene is as gay and the
+costumes even prettier than at Puebla itself. In the centre
+is a Zocalo; at one side a vast array of battlemented
+churches. That of the Capilla Real, consisting of three
+in one, is now decayed and abandoned. On the other is
+a fine colonnade devoted to the Ayuntamienta, or town
+council, with the jail. What a pity it is that we have so
+scant accounts left us of the life of Mexico when all this
+feudal magnificence was in full blast!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp59" id="illus035" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus035.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PRISONERS WEAVING SASHES AT CHOLULA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span></p>
+
+<p>I cannot say just why I visited so many prisons. Perhaps
+because they were always under the eye, adjoining
+the public offices, and the prisoners were a cheerful lot,
+who did what they could to attract attention. At Cholula
+we found them weaving, on a primitive kind of
+hand-loom, bright sashes of red and blue, which are sold
+in part for their own benefit. Their accommodations
+compared favorably with the barracks along-side. When
+we asked questions about them they stopped work and
+listened attentively. The guards, I fancy, thought we
+were trying to identify some persons who had robbed us—not
+conceiving of such a visit for the pure pleasure
+of it.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>When I inquired the way to Tlaxcala there was such
+an ignorance on the subject at my hotel, at Puebla, that it
+almost seemed as if I was the first person who could ever
+have been there. A luxurious Englishman abandoned
+me at this part of the expedition, claiming that nobody
+knew whether there were conveyances from the junction,
+whether there were even inns. It seemed to him a case
+of sitting on a Tlaxcalan door-step and perishing of hunger,
+or being washed away by the torrents of the rainy
+season. I found, however, that there was a choice of two
+trains a day, and went on alone. What then? I suppose
+Cortez did rather more than that. Tlaxcala was the most
+undaunted and terrible of all his enemies. He made his
+way to it after insuperable obstacles, and it was only by
+the alliance of the warlike Tlaxcalans, when he had finally
+won them over to his cause, that he effected the conquest
+of Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>The recollection had involuntarily given me rather
+dark and depressing ideas of Tlaxcala, as a place of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>gloomy forests and gorges suited for martial resistance.
+Who that has not seen it, I wonder, has the proper conception
+of Tlaxcala?</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>It is not gloomy; there are no forests; the country is
+open and rolling; and the name “Tlaxcala,” it now appears,
+is fertility, the “Land of Bread.” I left at 11 <span class="allsmcap">A.M.</span>,
+and arrived at the village of Santa Ana, on the railroad
+to Apizaco, in a couple of hours. After a time a conveyance
+was to be had, in the shape of a dilapidated hack
+drawn by three horses, in the lead, and two mules. This
+was run as a stage-line to Tlaxcala; and in an hour more,
+largely of floundering over ruts and following the beds
+of swollen brooks—for nobody ever thinks of mending a
+road in Mexico—we were there. We met, on the way, the
+carriage of the state Governor, an ancient coupé, improved
+by the addition of a boot, and drawn by two horses and
+two mules. I was deposited on the sidewalk at the upper
+side of a plaza, and scrutinized keenly when there by the
+shop-keepers of the surrounding arcades and loungers on
+comfortable stone benches.</p>
+
+<p>Tlaxcalan allies, in the shape of a small boy and a
+larger assistant, seized upon my satchel, and we set out
+for a personal inspection of such houses of entertainment
+as were to be heard of. The Posada of Genius was altogether
+too wretched and shabby, as is apt to be the way
+with genius. The Meson of the—I have forgotten its
+name—was too full to offer accommodation, and had a
+morose landlord, who seemed to rejoice in the fact. I
+came at last to a house where simply chambers were to
+be let. It was highly commended by my smaller Tlaxcalan
+ally, a very rapid-talking small boy, with the air of
+one much in the habit of dodging missiles.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span></p>
+
+<p>“It will be two reals” (twenty-five cents) “the night,
+as you see it,” said the proprietor, waving a hand in an
+interior bare of furniture.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! two reals the night!”</p>
+
+<p>“But perhaps the gentleman would desire also a bed,
+a wash-stand, and a looking-glass?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, let us say a bed, wash-stand, and looking-glass.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then it will be four reals the night.”</p>
+
+<p>The larger Tlaxcalan ally, who had had nothing to do,
+established a claim for services by offering praise of each
+successive article of furniture as it was brought in, as,
+“<i>Muy buena cama, señor!</i>” “<i>Muy bonito espejo!</i>”—“A
+very fine bed, señor!” “A very charming mirror, señor!”—and
+the like.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>Now, all this is all exactly as it happened, and one
+should hardly be compelled to spoil a good story by adding
+to it. Yet this appearance of amusing stupidity is
+dissipated, after all, by remembering the methods of
+travel in the country. Many, or most, journeys are
+made on horseback, and the guest is likely to want only
+a room where he can lock up his saddle and saddle-bags
+and sleep on his own blankets, or, if luxurious, on a light
+cot, carried with other baggage on a pack-mule. This is
+all the accommodation provided at the general run of
+the mesones.</p>
+
+<p>At the Fonda y Cafe de la Sociedad I supped, by the
+light of two candles, with a gentleman in long riding-boots,
+who had a paper-mill in the neighborhood. He
+told me that he had learned the business at Philadelphia.
+He was of a friendly disposition, and declared that I was
+to consider him henceforth my correspondent, so far as
+I might have need of one, on all matters, commercial and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>otherwise, at Tlaxcala. And to that extent I may say I
+do so consider him to this day.</p>
+
+<p>My room had, first, a pair of glass doors, then a pair of
+heavy wooden ones, and opened on a damp little court,
+in which the rain was falling. There were no windows
+nor transom, positively no other opening than a couple
+of diminutive holes in the wooden door, like</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“The fiery eyes of Pauguk glaring at him through the darkness,”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">as one awoke to them in the early morning. Another
+streak under the door figured as a sort of mouth.
+There was a clashing of swords in a corner of the shady
+and handsome Zocalo when I went out, and I fancied at
+first a duel, but it was only a couple of <i>Rurales</i> going
+through their sabre exercise under direction of an officer.
+The morning was bright and beautiful. Hucksters were
+putting up their stands in the arcades for the day’s business.
+A new market elsewhere, consisting of a series of
+light, open pavilions, was one of the best in arrangement
+I have ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>Tlaxcala recalls some such provincial Italian place as
+Este, seat of the famous historic house of that name. It
+has once been more important than now. The persons
+of principal consideration are the state employés. It is
+the capital of the smallest of the states, the Rhode Island
+or Delaware of the Mexican federation. I entered the
+quarters of the Legislature, and found there the Governor,
+a small, fat, Indian-looking man, scarred with a
+deep cut on his cheek, conferring with a committee of
+his law-makers. There are eight of these in all, and they
+receive an annual stipend of $1000 each. In the legislative
+hall a space is railed off for the president and two
+secretaries. There is a little tribune at this rail, from
+which the speeches are made. The members face each
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>other, in two rows, and comfortably smoke during their
+sessions, after the custom of the Congress at Mexico also.
+The rest is reserved for spectators. On the walls are four
+quaint old portraits of the earliest chiefs converted to
+Christianity, all with “Don” before their names.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp68" id="illus036" style="max-width: 17.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus036.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>OLD FONT AT TLAXCALA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The secretary of the Ayuntamienta has in a glass case
+in his office some few idols, the early charter of the city
+and regulations of the province, and the tattered silken
+banner carried by Cortez in the conquest. This last, once
+a rich crimson, is faded to a shabby coffee-color, and the
+silver has vanished from its spear-head, showing copper
+beneath. Tossed into corners were two large heaps of
+old, vellum-bound books from the convents. This is a
+common enough sight in Mexico. Treasures are abundant
+here which our own connoisseurs would delight to
+treat with the greatest respect. Apart from this there is
+no other museum nor especial display of antiquity. The
+town, kept nicely whitewashed, looks rather new. It contains,
+however, the oldest church
+in Mexico. The chapel of San
+Francisco, part of a dismantled
+convent, now used as a barracks,
+bears the date of 1529, and within
+it are the first baptismal font
+(the same in which the Tlaxcalan
+chiefs above-mentioned were
+baptized by Cortez) and the first
+Christian pulpit in America.
+The ceiling is of panelled cedar,
+picked out with gilded suns and
+the like. The approach is up an inclined plane, shaded
+with ash-trees. Through three large arches of an entrance
+gate-way, flanked by a tower, the town below appears as
+through a series of frames. A massive church in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>town plaza was cracked and unfitted for use by an earthquake
+in the year 1800, and its ruins stand untouched,
+with the bells still hanging in the steeple.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp52" id="illus037" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus037.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE FIRST CHRISTIAN PULPIT IN AMERICA. TLAXCALA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>To counterbalance this a modern church, very white,
+and a landmark to all the country round about, has been
+put up on the high hill of Ocatlan, a couple of miles
+back. I climbed there and looked down upon the prospect.
+Women and girls were going up to the sanctuary
+with bunches of roses, on some religions errand. There
+were wild pinks by the wayside, the air was full of the
+twittering of birds, and the chimes rang musically.
+Looked down upon from the height, Tlaxcala was seen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>to be a compact little place, flat-roofed, low, almost exactly
+square. The wide bed of the Zatuapan River, now
+very shallow, wound by it. The opposite hills, hung
+over by vapors and rain-clouds with changing lights
+among them, were now purplish and now indigo black.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp78" id="illus038" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus038.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PART OF CONVENT OF SAN FRANCISCO. TLAXCALA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>On the floor above me at my lodging resided, in a
+comfortable way, a doctor. He had with him a friend,
+French by nationality but long resident at Mexico, who
+was at present <i>paseando</i> a little here for his health. This
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>gentleman confided to me, mysteriously, that, since spending
+some time here, he had reason to believe that there
+were mines of silver and gold in the vicinity. In fact,
+he knew of some. “An Indian, some years ago,” he said,
+“brought to the padre of one of the churches two papers
+containing a fine dust. It was <i>poudre d’or</i>—gold-dust—nothing
+less. What do you think of that?”</p>
+
+<p>I thought highly of it—as I always do of treasure
+stories; nothing is more entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>“There are indications, in reading history,” he went
+on, “that much of the supply of the precious metals in
+the time of the Conquerors was taken from here. You
+are aware that most of the valuable mines were abandoned
+by the Spaniards in the terrors of the War of Independence,
+and have never since been worked. Often
+their very location has been forgotten. I have a friend
+here who has certain knowledge of a place where <i>poudre
+d’or</i> can be found.”</p>
+
+<p>He paused, perhaps to allow an offer to be made for
+an interest in the attractive enterprise, but none was
+made.</p>
+
+<p>He continued, alluringly: “It is my intention to enter
+into thorough explorations, now that I have leisure, as
+soon as my health is slightly more restored.”</p>
+
+<p>I took the seat beside the driver on the ancient conveyance,
+going back to Santa Ana. We went along sandy
+lanes, in which the rain of the night before was almost
+dry, and between hedges of maguey. Maize on the right—tall
+but slender, and without the large ears we are accustomed
+to; barley and wheat on the left. All the
+country fertile. Malinche boldly in sight, and a sky of
+rolling clouds, as in Holland. Shock-headed Indian children,
+with a Chinese look, holding babies, and peering at
+us out of rifts in palisades of organ-cactus. Bright skeins
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>of wool in door-yards, and glimpses of peasants weaving
+serapes in interiors. I recollect that morning as one of
+a few of unalloyed content. Perhaps it was because, in
+being at Tlaxcala, I had gratified a curiosity of an exceptional
+eagerness.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XVIII">XVIII.<br>
+<i>MINES AND MINING TRAITS, AT PACHUCA AND REGLA.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>We bought tickets for Pachuca at the Hotel Gillow,
+in Mexico. Pachuca, one of the earliest, and richest, of
+the mining districts in the country, notable for both its
+earlier and later history, is, fortunately, also one of the
+most accessible to the traveller from the capital.</p>
+
+<p>We took the train, from Buena Vista Station, at six in
+the morning. At Omeltusco, forty miles down the Vera
+Cruz Line, a group of diligences stood in waiting. Our
+own proved to be drawn by eight mules—two wheelers,
+four in the centre, and two leaders. We jolted along execrable
+roads, turned out where the mud-holes threatened
+to engulf us, and rode instead over high maguey stumps
+which threatened to hurl us back into them. The country
+was covered with magueys. The driver, by whom I
+sat, on the box-seat, for the better view of what was passing,
+asked me, in a patronizing way,</p>
+
+<p>“Have the Norte Americanos also <i>pulque</i>? and do
+they <i>se borrachau</i> (get drunk) with it, like people here?”</p>
+
+<p>We reached San Agostin, a shabby adobe hamlet, at
+eleven o’clock, waited there a while for the Philadelphia-built
+horse-car on the tramway, of which I have before
+spoken, and were at Pachuca about sundown. As to scenery,
+historically, and from the point of view of its returns,
+Pachuca is rivalled among raining districts perhaps
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>only by Guanajuato; but the place itself is shabby, and,
+lying nine thousand feet above the sea, its atmosphere is
+raw and penetrating even in July. Regularly every afternoon
+blow up a breeze and a dust like those which have
+attained celebrity at San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>There were said to be ten thousand miners at work in
+the district. Perhaps five hundred are British subjects,
+originally from the tin mines of Cornwall. They manifest
+in their new surroundings a rude independence of
+character amounting to surliness. I heard here of my
+French engineer who had been sent over to examine
+mining property. He had eccentrically given his left
+hand, after a way some Frenchmen have, to the captain
+of one of the mines, on his descent, and the colony talked
+of nothing but this. They had banded together to guy
+and mislead him in his inquiries as much as possible, and
+one of them told me, with a bitterness the trivial circumstance
+hardly seemed to warrant, that if he came again,
+with his supercilious way of treating people, they would
+try to tumble him into some pit. Our poor friend, I
+fear, went away, if he believed what was told him, with
+some very singular items of information.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>Pachuca has become a good-sized city within a comparatively
+modern period, while Real del Monte, adjoining,
+once more important, still remains a village. The English
+element is not new in either. There was probably
+more of it toward 1827 than even now. On the close of
+the War of Independence an impression went abroad of
+most brilliant profits awaiting whoever would furnish
+capital to reopen and work the old Spanish mines abandoned
+and ruined in the disasters of the long struggle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span></p>
+
+<p>The idea was seized upon with especial avidity in England.
+It was represented that but two simple things were
+needed: the pumping-out of the water which had accumulated
+in the disused shafts, and improved machinery
+for working at lower levels, than those which had been
+within the reach of the primitive appliances of the country.
+Seven great English companies were formed, which
+proceeded to pour out millions upon millions of pounds,
+distributing the money among the several mining districts
+of chief repute; and these half depopulated Cornwall
+for laborers for the new interests. The idea was
+in itself a good one. Mexico had produced in three hundred
+years of mining, according to the estimate of Humboldt,
+$1,767,952,000 of value in the precious metals.
+The yield had been going on before the Revolution at
+the rate of $30,000,000 yearly. It was an industry of
+the greatest regularity. From 3000 to 5000 mines were
+in operation, and constituted its chief wealth. Its towns
+were mining towns; its great families mining families.
+The funds from this source had built the churches, the
+dams for irrigation by which the great agricultural
+estates were brought under cultivation, and had supplied
+the gifts and loans to the King by which the nobility
+secured their titles. By the Revolution this source of
+wealth was exhausted and dried up. The new Congress
+of the country felt the imperative need of doing something
+to reopen it, and encouraged the advent of foreign
+capital by a legislation which is still felt as a liberalizing
+influence in mining matters.</p>
+
+<p>The idea was a good one, as I say, but the foreign investors
+did not sufficiently estimate the difficulties of their
+undertaking, the novelty of the country, language, persons,
+and processes, and the physical obstacles with which
+they had to deal. Almost without exception they lost
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>money. The “boom” of 1824 was followed by a panic
+in 1826, a general depression at home, and, in course of
+time, the transfer of the interests to cheaper hands.</p>
+
+<p>Among the English companies mentioned was the Real
+del Monte Company, which bought up, among others, all
+the mines of the Count of Regla, at Real del Monte and
+Pachuca. These had produced in fifty years $26,500,000.
+The history of the growth of the Count’s magnificence is
+briefly this. His principal vein, the Biscaina, had been
+worked continuously from the middle of the sixteenth
+century. Its yield in 1726 was nearly $4,500,000. In
+the beginning of the eighteenth century it was abandoned
+in consequence of the impossibility of drainage with the
+defective appliances of that day. A shrewd individual
+took up these mines anew in later years, and associated
+with him Don Pedro Tereros, a small capitalist, who became
+his heir. In 1762 Tereros struck a bonanza, and in
+twelve years took out $6,000,000. He procured the title
+of Count of Regla by his munificent gifts to Charles III.,
+and, investing his money judiciously, entered upon the
+career of splendor to which reference has heretofore been
+made.</p>
+
+<p>By 1801, however, he found himself at such a depth
+with his levels that the yield was insufficient to pay the
+expenses of extraction, and the mines were again disused.
+It was in this condition that the English company took
+them, knowing full well that there was treasure in the
+deeper levels, and proposing to bring it out with its
+improved machinery and Cornish labor.</p>
+
+<p>The director took a salary of $40,000 a year, built himself
+a castellated palace, and rode out with a body-guard
+of fifty horsemen. A magnificent road was built to Regla,
+six leagues away. The only access thither, for the six
+hundred mules of the Count of Regla, had been by a dangerous
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>bridle-path. Five large steam-engines and lesser
+machinery were dragged up from the coast at Vera Cruz,
+occupying the labor of a hundred men and seven hundred
+mules for five months.</p>
+
+<p>In all this probably a million pounds was consumed.
+Treasure was not found as expected—what there was appearing
+instead in new mines. After struggling hopelessly
+a while the management passed into other hands.
+The parade was dispensed with, and the costly machinery
+sold out, to a Mexican company, for about its value as
+old iron, and then the property began to pay.</p>
+
+<p>An English “Anglo-Mexican Company” also owned
+mines at Pachuca, and in like manner came to grief.
+There was an element of luck in all this, too, it must be
+admitted. Less than a hundred feet from where work
+was stopped in the Rosario, for instance, one of the mines
+of the latter, the new company struck a bonanza, which
+has been paying munificently ever since.</p>
+
+<p>The present director, Señor Llandero y Cos, a brother
+of the Secretary of State, lives in the same castellated
+palace, but on a simpler scale. I had reason to know
+that even he had had not a little to suffer from the
+fierce independence of his surrounding Cornishmen. I
+descended into two of the richest mines, Santa Gertrudis
+and San Rosario. Of these Santa Gertrudis has paid in
+a brief space thirty-nine dividends of $20,000 each.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>The interior, even of the richest Mexican silver-mine,
+is hardly what the novice might expect. You put a candle,
+pasted by a lump of mud, on the top of your hat and
+crawl through all sorts of dark and dripping holes. Now
+and then a guide flashes his light on some black and grayish
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>discolorations with a look of professional pride, but
+you do not exactly fall down in ecstasy over these. There
+are no forks and spoons hanging ready to your hand, no
+presentation plate, nor even ingots. The heaps of ore
+about the shafts do not glitter, and seem good for little
+but to mend the roads. The principal shafts are about
+sixteen feet in diameter, the galleries five by eight, and
+spaced about eighty feet apart. At the San Pedro mine
+the pumping-engine was of one hundred and fifty horse-power,
+and another of the same power drew up the malacate,
+or skip, full of ore in bags of maguey fibre. In
+some of the old mines, at Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi,
+they tell us, peons still tote the ore up the interminable
+ladders on their backs; but this, I think, must be
+rare. The depth of the Santa Gertrudis is about six hundred
+feet. The material is marl, limestone, and quartz,
+all of a soft character and easy to work, but requiring a
+heavy timbering-up. The clothing of the laborers is ransacked
+for nuggets by three separate searchers in turn, as
+they emerge from their work.</p>
+
+<p>There is a Government School of Practical Mining at
+Pachuca, to which students are sent after finishing the
+theoretical course at the Mineria, or school of technology,
+in Mexico. The director, an affable man, showed us the
+process of beneficiating, or extracting the metal from the
+rough ore, in miniature. You see the rock first crushed
+and reduced, with water, to a paste, then mingled with
+sulphate of copper, common salt, and quicksilver, which
+get hold of the metal. The quicksilver is afterward withdrawn
+and reserved for continued use. He gave me, also,
+a pamphlet of his on a new form of application of “La
+Accion Mechanica del Viento”—the mechanical action
+of the wind. A large wind-mill was moving in the
+court-yard made in accordance with his principle, which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>substituted large zinc cones for the ordinary sails and
+slats.</p>
+
+<p>The extracting processes were more entertainingly seen,
+however, at the beneficiating haciendas themselves. The
+“Loreto” is one of the principal. The ore is crushed
+either by the Cornish stamp, which drops a succession of
+iron-shod beams upon it; the Chilean mill, which grinds
+it by means of superposed revolving stones; or the <i>arrastra</i>.
+The last is the most primitive, cheapest, and still
+most in use. The crushing is done by common stones,
+hung to the arms of a horizontal cross, dragged round and
+round in a circular bed by mule-power.</p>
+
+<p>Then follows the making of <i>tortas</i>, “the patio system,”
+which had its origin here in 1557. Numerous large mud-pies
+of the powdered ore and water are laid out on a vast
+open court floored with wood. The chemicals mentioned
+are thrown in in successive stages, and troops of broken-down
+horses are driven around in the mass for from two
+to three weeks in succession, thoroughly mingling it together.
+It is then brought in wheel-barrow loads to washing-tanks,
+where men and boys puddle it bare-legged till
+the metal falls to the bottom and the detritus runs away.
+“Rebellious” ores are treated by first calcining, then separating
+with mercury by “the barrel process.” This last
+is done chiefly at the hacienda of Velasco, on the way to
+Regla.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two hundred and sixty-seven mines in the district,
+seven are worked by the Real del Monte Company.
+The paying mines are comparatively new, discovered
+within the last twenty or thirty years. The old Spanish
+mines do not pay, and are, in fact, little worked. The
+stories of old Spanish mines, abandoned, perforce, at the
+date of the Independence, and ready to yield splendid
+returns to whoever will reopen them, serves very well as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>romance; but it must be remembered that sixty years
+have elapsed since the Independence, and there have been
+plenty of prospectors with a shrewd eye for gain in the
+country in the mean time. The Mexicans themselves are
+good miners. It will not do to look on with amused contempt
+even where very primitive processes are largely
+retained, for these are often better adapted to the peculiar
+conditions than any others. Thus the puddling of
+the <i>tortas</i> by mules and human legs, with labor at but
+thirty cents a day, is deliberately preferred to machinery.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever might care to make purchases in such a place
+would do well to buy among the newly discovered mines.
+Or one may yet prospect for himself, for the district appears
+by no means exhausted. Robbers in the state of
+Hidalgo long served as an impediment to freedom of
+prospecting in out-of-the-way places, and it is only of late
+that their power has been broken. The last Governor
+is said to have shot three hundred of them. Wild-cat
+properties and pitfalls of the usual sort await the unwary
+here. That perversity which, by some natural law,
+seems to take hold upon dealers in mines as well as in
+horses possesses them in Mexico not less than elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The Mexican mine is divided into twenty-four imaginary
+equal parts, <i>barras</i>, and fractional parts of these are
+bought and sold as its stock.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>As to the mining laws of the country, I have heard
+them described by some Americans as better than our
+own. In certain respects this is true. The reprehensible
+looseness with which our American “district recorders”
+receive conflicting claims covering the same property
+many times over is unknown. An official goes to the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>field and settles the equity of the case at once, and never
+records but one title. Litigation about the original title
+of a Mexican mine is almost unknown, while that of an
+American mine of any value is invariably in litigation.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, there are some drawbacks. While
+a foreigner may hold property in mines in Mexico without
+being subject to the obligation of residence, as in respect
+to other real estate, provided he have a resident
+partner, nobody in Mexico, foreigner or otherwise, can
+acquire a mine outright and in absolute ownership. He
+cannot own it in fee, no matter what sum he pays for it.
+The legal theory is that the title to a mine is only that
+of “conditional possession,” and in the nature of usufruct,
+which is “the right of using and enjoying a thing
+of which the owner is another.” On violation of the
+conditions the title reverts to the sovereignty—formerly
+the King of Spain, now the Republic of Mexico. The
+body of the Ordinances as at present followed was promulgated
+by the King of Spain in the year 1783. To
+allow a mine to stand idle is assumed to be an injury to
+those who might otherwise work and extract profit from
+it. It is enacted, therefore, as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“I (the King) order and command that any one who
+shall for four consecutive months fail to work a mine,
+with four operatives, regularly employed, and occupied
+in some interior or exterior work of real utility and advantage,
+shall thereby forfeit the right which he may
+have to the mine, and it shall belong to the denouncer
+who proves its desertion.”</p>
+
+<p>The method of acquiring title to a new and original
+mine is to go before the proper officer in the district
+in which it has been discovered and register a claim.
+Ninety days is then allowed to any other persons who
+may advance pretensions to it also, to appear, after which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>it is confirmed to him whose case is best established.
+Abandoned and forfeited properties are “denounced”
+by a similar formality. Veins or mines may be denounced
+not only on common lands, but those of any
+private individual, on paying for the surface occupied.
+In order, however, to obviate malicious or idle destruction,
+the searcher may be made to give security, before
+beginning his trial, for any damage he may occasion to
+the owner of the ground. Sites and waters for reducing
+works are included in the same permission.</p>
+
+<p>The denouncer must take possession and begin the
+prescribed work within sixty days. The discoverer may
+have three <i>pertenencias</i>, or claims, continuous or interrupted,
+on any principal vein which is absolutely new.
+The <i>pertenencia</i> consists of two hundred metres along
+the line of the vein and one hundred on each side (or as
+the miner may desire), as measured on a level. A person,
+not the discoverer, can denounce two contiguous
+mines, on the same vein, but one may acquire as many
+others as he likes by purchase.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient code created a General Tribunal of Mining
+for New Spain, and gave it cognizance of all mining
+matters. It was composed of a President, Director-general,
+and three Deputies-general, elected by the <i>Reales</i>,
+or mining districts, and two Deputies besides, elected by
+each <i>Real</i>. The <i>Real</i> had to be a place containing a
+church, six mines, and four reducing establishments, in
+actual operation. The qualifications for holding office
+were, that one should have been engaged in practical
+mining for ten years, that he should be an American, or
+European Spaniard, free from all inferior blood, and that
+he should agree to “defend the mystery of the Immaculate
+Conception of Our Lady.”</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that offices were not always in as active
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>demand as in our days, for heavy fines are enacted for
+non-acceptance on election, besides being compelled to
+serve afterward. An honest and straightforward purpose
+appears in the rules of procedure quite worthy of imitation
+elsewhere. Let us cite some examples.</p>
+
+<p>“As said classes of causes and suits,” says the King,
+“ought to be determined between the parties briefly and
+summarily, according to manifest truth and good faith,
+as in commercial transactions, without allowing delays,
+declarations, or writings of lawyers, it is my will that
+whenever any persons appear in said Royal Tribunals ...
+to institute any action, they (the tribunals) shall not admit
+any complaint or petition in writing until after they
+have cited the parties before them, if it be possible, so
+that, hearing orally their complaints and answers, they
+may settle with the greatest despatch the suits or dispute
+between them; and not being able to succeed in this, and
+the matter in question exceeding the value of two hundred
+dollars, petitions in writing will be admitted, provided
+they be not drawn up, arranged, or signed by lawyers....
+In the judgments which may be pronounced no
+consideration shall be paid to any default in observing
+the minute formalities of the law, or to inaccuracies or
+other defects; but, in whatever stage of the proceedings
+the truth may be ascertained, the causes shall be decided
+and adjudged.”</p>
+
+<p>The legal fraternity had secured a repute for sometimes
+misleading justice, it is seen, even so far back as
+this. There appears to have been a <i>Consulado</i>, or Tribunal
+of Commerce, upon pretty much the same plan.
+This ancient system has been swept away by various
+stages. Since the day of the republic the power once
+vested in the old tribunal has been lodged with the ordinary
+civil courts and political authorities.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is doubtful whether mining has ever been pursued
+to better advantage, made more productive and regular,
+and more effectively freed from the element of wild-cat
+speculation, than in New Spain of the period considered.</p>
+
+<p>There were decrees to prevent miners, especially those
+of affluence, from wasting their substance. Negligence in
+tunnelling, imperfect ventilation, and the like, by which
+life and health are endangered, were severely punished.</p>
+
+<p>Criminals and vagabonds were made to labor in the
+mines, but the main bulk of laborers in early times consisted
+of the Indians, apportioned to proprietors as <i>repartamientos</i>,
+and held in a kind of slavery.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>The gorgeous Count of Regla was a great mine-owner
+here in his day. It was hence that he would have taken
+the ingots for the King of Spain to ride upon from the
+coast to the capital, should they have been called for by
+an actual acceptance of his splendid invitation before
+mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>His ancient beneficiating hacienda of Regla, say eighteen
+miles from Pachuca, is of great interest. A most
+excellent wagon-road, constructed by the Real del Monte
+Company, at large expense, leads to it. As many as
+eighty heavily loaded ore-wagons, each drawn by from
+eight to a dozen mules, traverse it in a single day.</p>
+
+<p>Señor Llandero y Cos kindly provided us, for this and
+the remaining part of our expedition, with horses and a
+mozo, to be kept at our convenience. White posts of
+substantial masonry dotted the abrupt slopes, by way of
+locating the various claims. Some lonesome-looking
+wooden structures, not unlike Swiss chalets, generally
+marked the shafts of the smaller mines as we went onward,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>while a small <i>arrastra</i> or two was turned by mule-power
+in the neighborhood. One, called the Fortune, if
+what was said were true, should rather have been the
+Misfortune or the Ill-fortune, for it had never produced
+a tlaco of profit.</p>
+
+<p>Convolvuli and fragrant <i>flor de San Juan</i> touched
+with a trace of beauty the sterile hills. Real del Monte,
+embowered in rich woods, presented a scene like a fine
+landscape in Pennsylvania. We stopped first at the old
+<i>Presidio</i>, above the Tereros Mine, where the convicts
+drafted for mining labor were formerly kept; then dismounted
+and went down a ravine, to see the mouth of a
+tunnel, seven thousand yards in length, built to drain the
+works of the original Real del Monte Company.</p>
+
+<p>Hamlets were set near together along the road, and the
+country continued bold and generously wooded. At the
+abandoned Moran Mine, one of the Count of Regla’s principal
+treasure-stores in its time, we found picturesque remains
+of walls and columns, with a round tower, which
+had once contained a hoisting drum. It was obliged to
+be abandoned, like the Sanchez, in the vicinity, for lack
+of water. Near the Sanchez is the mouth of the general
+drainage tunnel constructed by the Count. Esteemed
+very important in its day, it has been wholly eclipsed by
+works on a larger scale prevailing in the mean time.
+Velasco, where “rebellious” ores are treated, is presided
+over by an English superintendent. He had in use a
+crushing-machine of still a different pattern from those
+described. Heavy iron rockers, driven by steam-power,
+were worked back and forth upon the ore in a bath of
+water. It was claimed that one-fourth more work could
+be done with this at an equal expenditure of power than
+by the Chilean mill. Attached to the establishment in
+the usual way were a charming villa and gardens. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>superintendent at Pachuca sometimes came there to pass
+a fortnight’s vacation.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate approach to Regla is along the side
+of a deep tropical barranca. Bananas grow generously
+within it, and a palm-thatched Indian village crowns its
+opposite verge. The hacienda itself is set down in a
+most impressive natural formation. It is encompassed
+by grand columniated cliffs of basalt, like those of the
+Giant’s Causeway. The columns are hexagonal in shape,
+with an average diameter approaching three feet. At
+places whole areas of them have been distorted and
+twisted hither and thither in the cooling, with a most
+wild and singular effect.</p>
+
+<p>A cascade like a little Niagara tumbles roaring down
+among them, and furnishes the strong water-power
+for the works. The hacienda belongs to the Real del
+Monte Company, and it is chiefly ores of that company
+which are brought to this strangely attractive scene to be
+treated. Troops of horses were going round in the usual
+way in a great walled patio, making the tortas. Connected
+with this were smelting-furnaces and kindred
+buildings of many sorts. Madame Calderon de la Barca,
+who also visited Regla, found it such a place as might
+have been conjured up by magic, by some giant enchanter,
+for his own purposes. Mediæval-looking towers,
+gateways, terraces, a chapel, and prison garnish it. Opposite
+the chapel is a pretty residence, Moorish in aspect,
+surrounded by vines and flowers. The whole is said to
+have cost some two millions of dollars.</p>
+
+<p>We spent a night here with the superintendent, Don
+Ramon Torres, a youngish man, who had learned his
+avocation in the mines at Guanajuato. He seemed but
+too delighted, in his comparative isolation, to entertain
+company and honor the introduction of his chief, Señor
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>Llandero. He dwelt in his talk upon the lack of ambition
+among the Indian laborers. He said, among other
+things, that in the Tierra Caliente the women were better
+workers than the men.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp78" id="illus039" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus039.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SUPERINTENDENT’S HOUSE AT REGLA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Our next stage from here was to be the hacienda of
+Tepenacasco, near Tulancingo, where Mr. Brocklehurst
+and myself had been invited to visit, in order to witness
+the manner of life on one of the great country estates.
+Regla is rather famous for thunder-storms, and on the
+day of our departure we had one of the traditional sort.
+Within a few minutes after its commencement the cascade
+was blood-red with soil torn out by the swollen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>stream. The storm abated at first, but we encountered
+it in renewed fury on wide green uplands like an Illinois
+prairie, known as the Plains of Mata. As we galloped
+in the midst of it, the rain pouring in torrents from our
+rubber blankets, the lightnings (<i>rayos</i>) darted into the
+ground, now on this side, now on that, in a way which
+I can only compare—perhaps too trivially—to spearing
+for olives in a jar with a fork. The <i>rayos</i> are dangerous
+in this region, as naturally on open plains everywhere,
+and crosses mark places where herdsmen have
+been stricken down among their flocks. One of these
+victims had been found recently, with his animals gathered
+around in a circle at close quarters staring at him
+curiously, while he lay stark on his face.</p>
+
+<p>The rain had its lulls and relapses, and twice in succession
+we took shelter under the sheds of isolated <i>ranchitos</i>
+which we fell in with. We were joined here by an occasional
+ploughman, wearing the long cloak of coarse woven
+grass, which diverts the water from the wearer. We were
+joined, too, by all the domestic animals of the neighborhood.
+The wait at the last retreat seemed as if it would
+never end. At last a pig ventured forth, and we said, idly,
+that if he should return we would accept it as an augury
+that the deluge was over and the waters had ceased upon
+the face of the earth. Sure enough, he came back presently,
+munching a green carrot-top; and, receiving this
+like the olive-branch brought to Noah, we sallied forth.
+Our confidence proved well justified. A lovely prismatic
+bow of promise was presently set in the sky, the clouds
+rolled away, scattering their last lingering drops, the rills
+babbled merrily, and the face of the country sparkled
+with an enchanting freshness. We paused again briefly
+at a hacienda which belonged to the Governor of the
+state. The main building was large, plain, and yellow-washed,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>and had before it an enclosed threshing-floor,
+on which grain is tramped out by the feet of horses. A
+young American girl had been employed as governess
+here up to a recent date.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus040" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus040.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PLOUGHMAN IN GRASS CLOAK.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was now toward evening. The sunset glowed warm
+upon the little hamlet of Acatlan, through which our road
+was seen winding below. In its midst lay a dismantled
+convent, with belfries still standing, which from a distance
+resembled an English ruined abbey. It was found
+on being reached, however, unlike the latter, to be built
+of bricks and adobe. I had at first taken this for our
+hacienda itself, but the hacienda proved equally attractive
+in a different way. After a couple of miles farther on
+we sent back our horses and guide with a warm missive
+of thanks to their owner, and were hospitably installed at
+Tepenacasco.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XIX">XIX.<br>
+<i>A WEEK AT A MEXICAN COUNTRY-HOUSE.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>With a taste for country life, so novel a domain to
+explore, and constantly agreeable weather, I found a
+week’s stay at the hacienda one of the most agreeable of
+experiences. From a distance the extensive habitation
+has a stately air, like some ducal residence. In approaching
+it you pass first through fields of maguey and blossoming
+alfalfa, then by a long stone corral for cattle,
+extensive barracks and huts of laborers, and a pond
+bordered with weeping willows. It is built of rubble-masonry
+and plaster, whitewashed, and consists of a single
+liberal story. The dwelling, with numerous connected
+buildings, makes in all a façade of about six hundred feet.
+A belfry, with two tiers of bronze bells hung in arches,
+sets off the centre. The large windows are defended by
+cage-like iron gratings. A door, flanked by holy-water
+fonts, at the left of that forming the main entrance,
+opens into a family chapel. In a gable above the main
+entrance is inscribed this motto—which has not, however,
+prevented the hacienda from being the scene of more
+than one sack by revolutionary forces:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>En aqueste destierro y soledad disfruto del tesoro de
+la paz</i>”—“In this retirement and solitude I enjoy the
+treasure of peace.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus041" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus041.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE HACIENDA OF TEPENACASCO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span></p>
+
+<p>Immediately in front of the buildings is laid out, after
+a usual custom, a substantially paved and enclosed area,
+semi-circular at one end, used as a threshing-floor. Troops
+of running horses are driven around here upon the grain,
+like those in the <i>patio</i> process, only in a very much livelier
+fashion. The long façade was made up in part of
+massive <i>trojes</i>, or granaries, comprised under the same
+roof as the house. Each <i>troje</i> has a special name of its
+own inscribed upon it. There were, for instance, the
+“<i>Troje de la Espigero</i>” (“Corn in the Ear”), the “<i>Troje
+de la Teja</i>” (“Tiled Roof”); and the “<i>Troje de Limbo</i>”
+and “<i>Troje de Nuestro Señor del Pilar</i>.” The walls
+of these granaries were of great thickness, in order to
+preserve the contents cool and at an even temperature.
+Heavily buttressed, and with their long lines of piers, a
+yard square, extending down the dim interiors, they are
+more like basilicas of the early Christian era than simple
+barns. The central cluster of buildings alone, not counting
+those detached, covers perhaps from four to five
+acres. Mounting to the roof and looking over its expanse,
+broken by the openings of numerous courts, you
+seem to be contemplating, as it were, some agricultural
+Louvre or Escorial. Its rear wall is washed by a <i>presa</i>,
+or artificial pond for irrigation, which stretches away like
+a lake. Beyond this rises a charming grassy hill, called
+the Cerro. We climbed the Cerro, and lounged away
+more than one afternoon there in sketching, and contemplating
+the beautiful level valley of Tulancingo, spread
+out below.</p>
+
+<p>The white hacienda with red roofs lay in front, reflected
+clearly in its pond. Tulancingo was a white patch
+at a distance, and other white patches nearer by were the
+hamlets of Jaltepec, Amatlan, and Zupitlan—the latter in
+ruins. Straight, lane-like roads led from one to another.
+The mountains on the horizon afforded glimpses of basaltic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>cliffs of the same formation as those at Regla, and
+of the white smoke of charcoal-burners rising from their
+forests. Cattle wandered in fine herds in the grassy pasture,
+each tended by its herdsman and dog. We saw a
+troop of them at twilight come to drink at the pond, and
+the complication of all their moving forms was curiously
+picked out in silhouette against the gleaming brightness
+of the water.</p>
+
+<p>At evening there returned to the court-yard of the hacienda,
+to disband after their day’s labor, sometimes as
+many as forty ploughmen. If it had rained they wore
+their barbaric-looking grass cloaks. They drove yokes
+of oxen and bulls harnessed to the primitive Egyptian
+plough, and carried long goads to prod their animals.
+After them rode in now and then an armed horseman,
+wrapped in his serape, who overlooked and guarded them
+at work. At the same time came troops and droves of
+the other animals needing to be housed: black swine from
+the grassy slopes of the Cerro; mules released from harness;
+young horses and mules not yet put to work;
+milch-cows, and young steers and heifers, each wending
+its way sedately to its own department.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the cattle, I observed, were hornless. This is
+brought about by a practice of paring the young horns
+when first sprouting. It would seem that this might be
+desirable among ourselves, both on the farm and especially
+in transporting cattle in the cars ordinarily in use.
+Milking-time came only once a day—in the morning—and
+not, as with us, twice. The hind-legs of the cows
+are lassoed together when being milked. The calves of
+tender age are also lassoed to the side of the mother,
+and it is a quaint and amusing sight to see their impatient
+demonstrations while awaiting the conclusion of the
+process.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus042" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus042.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE THRESHING-FLOOR.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span></p>
+
+<p>I sat down one day with “Don Rafael,” the administrador,
+or salaried manager, of the estate, to make a rough map
+of its general distribution and extent. The property proved
+to be some eighteen miles in length by twelve in its greatest
+width, and of very irregular pattern. It had no less
+than eleven large <i>presas</i>, formed by dams at convenient
+points for irrigation. The principal dam was a mile in
+length, and by means of it had been formed a lake of two
+miles in its principal dimension. On the borders of this
+stands the feudal-looking ruined hamlet, with church and
+hacienda, of Zupitlan, before mentioned. The bulk of
+the estate was in grass, but irregular patches of ground
+had been taken out here and there for various crops, and
+to each was given its special name. Thus the field of
+San Pablo was devoted to maize and alfalfa; Las Animas,
+San Antonio the Greater, and San Antonio the Less were
+given up to maize; Del Monte and San Ignacio el Grande
+to barley.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>magueyales</i>, or maguey fields, were of considerable
+extent. The making of the <i>pulque</i> from their product
+was confided to a special functionary called the tlachiquero.
+The heart of the maguey is cut out at a certain
+stage of its growth and a bowl thus formed, into which a
+quantity of sweet sap continues to run regularly for several
+months. By the end of that time the plant is dead,
+and is uprooted and replaced by another. The sap is at
+first called <i>agua miel</i>, or honey-water, which it resembles.
+The tlachiquero makes a daily pilgrimage to the fields,
+and draws off the <i>agua miel</i> by means of a bulky siphon
+formed of a gourd. Sometimes he bears simply a bag,
+made of undressed sheepskin, like the wine-skins of Old
+Spain, on his back; again, he is accompanied by a donkey
+loaded with a number of these skins. He transfers the
+sap to these bags, and returns with it to a department of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>
+his own, called the Tinecal. There he pours it into shallow
+vats of undressed skin, where it is allowed to ferment.
+Without describing the process farther in detail, in a fortnight
+it is ready for sale or for home consumption.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="illus043" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus043.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE TLACHIQUERO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span></p>
+
+<p>The pasture fields have their distinctive titles also.
+There were, for instance, San Gaetano, San Ysidro, and
+San Dionysio; and, again, the corrals of San Ricardo,
+San Gaetano, and Las Palmas, where cattle were enclosed
+at various times. Dairy-farming was the principal industry
+of the estate. Its neat cattle numbered seventeen
+hundred head. The pay-roll showed a total for the week
+of eight hundred and fifty men and boys.</p>
+
+<p>The living apartments of the dwelling were set along
+two sides of an arcaded court-yard, which had a dismantled
+fountain in the centre. Offices and store-rooms occupied
+the other two sides. A department for the butter
+and cheese making had a special court to itself in the
+rear. One of the store-rooms contained an ample supply
+of agricultural implements. Those of the slighter sort, I
+learned, such as ploughs, spades, picks, hammers, and the
+<i>coa</i>, a peculiar cutting-hoe, are made in the country,
+at Apulco, not far distant, where are also iron-works.
+An iron plough made at Apulco costs $7, while the imported
+American plough costs $10. There are wooden
+pitch-forks and spades among the implements. The
+wooden, or Egyptian, plough is much more in use than
+that of iron. It consists simply of a wooden beam shod
+with an iron point, and has an adjustable cross-piece
+for service in case the furrow needs to be made wider.
+The purpose to which it is most applied is that of turning
+shallow furrows between rows of corn, and for this it
+appears well enough adapted. At Pensacola, in the state
+of Puebla, such larger pieces of agricultural machinery as
+reapers, mowers, and separators are manufactured.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>We happened, among other accommodations, in our exploration
+of the corridors, upon a prison, described as for
+use in locking up the refractory peons when they will not
+work.</p>
+
+<p>“Can you do that? Have you, then, such an absolute
+power over them?” I asked our host, in some surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, no,” he replied, in effect, deprecatingly, “I suppose
+not; but, you see, now and then it is the only way to
+manage them, and we have to. It is not civilizated, that
+people,” he continued, in an English which left something
+to be desired, “and we do the best what we can.”</p>
+
+<p>This seems something very like a feudal control on
+the part of the hacendado, but his numerous dependents
+do not seem to complain of it. Cases of protest before
+the magistrates are rarely known, and should they be
+made it is not likely, since the magistrates are friends of
+their masters, and of the same social station, that they
+would meet with any great attention.</p>
+
+<p>We found this laboring population living in squalid
+stone huts, often six and eight persons in a room. The
+floors were simply the dirt of the ground, and there was
+sometimes not even so much as the usual straw mat to
+sleep or sit upon. We were told here again that the peons
+are avaricious. They are believers in a general way, but
+not greatly given to religion. Few attend the services at
+the chapel, even on Sunday. They summon the priest
+when about to die, but not otherwise. But few of the
+children go to school. As a whole, they seemed about as
+wretched as the poor Irish, except for the advantage over
+the latter in climate. In every interior is seen a woman
+on her knees, rolling or spatting the interminable tortillas.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span></p>
+
+<p>The laborers on the pay-roll were of two classes: those
+employed by the week, and those employed by the year.
+The former “found themselves;” the latter were “found”
+by the estate, and paid a certain sum at the end of the
+year. Wages ran from six cents a day for the boys to
+thirty-seven for the best class of adults.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>The administrador was assisted, in the management of
+the hacienda, by the <i>mayor-domo</i> and the <i>sobre-saliente</i>,
+who acted as his first and second lieutenants; a <i>caporal</i>,
+who had general charge of the stock; and a <i>pastero</i>, who
+had charge of the pastures. The <i>pastero</i> it was who indicated
+the condition of the various areas of pasturage,
+that the animals might be moved to one after another of
+them in turn. These minor officers were of the native
+Indian race. They were dark, swarthy men, very bandit-looking
+when armed and mounted on horseback, but in
+reality, when you came to know them, as mild and amiable
+persons as need be wished for.</p>
+
+<p>One, “Don Daniel,” supervised the butter and cheese
+making interest. A book-keeper, “Don Angel,” kept an
+account of all the property of the estate—receipts, and
+disbursements, and an inventory of stock—upon a system
+which seemed a model of commercial accuracy. Every
+week a report was forwarded to the owners, at Mexico,
+upon a printed blank filled out in the most exhaustive
+detail, so that they could see at a glance how they stood.</p>
+
+<p>The administrador, Don Rafael, was a steady-going
+man of middle age, a native of San Luis Potosi. He
+had land and <i>casitas</i>, little houses, of his own, which he
+rented. He had also a house in the city of Tulancingo,
+near by, occupied by his family, whom he visited once a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>week. His salary reached about $1000 a year, and he
+could be called a person of substance. A conspicuous
+scar on his forehead led it to be supposed that he might
+have seen service in the field; but he spoke with contempt
+of the wars of his country when questioned about
+it, and said that he had got his scar in breaking a horse.</p>
+
+<p>“A sensible man can always find better occupation than
+fighting,” he said. “I have busied myself with regular
+industry. The North Americans, now, understand that.
+They have good ideas. There everybody works and gets
+a little ahead in the world. Without money in his pocket
+what is a man good for? He might as well take himself
+over to the cemetery yonder at once and have done
+with it.”</p>
+
+<p>Don Angel was young, mild, taciturn, painstaking, and
+a native of Old Spain. His handwriting was small and
+neat, and he had a great head for details. His salary
+was the sum of $400 a year. The revenues of the estate
+which it was his province to cast up amounted, I was
+told, to $20,000 a year.</p>
+
+<p>Don Daniel, the butter and cheese maker, was young
+also, but large, handsome, rosy, and had excellent teeth,
+with coal-black hair and beard. He was a model of robust
+health and lively spirits. He too had a wife at Tulancingo,
+whom he visited every Sunday, returning before
+daylight on Monday morning, to be in time for the milking.
+He was given to strumming on a guitar in the evening,
+and assembled around him in his room such convivial
+spirits as the hacienda afforded. Nonsensical refrains
+like</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Amarillo si, amarillo no,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Amarillo y verde, me ho pinto,”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">were heard proceeding from there long after more staid
+and decorous persons were in bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span></p>
+
+<p>Another member of the household was, let us say,
+“Manuel,” a boy of eighteen, looking younger, who had
+formerly been a cadet at the national military school. He
+was here learning the business of a hacienda, or, as some
+said, he was a young scapegrace whom it was designed
+to keep out of mischief. At any rate, he was an aide-de-camp
+to Don Rafael, and took his orders about on horseback.
+He dressed, like Don Rafael, in a substantial suit
+of buff leather. He was a very garrulous and communicative
+person, and, as our attendant and guide—in which
+capacity he offered himself, I think, somewhat as an excuse
+for escaping more onerous labors—he furnished us
+much useful information. His elders took a tone of raillery
+with him, representing him as a very callow youth,
+whose views were of no consequence, and who should
+be seen but not heard from. They ridiculed his French,
+which he had learned at the military school, even affecting
+not to believe that it was French at all. Our visit
+was the occasion for a strenuous effort on his part to set
+himself right on this point.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>N’ai-je pas bien dit?</i>” he cried to us, across the generous
+dining-table where we sat together, stretching at
+the same time a bony, school-boy arm for aid in putting
+the scoffers down.</p>
+
+<p>One day we mounted to go to a beautiful clear spring
+of water, which was admired even as early as by Humboldt
+in his travels. On others we visited the adjacent
+hamlets, or Tulancingo, from which, later, we were to
+take the diligence homeward. Again, we made our objective
+points the various crops, a dam undergoing repairs,
+or the remoter pastures and corrals.</p>
+
+<p>The herdsman and a boy-assistant at these corrals slept
+at night in their blankets under a mere pile of stones.
+The upper irrigating dams are discharged of their waters,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span>when it is desired, by the primitive device of lifting
+up one cross-beam after another from a narrow gate
+in the centre. In some of the maize-fields are lookout
+boxes, aloft on high poles, as a device against crows and
+other marauders. The general surface over which we rode
+was the grassy plain, affording a delightful footing for
+the horses. It was of a fresh, soft green, and enamelled
+besides with flowers, like violets, the blue maravilla, and
+many varieties of a yellow flower resembling the dandelion,
+but prettier.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>The room first entered from the main corridor in the
+house itself was devoted to the uses of a <i>despacho</i>, or office.
+Here was the department of Don Angel, and the
+master himself sometimes took his place behind the long,
+baize-covered table, strewn with matters of business detail,
+to hold audience with the peons of the estate, who
+came, with wide-brimmed hats humbly doffed, to make
+known various wants and complaints. In the corners
+stood rifles, spades, and the long branding-iron, which
+is heated in the month of August to brand the young
+cattle with the device of their owner.</p>
+
+<p>A fat dark peon enters, and proffers a request for an
+allowance to be made him for a baptism in his family.</p>
+
+<p>“A baptism?” says the master, briskly. “Well, now,
+come on! Speak up; don’t stand mumbling there! Let
+us see what your ideas are.”</p>
+
+<p>The man suggests, deferentially, to begin with, the sum
+of $3 for a <i>guajolote</i>, or turkey, as a <i>pièce de résistance</i>
+for his feast.</p>
+
+<p>“You are always wanting a <i>guajolote</i>, you people. You
+don’t need anything of the kind. However, let us say
+$1.50—twelve reals—for the <i>guajolote</i>. What next?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The <i>pulque</i>—about forty <i>cuartillas</i> of <i>pulque</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Twenty <i>cuartillas</i> of <i>pulque</i>,” says the master, ruthlessly
+cutting down the estimate by half. “Well, what
+next? Speak up!”</p>
+
+<p>The peasant, one of the laborers by the year, perseveres,
+in his humble, soft voice, regularly making his
+estimate for each article twice the real figure, and having
+it as regularly cut down. He caps the whole by demanding
+four reals for a sombrero, well knowing—and knowing
+perfectly well that his master knows also—that the
+kind of sombrero he would be likely to want costs but
+one real.</p>
+
+<p>We had proposed to witness the festivities of this christening,
+but unfortunately delayed too long at table on the
+evening of its occurrence, and lost it. But the sky was
+gloriously full of stars as we went out among the huts
+and barracks. A woman came out of one of the tenements
+and made a complaint of a neighbor with whom
+she had had a row, but got no great sympathy, and
+hardly seemed to expect any. They are admirably polite,
+these poor rustics—nobody can deny them that. As
+we sat by the road one day at Amatlan, sketching, some
+of the women called to us as they went by:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Buenas dias, señores! Como han pasado, ustedes,
+la noche? Adios, señores!</i>”—“Good-day, sirs! How did
+you pass the night? Good-bye, sirs!”</p>
+
+<p>We had not in any way first addressed them, and they
+did not stop, but went swiftly onward, scarcely turning
+their heads to look. These and many more of the sort
+are but their ordinary salutations.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate family at the hacienda consisted of one
+of the several heirs, “Don Eduardo,” his wife, mother,
+and two small children, and their Indian nurses. They
+were in the habit of spending but a small portion of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>year here, and, when they came, lived in quite informal
+style. Servants and employés, equally with her intimates,
+called the young mistress “Cholita,” a diminutive
+of her name Soledad. There was little or no receiving or
+paying of visits, owing to the great distances to be traversed
+and the scarcity of neighbors.</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>Social life in the country is hardly known. We had
+piano music and singing in the evening in a stately, dimly-lighted
+<i>salon</i> of the style of the First Empire. One
+day a large farm vehicle, gayly decorated with boughs,
+was brought around, all hands got into it, and we proceeded
+to the lake at Zupitlan for a picnic. The provisions
+were carried on a litter by a couple of men, and a
+guard on horseback, with his rifle, rode along-side for our
+protection. Such a precaution was not absolutely needed,
+perhaps, but there had been a time—before the Governor
+of Hidalgo had taken his summary measures—when the
+brigands would have swooped down from the adjacent
+hills and seized upon such a procession with little ceremony.
+After dining <i>al fresco</i> we amused ourselves with
+shooting some of the ducks and cranes which abound on
+the lake.</p>
+
+<p>We had chocolate and buns on rising in the morning,
+and two over-liberal repasts, resembling each other in
+character, at noon and nine in the evening. The dogs
+swarmed in and out over the house, which presented the
+aspect of a generous farm rather than a villa.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp62" id="illus044" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus044.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>NURSE AND CHILDREN AT THE HACIENDA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It was designed in its day for much greater state. The
+furniture, though battered and ruined now, was of the
+charming artistic pattern of the First Empire, and all
+the rooms were large and of fine proportions. In one of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>the two principal bedrooms the bed is raised upon a daïs,
+ascended by steps. In the other the corners are cut off
+by columns, so as to give it an octagon shape. In three
+of these corners the beds are regularly built in between
+the columns; the fourth is taken for a door. It so happened
+that I had not read Madame de la Barca before
+leaving home. Perhaps I had but a rather disparaging
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span>idea of a work descriptive of Mexico coming down no
+later than 1839. On taking it up after my return I had
+an opportunity to find how little the country had changed.
+She too visited this hacienda of Tepenacasco. She noted,
+among other items, a quaint wall-paper, of a Swiss pattern,
+on the octagon room. That very paper is there to
+this day.</p>
+
+<p>The proprietor was of quite a different sort in those
+times. He used to give bull-fights in the court before
+his portal, which is now a threshing-floor, and is said to
+have entertained half the population of Tulancingo at
+his table. He finally ruined himself by his extravagance.
+It is said, among other things, that if he took a sudden
+notion to go to Mexico, a hundred and twenty miles
+away, he rode his horses so hard that they sometimes
+dropped dead under him.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XX">XX.<br>
+<i>ON HORSEBACK AND MULEBACK TO ACAPULCO.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The time came at length—all too soon—for my final
+Mexican journey—to the Pacific coast at Acapulco, where
+I was to take the steamer for San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>I was advised not to go to Acapulco. There are always
+persons ready to advise you not to do perfectly feasible
+things. It was now August, and the rainy season had
+begun in town itself. It began one afternoon with a
+rush. I had been reading at the National Library, and,
+coming out at four o’clock, found the streets a couple of
+feet deep in water. The cabs, now at a premium, and
+some few men on horseback, who could give a friend a
+lift, served as impromptu gondolas upon these impromptu
+canals. There were also <i>cargadores</i>, who, for a medio,
+carried you on their backs from corner to corner. I was
+told that ladies in the balconies, watching the animated
+sight, now and then slyly held up a real, in consideration
+of which the <i>cargador</i> dropped some gallant in the water,
+presenting a ridiculous sight. Such inundations last several
+hours before the sluggish sewers can carry off the
+surplus water, and they leave the ground-floor habitations
+of the poor in but a cheerless condition, as may be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>If this were to be added to the other embarrassments
+of life every afternoon, it was not interesting to think of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>remaining longer at the capital. And yet, with Macbeth,
+there seemed “nor flying hence, nor tarrying here.” The
+journey to Acapulco was represented as very difficult and
+dangerous. The route was a mere trail or foot-path, a
+<i>buen camino de pajaros</i>—a good road for birds. No
+wheeled vehicle ever had passed or ever could pass over
+it. All this was, indeed, the case. Three large rivers
+were to be crossed, and these unbridged.</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose,” said the advisers, putting the case in that
+bold and alarming way in which advisers delight, “that
+these should be swollen by the floods, as is naturally to
+be expected now in the rainy season. You would then
+be delayed so long on their banks as to miss your steamer,
+which touches at Acapulco only once a fortnight.
+Again, the road lies, for days at a time, in ravines and
+the beds of streams; but when the waters occupy their
+channels what room is there for travellers?”</p>
+
+<p>If to this were added the natural reflections of the novice
+on the score of danger to property and person in entering
+upon so wild a section, the prospect was not at all
+a pleasing one. Nevertheless it would be almost too much
+to expect that a person bound for California should come
+back to the United States again in order to go there, and
+I had a firm conviction that the Acapulco trip could be
+made.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I had negotiated a little already with an <i>arriero</i>, or
+muleteer, named Vincente Lopez, in a street called Parque
+del Conde. He would furnish a horse to ride, and a
+mule to transport my baggage, each for $20—all other
+expenses to be defrayed personally along the way—which
+makes the three hundred miles come a good deal higher
+than so much railway travel. I had thus dallied with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>the idea, and my decision was precipitated by the sudden
+coming down of the rain. I hurried to Parque del
+Conde Street, and closed with Vincente Lopez. I was
+glad to learn from him that he had also another patron
+who was going, in the person of a colonel of the
+army. The journey, under the most favorable auspices,
+consumes ten days on horseback, besides the day occupied
+in going down by stage-coach to the provincial city of Cuernavaca,
+where the bridle-path begins. Considering all
+the circumstances as stated, there were many companions
+one would much less prefer to have than so presumably
+bold and well-informed a person as a Mexican regular
+officer.</p>
+
+<p>He proved to be a veritable military man, a colonel
+who had seen twenty years’ service in different wars of
+his country, and bore bullet-holes in his body as the result
+of them. He had begun in the War of the Reform,
+which overthrew the Church and aristocratic party; he
+had fought against the French and Maximilian in the
+second War of Independence; and, lastly, for the government
+of Lerdo against Porfirio Diaz. To the party of
+the latter he was, however, now reconciled, and he was going
+to take a command on the disturbed northern frontier.
+If more were needed, he had lately fought a duel, as he
+told me, in which the weapons were sabres, and had so
+slashed his opponent, a brother officer, that the latter was
+laid up in a grievous state at the hospital. A vacant barracks
+had been set apart, by the War Department, for this
+proceeding. Army duelling, as on the Continent, is connived
+at. The case seems to be that, if you fight, you are
+afterward reprimanded; but if you do not, you are likely
+to be cashiered as pusillanimous.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the colonel was in all respects the most agreeable
+of travelling companions. He was much wrapped
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>up in his own affairs at first, and later displayed some
+traits of a certain childish selfishness.</p>
+
+<p>Vincente Lopez collected our baggage at the appointed
+time. He was a plausible person, and when he desired
+the full amount of his bill in advance I had well-nigh
+yielded to him. I submitted, however, as more equitable,
+that one-half should be paid down and the remainder on
+the completion of the journey according to contract.</p>
+
+<p>“That would be equitable, indeed, for ordinary <i>arrieros</i>,”
+said Vincente Lopez, “but I am one of especial
+probity. It is my habit to watch over the persons who
+confide themselves to my care with a tender solicitude,
+and in the present instance I have intended to multiply
+even my usual pains. I am one of those who have never
+known what it is to encounter on the way the slightest
+delay or annoyance.”</p>
+
+<p>He seemed wounded in his finest sensibilities by an appearance
+of mistrust, which was to him hitherto unknown.
+There were considerations in his favor. He said that the
+colonel, at another hotel, had paid the full sum in advance,
+and this proved true. Whatever money was to be
+taken, besides, must be in the heavy silver coinage of the
+country, $16 to the pound, and to be rid of the weight
+and jingling of even a part of it was desirable. Still,
+on the whole, the contract was drawn in my way, by
+the advice of the dark secretary of the Iturbide Hotel.
+Though it seemed almost cruel at the time to act in
+this formal manner with so good a man, the precaution
+proved in the sequel to be very useful.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus045" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus045.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE “DILIGENCIA.”</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>My colonel was accompanied down to Cuernavaca in
+the <i>diligencia</i>—in which we were all extremely jolted,
+dusty, and uncomfortable together—by two generals.
+They had apparently come to give him parting directions
+about his mission. One of them was a thick-set, black-bearded
+man, with a husky voice, and a conspicuous scar
+upon his face. I must not branch off too much into side
+issues, but the history of the scar was that, while commanding
+in Yucatan, he had ordered to be shot, on some
+of the ordinary revolutionary pretexts, a member of the
+powerful family of Gutierrez Estrada, a family with commercial
+houses in Paris, Mexico, and Merida, and noted,
+among other things, for the beauty and intelligence of its
+women. A brother of the victim came over from Paris
+as an avenger, sought out the general in question, met
+him in a duel, and left this mark, which, at the time of
+its infliction, brought the recipient to death’s door.</p>
+
+<p>The city of Mexico is some 7500 feet above the sea,
+and, having come up, we now followed a great downward
+slope. It abounds in bold points of view, from which the
+prospects spread vision-like at vast distances below. Cuernavaca
+presents one of the most thrilling of these.
+What is yonder singular detail in the valley? A hacienda
+set in the open side of an extinct volcanic crater,
+of which the whole interior has been brought under smiling
+cultivation. And yonder yellowish spot? The sugar-cane
+fields of the Duke of Monteleone. He is an Italian
+nobleman of Naples, who inherits, by right of descent, a
+part of the estates reserved here for himself by Cortez.
+The Conqueror was made “Marquis of the Valley,” with
+his port at Tehuantepec, and an estate comprising twenty
+large towns and villages, and 23,000 vassals.</p>
+
+<p>Nowhere is there a quainter group of old rococo
+churches than that in this solid little city. They have
+flying buttresses, of two arches in width, descending
+quite to the ground, domes, and other inlay in colored
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>porcelain tiles; and they are all clustered together, with
+tombs and a battlemented wall about them. A student
+of architecture coming this way with his sketch-book
+in his hand could find material here for a month. I am
+not sure that the trip could not be made enjoyably, as it
+certainly could economically, on foot, with an attendant
+to carry a knapsack, as we met some German naturalists
+and prospectors making it farther on. Close by is a garden
+on a great scale—the Jardin Borda—to which one
+obtains admittance for a fee. It has a stone fish-pond as
+large as a lake, terraces, urns, and statues worthy of the
+most luxurious prince in Europe. I was told that it
+could be bought for $5000. I asked the custodian about
+the owner—what he had been remarkable for.</p>
+
+<p>“He had <i>altos pesos</i>,” replied the man, which is Spanish
+for “a pile of money.” Bushels of delicious mangoes
+were rotting untouched along the walks. From
+the outer terrace you look down into the barranca which
+Alvarado crossed by a fallen tree when sent by his indefatigable
+general against the disaffected Gonzalo Pizarro.
+Here are guava, mango, pine-apple, banana, and plenty of
+other fruits, but not yet the cocoa-nut, which only flourishes
+lower down.</p>
+
+<p>Behold us ready to set forth on the trail! Vincente
+Lopez is not present, strange to say, to cast about us the
+fostering care he has promised. On the contrary, he has
+quietly sold out his contract and gone back to the Parque
+del Conde with his profits. We are in the hands of a
+new muleteer, “Don Marcos,” who has never made the
+journey to Acapulco before, and a fourteen-year-old boy,
+“Vincente,” who is depended upon to find the way.
+Every cavalcade in Mexico is bizarre, and ours, ordinary
+enough there, would attract attention elsewhere. First,
+upon the mule “Venado” rides the colonel, a tall, spare
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>man, in military boots, wide hat with silver braid, and a
+linen blouse, through which project the handles of huge
+revolvers. He is aiming, not at display, but comfort. Of
+myself I shall say nothing. It is a privilege of the narrator
+to let it be supposed that he is always gallant and imposing
+in appearance, and exactly adapted to the circumstances
+of the case. I rode the rather large bay horse
+“Pajaro.” Don Marcos, a deprecating, tricky person,
+with a purpose, soon evident, of making up from us his
+bad bargain, wore a crimson poncho and cotton drawers,
+and bestrode the small white horse “Palomito” (“Little
+Dove”). Thus appreciatively had he thought fit to name
+all the animals, though he had but on the instant come
+into possession of them. The trunks, first securely sewn
+up in cocoa-mats, were tied, the colonel’s upon the back
+of the mule “Niña,” and mine upon “Aceituna.” Vincente,
+the boy, ran barefoot most of the way to Acapulco
+behind the mules, crying, “<i>Eh! machos!</i>” and cracking
+at them with a combination whip and blinder. With this
+same blinder their eyes were covered while their loads
+were being put on and taken off, at morning, noon, and
+night.</p>
+
+<p>There was a bit of wagon-road at first, as there is outside
+of each of the more important places along the way.
+This soon merged in the trail, which was of increasing
+wildness. The huts and hamlets we fell in with were
+of cane, well thatched. There were fields of cane,
+trains of mules laden with sugar-loaves, and an occasional
+stately sugar hacienda. Now and then there were the remains
+of one ruined in the wars. At noon the mules
+were unpacked at some favorable point, and the expedition
+rested for several hours. It was the custom to take
+a siesta during the extreme heat of the day. At night
+there were occasional <i>mesons</i>, or rude inns, but generally
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>our stopping-place was such accommodation as could be
+offered by the inhabitants of the villages. The baggage
+was piled up under a thatched pavilion. Beds, consisting
+of mats of stiff canes resting upon trestles, were arranged
+for us along-side, or in open piazzas. These, in the warm
+nights, were more agreeable than might be supposed. <i>À
+la guerre comme à la guerre!</i> Sleeping almost under the
+<i>belle étoile</i>, you could study the constellations, the outlines
+of strange, dark hills, your own thoughts, and hear
+the dogs bark, down at remote Sacocoyuca, Rincon, and
+Dos Arroyos, and there was not a little pleasant novelty
+in the situation. At the gray of dawn we were off.</p>
+
+<p>The people, all of Aztec blood, were gentle with us,
+honest, and not much less comfortable in their circumstances
+than farmers newly established at the West.
+The predicted difficulties of the undertaking largely
+melted away. It rained chiefly at night; there were but
+one or two showers in the daytime, though of these one
+was very hard. The food obtained along the way was of
+rustic quality, and occasionally scanty, but, on the other
+hand, it was often excellent. Chickens were generally to
+be had, with fried bananas as the most frequent vegetable
+accompaniment. The national dish of <i>frijoles</i> (black
+beans) was always palatable. There was milk in the
+morning, but not at night, the cows being milked but
+once a day. We foraged more or less for ourselves.
+The colonel would demand a couple of eggs under the
+off-hand formula of <i>un par de blanquillos</i>, which can
+hardly be translated, but is as much as to say, “A pair of
+little white ’uns.” He declared it “a miserable population”
+where they were not to be had.</p>
+
+<p>On the very first day out Don Marcos came to say that
+he had no money with which to buy feed for the animals.
+It was with the reserve I had retained, doled out
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span>little by little, that this necessary purpose was thereafter
+accomplished, and the <i>arriero</i> perhaps kept from leaving
+us in the lurch.</p>
+
+<p>It was <i>à propos</i> of this incident that my first glimpse
+into the peculiar nature and inclinations of the colonel
+was obtained. It was now evident that it would have
+been better not to have paid the man in advance. But
+the colonel refused either to regret that he had done so
+or to regard it as a lesson for the future.</p>
+
+<p>“I am a philosopher,” he said. “The philosopher
+makes no account of such things.”</p>
+
+<p>These views he professed also on other occasions, and
+seemed, with a bravado of stoicism, almost to go in search
+of inconveniences.</p>
+
+<p>“But is it not rather philosophy,” I argued, “to avoid
+such inconveniences as one can by a little exercise of
+forethought, and then endure the inevitable with equanimity?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; that is the civilian’s, not the soldier’s, point of
+view,” he persisted, with obstinacy.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>This route, probably no better, and certainly no worse,
+was travelled, as now, nearly a hundred years before the
+Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It was the sole
+highway between Acapulco, the only really excellent
+port on the Pacific Coast, and the capital. It has seen
+the transit of convoys of treasure, slaves, silks, and spices
+from the Indies, bound in part for Old Spain. A regular
+galleon used to sail from Acapulco for supplies of
+Oriental goods. It has seen the march of royalist troops,
+under the sixty-four viceroys, and of many a wild insurgent
+troop. Morelos operated here, with his bandit handkerchief
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span>round his head, and kept the district clear of
+Spaniards down to the sea at Acapulco. By one of the
+rivers still lies the massive stone-work for a bridge, the
+construction of which was abandoned in the War of Independence,
+seventy years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Most momentous of all the processions it has seen,
+however, must be counted that of Iturbide, who returned
+along it, with his new tri-colored flag of the three guarantees—Religion,
+Union, and Independence—to the capital,
+to make himself, for a brief season, Emperor. This
+brilliant figure, of such an ignominious end, is still greatly
+honored in Mexico, and there is something rather typical
+of Mexico, or of Spanish America generally, in his
+history. Taking the position which would have been
+that of a Tory here, he fought against the earlier insurrection
+of his country, from its outbreak, in 1808, till
+1820. Sent in command of an army against the rebel
+chief Guerrero in the latter year, he united with instead
+of attacking him, seized a convoy of treasure to serve as
+sinews of war, and drew up at Iguala—a charming little
+city on the route—a plan of independence of his own.
+The Viceroy, in despair, tried to buy him back with
+promises of pardon, money, and higher command, but
+without success. He made a triumphal entry into the
+capital in September, 1821. In May of the following year
+a sedition, which he had without doubt artfully set on foot,
+roused him at his hotel at night, with a clamor that he
+should become Emperor. He appeared upon his balcony
+and affected to reluctantly consent to the popular will.</p>
+
+<p>He modelled himself after Napoleon, nearly his contemporary.
+There is a portrait of him at the National
+Palace, in the same gorgeous coronation robes affected by
+the latter, though in his own whiskered countenance he
+is more like the English Prince Regent of the same date.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span>In August he imprisoned some Deputies, and in October,
+still following his illustrious prototype, put his troublesome
+Congress out-of-doors. But in October also the
+country rose against him, and he was obliged to leave it
+and take refuge in England. He returned again in July
+of the next year—another Napoleon from Elba; but, instead
+of sweeping the country with enthusiasm, he was
+seized upon landing, and ordered to prepare for death
+within two hours. Four days of grace were finally given
+him, and then he was shot.</p>
+
+<p>Iturbide was a person of a highly politic turn, as has
+been seen. A thorough devotee of expediency, he maintained
+(and there was not a little truth in this) that a people
+made up so largely of Indian serfs suddenly released
+from tyranny was not ready for self-government. He
+said that he had meant the Empire to be only temporary.
+He had shown no personal valor in the service of his
+country, as there had been no occasion for it; all his actual
+fighting had been against it. Yet he is commemorated
+in the national anthem,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and a certain hold, in the
+Napoleonic way, which he had upon the popular imagination,
+was relied upon by the French when they endeavored
+to establish Maximilian in Mexico. A grandson of
+Iturbide still lives who was adopted by Maximilian, in
+order to give his dynasty a more indigenous effect, and
+made heir to the succession. The boy’s mother, who at
+first acquiesced in the usurping order of things, later
+repented, and endeavored to get him away. This was
+finally effected through the mediations of Secretary Seward
+and Mr. John Bigelow, then Minister to France.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXI">XXI.<br>
+<i>CONVERSATIONS BY THE WAY WITH A COLONEL.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Iturbide was the subject of confab between the
+colonel and myself as we jogged along the way; and
+this led naturally up to Maximilian. My companion
+had served under Escobedo in the campaign in which
+Maximilian was overthrown, and had witnessed his execution
+at the tragic Cerro de las Campañas.</p>
+
+<p>“He died like a true soldier,” said the colonel. “He
+was not afraid; though he deserved his fate, and I would
+not have had it otherwise.”</p>
+
+<p>It seems to be the general verdict that this ill-starred
+ruler was not without the physical fortitude which is esteemed
+a part of the heritage of princes. But he was
+better fitted for many other things than the task of fastening
+a monarchy upon belligerent Mexico. I drew the
+conversation, when an opening appeared, to the present
+novel relations of Mexico with our own country.</p>
+
+<p>“Had I the authority,” said the colonel, frankly, “I
+would never have granted the railroad charters which are
+making this great bustle. I fear the aggressions of the
+Americans. The conservative Mexican policy is to grant
+you such privileges only when they are balanced by others
+to Europeans. This was the consistent policy of Juarez
+and Lerdo. It was Porfirio Diaz, during his presidency,
+who first broke it down and brought this invasion upon us.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span></p>
+
+<p>“We, on the contrary, incline to make it one of his
+merits,” I said—“a proof of his superior enlightenment.
+He stepped over the boundaries of narrow prejudice and
+jealousy, and allowed a beginning to be made of developing
+the country by those who were ready to do it, without
+waiting farther for those who would not.”</p>
+
+<p>“His enemies say he was bought,” rejoined the colonel,
+who had evidently no great love for Porfirio. “He has
+not been wholly above corruption in his time. He made
+fabulous sums out of the liquidation of the military arrears,
+for instance. He paid a million dollars for his
+magnificent hacienda in the state of Oaxaca. Where
+did that come from? That is a great weakness among
+us for official corruption. There are too many examples
+of it. A defaulting person in a high place is rarely punished.
+When I see a case of that kind treated with severity
+I shall begin to conceive new hopes.”</p>
+
+<p>“But,” I argued, “the Americans certainly have no
+other designs than that of commercial profit. They do
+not want your country. What Americans have anything
+to gain by taking it? Who would put his hand in his
+pocket to pay the expenses of a war of annexation? We
+look out for ourselves as individuals, and we fail to see
+where the profit comes in. We are large enough now
+to gratify our own vanity on that score. Love of glory
+and territorial aggrandizement is not one of our national
+traits. Spoliation might rather be feared at the hands
+of some ambitious prince, if you had any such for a
+neighbor, who could turn it to personal account.”</p>
+
+<p>“You will not annex us with bayonets,” he returned;
+“you will annex us with dollars. I feel it; I know it.
+Your great commercial enterprises will insensibly get
+hold of the vitals of our country, and the rest will follow.
+Perhaps there may be disturbances, and your government
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>called in to protect the property of investors. There will
+naturally be sympathy for them at home, and they will
+move heaven and earth rather than lose. A thousand
+times better that our country were not developed at all
+than at such a price.”</p>
+
+<p>As I still insisted upon the unreasonableness of this
+notion, the colonel continued: “Even granting that you
+are sincere in what you say of the wishes of your people,
+I feel that it is the manifest destiny of Mexico to be taken
+by the United States. In former times the Latin races
+ruled the world, but in this and the coming ages the Saxon
+race will do it. You are a strong, commercial people,
+and commerce is the breath of the nostrils of modern
+civilization. Look at what you have done in California
+since it ceased to be a Spanish province. I have been at
+San Francisco—a great, splendid city; I looked upon it
+with amazement. ‘This was once Mexican,’ I said to
+myself. ‘Ah, what a different genius from that of Mexico!’
+Yes, you will get us. It will be the amelioration
+of many abuses, and our greater prosperity, without
+doubt; but I hope I shall never live to see the day. As
+a patriot, as a soldier, I would give my life fifty times
+over rather than consent to it.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, since you concede such benefits as probable,” I
+ventured to say, “what is this patriotism upon which you
+so strongly insist? We do not want you, and have no
+designs upon you, but—purely for the sake of argument,
+and talking as enlightened persons—is it not rather fantastic?
+Is a boundary-line such an object in itself? May
+not a good deal that has stood for patriotism in the past
+be a mere provincial narrowness? Supposing that Mexico,
+or Canada, without force, but in its own judgment of
+what was for the good of its people, should desire to become
+a part of the Union, maintaining its organization in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>states and its local self-government as now, and merely
+sending delegates to Washington to represent it in national
+affairs, would you, as a Mexican citizen, feel bound
+to resist, as if it were the consummation of something
+scandalous and recreant? Is not the enjoyment of life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest advantage,
+the object of a rational being? Is there any
+virtue in an essential Mexicanism, Americanism, or Anglicism,
+that it should be preserved at all hazards?”</p>
+
+<p>And, having asked many such-like questions, I endeavored,
+farther, to explain a view that we may be all approaching
+a great cosmopolitan period, when we shall be
+members of a republic of nations, and foreigners, as
+such, shall nowhere any longer be either dreaded or despised.</p>
+
+<p>“That is all very well,” said the colonel, stubbornly,
+“since the advantage is to fall on your side; but I tell
+you I would give my heart’s blood rather than see it.”</p>
+
+<p>As to the value of his prognostication I have no opinion;
+but this seriousness of conviction about the plans of
+the Americans from such a source was full of interest.
+It is held by the bulk of the Mexican people, and it
+means trouble ahead for the enterprises, since it must
+increase with their very success.</p>
+
+<p>“Has any party ever been heard of, with you, in favor
+of annexation?” I went on to ask.</p>
+
+<p>“There is no such party,” he replied. “There are
+none who could favor it—unless, singularly enough, it
+might be the Church party. Protestant country though
+you are, with you they could enjoy a greater freedom
+than here. Since their suppression under the War of the
+Reform there can be no convents, religious orders, nor
+monastic schools; but in the United States, I understand,
+they could have as many as they wished.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span></p>
+
+<p>The colonel was rather fond, as stated, of dwelling
+upon the soldier’s point of view. One day, when he had
+been writing, as he said, to his mother, he declared, in a
+gloomy mood, not without its pathos: “That is the only
+tie that binds me to life. At forty-four, as you see me,
+I have passed through many disappointments and chagrins.
+I have little pleasure in the present and no great
+hopes for the future. Well, that is a proper state of mind
+for the soldier.</p>
+
+<p>“The soldier,” he went on to say, “should be one who
+either sets little value upon life, and looks to death as a
+release, or one having a supreme sense of honor, of pride
+in his profession, and duty to his government. He makes
+a contract, as it were, with authority. He is well paid and
+highly considered; in return, he must be ready to spill
+his blood whenever his employer demands it.”</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>The display of childish selfishness on my companion’s
+part to which I have adverted consisted in getting up
+one morning and riding off on my horse, without saying
+so much as “By your leave.” He had cast eyes on it as
+we went along, judged it to be on the whole preferable
+to his mule, and in this direct way took possession. The
+matter was adjusted, but not till it had assumed at one
+time an almost international aspect. It was in the coolness
+resulting from this incident that I rode on alone
+and first saw Iguala.</p>
+
+<p>The expedition had stopped, after its usual day’s march,
+before sunset, at the tropical hamlet of Platanillo. I
+was anxious, however, to pass the night instead in the
+notable city named. The twilight shuts down very rapidly
+here, and from the estimates of casual informants I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>had miscalculated the distance. “<i>Adelantito, señor</i>,”
+they said, after the inaccurate way of such informants—“Just
+a little way ahead;” “<i>Aca bajito, no mas</i>”—“Right
+down there; a mere trifle, that is all.” I had a distant
+glimpse or two of it from the pass, while the sun glowed
+like a beacon-fire on the crests of vast mountains encompassing
+its little valley. A small lake sparkled in its vicinity,
+and plantations of cane near it showed a brighter
+green. Of the town itself, which might have been a
+mammoth hacienda, only a dome and a few white spots
+appeared out of the midst of a quadrangle of foliage
+marked off on all sides to an even line. Then night
+came on, a dark and cloudy one, though without rain.
+My horse slipped with me on the steep over rolling
+stones. It was no longer safe to ride after that, and I
+led him most of the way, picking out the path in the
+dark. The view had been very deceptive, and we had
+many miles to go.</p>
+
+<p>Lonely gulches, brooks, and bits of wood were passed.
+Cows had gone to sleep in upland pastures, and one occasionally
+loomed up, a mysterious shape, in the path and
+took herself out of the way. The rays of a clouded moon
+gleamed now and then on a white patch of the lake, but
+the city seemed to have vanished out of existence. At
+last, however, a dim light in a dome, then a barking of
+dogs, and audible human voices. All this time there had
+been neither house nor hut. It was after nine o’clock.
+I came close up to one of the formal lines of trees,
+opened a gate in it, and was in the midst of Iguala.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus046" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus046.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>OUR CAVALCADE AT IGUALA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span></p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether the place has quite advantages
+enough to offset so much discomfort. What there is to
+be seen could easily have been taken in the next day on
+the march. There is no other vestige of Iturbide yielded
+to inquiry than the house in which the Plan of Iguala is
+said to have been signed—the oldest, as it is one of the
+shabbiest, in the place. It is of one story, like most provincial
+Mexican houses, with the whitewash badly rubbed
+off its adobes, and is now a poor <i>fonda</i>, or restaurant,
+without so much as a sign.</p>
+
+<p>But Iguala is charming. A row of clean, white colonnades,
+made up of square pillars of masonry, supporting
+red-tiled roofs, extends around a central plaza. The windows
+of the better residences are closed, not with glass,
+but projecting wooden gratings of turned posts, painted
+green. The market, a little paved plaza, opening from
+the other, consists of a series of double colonnades, light,
+commodious, and very attractive. The church, of a noble,
+massive form, made gay by an azure belfry and clock,
+stands in a grassy enclosure surrounded by posts and
+chains. Across the way is the zocalo, with brick benches,
+deep, grateful shade of <i>tamarindos</i>, as large as elms, and
+arbors draped with sweet-peas in blossom. Such a park,
+such a church, and such a market could be conscientiously
+recommended as worthy of any populace in the world.
+The heads of palm-trees star the heavier, Northern-looking
+foliage. Grass sprouts plentifully between the cobble-stones,
+and gives a rural air. A band played in the
+zocalo in the evening, though there was but a small scattering
+of persons to hear it.</p>
+
+<p>As I was making a sketch of the zocalo from a portal
+some very well-dressed young men and a professor came
+out. It proved that this house was a school, and a pleasant
+one it seemed.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Amigo</i>”—friend—they said, in a rather patronizing
+tone, “what is your interest in this place? What is your
+picturing designed for?”</p>
+
+<p>Three days farther on is Chilpancingo, to which also
+complimentary terms—in a lesser measure than Iguala—may
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span>be applied. It is the capital of this rugged Guerrero,
+a state named after the patriot general, who was once,
+like our own Marcos and Vincente Lopez, a muleteer. It
+contains an ornate Government-house, a zocalo with a
+music-stand; and we met here a colonel of the detachment
+of cavalry guarding the country, gotten up in such
+dapper civilian riding-dress as if for a promenade in Central
+Park. Population—but populations are hard to get
+at in Mexico. I should say, at random, for either place,
+about three thousand people.</p>
+
+<p>At Chilpancingo you see the place in which the original
+Declaration of Independence of Mexico was proclaimed,
+in 1813. It had to be fought for many a long
+year till the day of Iturbide. This is merely a white
+house with a tablet, and not of farther interest. It was
+a wild and problematic cause, truly, when remote Chilpancingo
+was resorted to by the first constituent Congress,
+assembled by Padre Morelos, to throw off the yoke of
+Spain.</p>
+
+<p>But how has all this been done? These little bits of
+ornate civilization are like enchanted places which we
+happen upon in penetrating the fastnesses of the mountains.
+Perhaps we had better take out at once some
+such commission as that of the Adelantado of the Seven
+Cities; and yet greater discoveries may await us, never
+before heard of by man. Each lies in its miniature valley,
+smiling and fertile, with wagon-roads for a little
+space around; but their inhabitants can hardly be conceived
+as going over the wild trail to supply themselves
+with the fashions and comforts they possess.</p>
+
+<p>Candid judges from without would pronounce it impassable,
+and think it a practical joke that they were
+asked to consider it a road. We crossed and recrossed
+swift, small streams, the water reaching to the animals’
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>shoulders. The colonel had a way of dangling his military
+boots on such occasions in the water, to let me see how
+excellently they were made; but one night, I observed, he
+could not get them off, and the next morning he could
+not get them on. All of one day we traversed the <i>cañada</i>,
+or gorge, of Cholitea, over a sandy bed of which the
+flood had not yet taken possession; another day, the
+Cañada del Zopilote. Our old friend of the North, the
+ailanthus, was common where other natural features were
+dreariest, and often filled the air insufferably with its
+odor. The three rivers crossing our way were swollen
+indeed, as had been predicted. When we came down
+to the wide Mescala it was opaque with red soil, and
+tearing past at twenty miles an hour. We were transported
+across it in a flat skiff guided by an oar. There
+was no plank to aid in the embarking of the horses, and
+one of them fell into such a panic as caused a terrific
+combat of well-nigh half an hour. He was finally thrown
+on board, more dead than alive, with lassoed legs.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, what a soul you have!” (<i>Ah, que alma tienes!</i>)
+cried Marcos fervently to his animal, which had well-nigh
+kicked us all into the river; and losing all policy in his
+rage, he begged to borrow my revolver, that he might
+despatch such a brute, of the ownership of which he was
+ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>The Papagallo River succeeding, we crossed in a dug-out,
+and the animals swam. I asked the colonel, in my
+simplicity, if this were not more or less like war, meaning
+the manner of travel, our foraging, half open-air way of
+sleeping, and the like. He smiled in disdain, and gave
+me a sketch of his campaigns in the day of the French
+usurpation. The rightful government had had at one
+time so little foothold in the country that it was called
+the Government of Paso del Norte, from the farthest
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span>town on the northern frontier, to which it was driven.
+Eating and sleeping seem hardly to have been the custom
+at all till, by an unremitting guerilla warfare, the tide
+was turned.</p>
+
+<p>When we came to “the Cajones,” however, he admitted
+that this was a little like war. We slipped and slid
+all one day down the Cajones—natural, or rather most
+wofully unnatural, steps in the solid rock, in the midst
+of a dark forest. The perpendiculars are three and four
+feet at a time, and often there are mud-holes at the bottom;
+and besides, there are vines that aim to take you
+under the chin. The sagacious steadiness of the pack-mules,
+picking their steps unaided in the most critical
+situations, was wonderful to see.</p>
+
+<p>We met peons, in white cotton, coming up with barrels
+of ardent spirits on their shoulders, and we came to a full
+stop to allow the passage of jingling mule-trains of goods.
+The water ran in the path with us, courteously sharing its
+right of way. At one place it increased and converged
+from every side, and the wood was full of its murmurs,
+as if another universal deluge were coming to overwhelm
+us. It was full, also, of patches of pale-green light upon
+moss-covered stones, and limpid pools, and delicate ferns,
+like snow crystals turned vegetable. Now and then some
+white cascade stood out of the semi-obscurity like a beckoning
+Undine.</p>
+
+<p>Among vegetable growths on the way was the gum-copal,
+not unlike our white birch. There was a tree, the
+<i>cuahuete</i>—if I may trust the pronunciation of Marcos—smooth,
+bronze-colored, and often of a repulsive red, as if
+full of blood. We saw a good many charming red-and-yellow
+flowers on a high bush, like butterflies alighted,
+and once or twice a sprig of heliotrope and a calla-lily.
+The <i>amape</i>, found in the villages, and somewhat like the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span>chestnut, was the finest shade-tree. There was a notable
+absence throughout the journey of what we are accustomed
+to deem the essentially tropical features. Very
+often one might have been riding in the woods of Connecticut.
+There was not even a rank luxuriance of
+growth, just as there were no serpents nor the swarms
+of pestiferous insects (other than a few gnats) to have
+been expected. We saw once a couple of coyote wolves
+trotting demurely along, and, again, a large <i>iguana</i>, a
+harmless reptile, one of which I also noted later, gliding
+around an old bronze gun at the fort of Acapulco.</p>
+
+<p>Birds I hardly recollect at all, except a white heron or
+two, charmingly reflected in an upland pool one early
+morning, and the <i>tecuses</i>, a kind of black-bird. Vincente
+pelted at these latter with small stones, by way of trying
+his aim. The organ-cactus, however, should be exempted
+from the complaint of a want of tropicality. It abounds
+thickly about the gorges and on the mountain slopes.
+Rising twenty-five feet and more in height, the plants
+are like seven-branched candlesticks of the Mosaic law,
+or spears of the gods hurled down and yet quivering in
+the earth. The fan-palm, too, must be excepted. It
+crops out on the bleak hill-sides as common as mullein-stalks
+with us. I can never respect it, in the conservatories,
+again. To see it thus was a kind of shock: it was
+like seeing some exotic belle of society masquerading as
+a kitchen wench. For one day before reaching the coast
+we had the cocoa-nut-palms. Nobody in the hamlets
+would get the fruit down for us except on a wholesale
+order, for munificent prices, which brought the cost above
+what it is in New York. There was often a shortage of
+the other fruits and commodities, as sugar, in the same
+way, in or near the very places where they grew.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the concluding stages of the march we fell in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>with another travelling-companion, an officer in the Customs
+service. When he learned that the colonel was
+going to the frontier, with a view, among other things,
+to suppress the extensive smuggling carried on there,
+he said, “You had better make your little $20,000 or
+$30,000 by protecting it. That will be much less trouble.
+The smugglers will buy up your soldiers, anyway;
+so it amounts to the same thing.”</p>
+
+<p>I must not represent that the colonel was always of an
+oppressively serious carriage. On the contrary, he developed
+a vein of humor, the more amusing from the simple
+good-faith of those at whose expense it was generally exercised.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you charge no more than this to persons of our
+consideration, my good woman?” he said to a peasant,
+whose bill was modest, though but in keeping with the
+primitive nature of the accommodations. “It is a species
+of affront, as one might say. Do you comprehend that I
+am a colonel in the army, and this gentleman a learned
+traveller, noting down the manners and customs of foreign
+lands? When strangers of our position come this
+way again understand that double what you have demanded
+is the least that you should take.”</p>
+
+<p>The woman, abashed, received double her fee, and replied
+that she would bear the lesson in mind for the
+benefit of future comers.</p>
+
+<p>Again, meeting three honest-faced Indian maids, with
+pitchers on their heads, going to the spring, he said,
+“Good-day, Marias!” and turning to me, in an aside,
+“Not that I know, from Adam, whether one of them
+is Maria or not.”</p>
+
+<p>He praised glaringly, to her face, as of exceeding comeliness,
+a servant-maid who wore gold ear-rings and necklace,
+and was, perhaps, not of more than average dumpiness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>and plainness. She waited on us at table at Tierra
+Colorada. The colonel desired to know her name.</p>
+
+<p>“Victoria.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well are you named Victoria!” he cried, in simulated
+enthusiasm. “<i>Que cara simpatica!</i>” (“What a sympathetic
+face!”) he repeated at intervals.</p>
+
+<p>Meekly, and with no suspicion of raillery, she replied,
+each time, “<i>Mil gracias</i> (“A thousand thanks”), <i>señor</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Give thanks rather to Heaven, which made you so,
+and not us, who do but recognize it,” rejoined the colonel,
+piously.</p>
+
+<p>At La Venta de Peregrino the night was hot, and it
+still rained, after having rained all day. A garden of
+bananas twenty feet tall grew next the basket-like house
+of canes where we stopped. We hung up our wet garments
+and properties on the poles of the thatched porch,
+or pavilion, till it resembled one of those very numerous
+national establishments, the <i>empeños</i>, or pawn-shops.
+Dogs, cats, donkeys, horses, pigs and fowls—“shooed” out,
+when they became too familiar, with an emphatic <i>Ooch-t!</i>—gathered
+under the same shelter, as if it had been a
+Noah’s ark. We supped on pepper-sauce, tough chicken,
+frijoles, tortillas, cream-cheese, and coffee without milk,
+spread out upon a mat on the ground. The proprietor in
+person—a man in an embroidered shirt and cotton drawers,
+whose talk was not of the wisest sort—held pitch-pine
+splints to light the feast.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, how does it happen, hombre,” inquired the colonel,
+as if in a speculative way, “that a person of your fine
+appearance; a person of manners, intelligence, education,
+hospitality; a statesman, as one might say, who goes to
+Dos Arroyos to see who is going to be elected mayor” (the
+man had been there that day, as he told us), “with a fine
+house like this—how does it happen, I say, that you have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span>not a table of any sort to serve two travellers a supper
+upon?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Pos bien</i>,” said the illiterate host, both pleased and
+flustered, scratching his head. “Tables? Yes, tables, now,
+to be sure. All that you say is very true, but there is a
+great scarcity of carpenters in this part of the country.
+<i>Si, escasen muncho</i> (Yes, they are mighty scarce), I can
+tell you.”</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Two days after this we came down to Acapulco. It is
+a town for the most part of straggling huts, with a straggling
+thirty-five hundred of people. It has no vestiges
+of its antiquity but an old Spanish fort, after the order
+of Morro Castle, dismantled by Maximilian’s French on
+their abandonment of the place.</p>
+
+<p>Near the fort lay a couple of rusted rails in position on
+a bit of washed-out embankment, the beginning of a railroad
+inaugurated here with a flourish on the 5th of May,
+1881. Having passed over the line, one would judge that
+it might be much more than dread of American aggressions
+which would prevent its speedy completion.</p>
+
+<p>There was no small pleasure in discovering at last, like
+another Balboa, the Pacific Ocean, in boarding the fine
+steamer of the Pacific Mail Company, the <i>City of Grenada</i>,
+which had come her long jaunt from Panama northward,
+and re-establishing connection with the outer world.</p>
+
+<p>With this, too, began an acquaintance with the western
+ports of Mexico. One of the semi-monthly steamers,
+rightly chosen, each month puts into them all. An idea
+of the country can thus be got which would not be possible
+otherwise without much greater fatigue and expense,
+but it is not at all as favorable as that presented by the
+interior.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span></p>
+
+<p>Neither of the three lower ports is of great size. Acapulco
+has the most complete and charming harbor. Manzanillo
+is a small strip of a place, on the beach, built of
+wood, with quite an American look. The volcano of
+Colima appears inland, with a light cloud of smoke
+above it.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp78" id="illus047" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus047.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>San Blas is larger, but still hardly more than an extensive
+thatched village. On the bluff beside it exist the ruins
+of an ancient, substantial San Blas, shaken to pieces by an
+earthquake. Some old bronze bells from its church have
+been brought down and set up on some rude wooden
+trestles, on the ground in front of the poor chapel, without
+a belfry, which now fills the ecclesiastical needs of
+the place. This arrangement is sometimes referred to
+satirically as <i>la torre de San Blas</i>—the steeple of San
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span>Blas. My slight sketch of these bells, made on a fly-leaf
+of my note-book in the first instance, came to have an
+importance far beyond its own merits. I have the gratification
+of knowing that it proved to be the source of
+nothing less than the last inspiration of Longfellow. The
+great and good poet died on the 24th of March, 1882.
+In his portfolio was found his final work, “The Bells of
+San Blas,” dated March 15, which afterward appeared in
+the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>. His memorandum-book contained
+a reference, as a suggestion for a poem, to the number
+and page of <i>Harper’s Magazine</i> of the same month, in
+which the sketch was published.</p>
+
+<p>At Mazatlan we are in a bustling harbor, and a well
+and handsomely built little city, with improvements and
+shops of the better sort, which other countries than Mexico
+might be satisfied with. It seems surprising, until we
+comprehend the extensive back country which is tributary
+to it, how a city of but fourteen thousand people can be
+justified in maintaining so elaborate a stock of goods.</p>
+
+<p>We steam finally across the Gulf of California and up
+the coast of that peninsula which seems one of the remotest
+points of the globe. The days are calm and blue;
+the bold outlines of the shores offer constant novelty. An
+arbitrary line is passed: we have lost Mexico, but gained
+California—the richest and most marvellous of her provinces.</p>
+
+<p>It is remarkable now to recall that, upon the accession
+of the Emperor Iturbide, Mexico boasted of being, with
+the exception of Russia and China, the most extensive
+empire in the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PART_II">PART II.<br>
+THE LOST PROVINCES.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[295]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_LOST_PROVINCES">THE LOST PROVINCES.</h2>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXII">XXII.<br>
+<i>SAN FRANCISCO.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>It is the way of sea-coasts, as observed from the water,
+to maintain a close reserve. If they allow us a cliff or
+two, a suggestion of green forests, or a mountain in the
+background, it is as much as they do. All their natural
+projections, from a steamer’s deck, retire into a straight
+line. “You have chosen your element,” they seem to say,
+“and you shall not enjoy at once the pleasures of both.
+If you can do without me, so can I without you, and until
+you take the pains to disembark you shall know nothing
+of the attractions I purposely keep out of sight just
+over the surf-whitened margin.”</p>
+
+<p>The coast of California seems of even an especial moroseness
+in this respect. You pass some few islands, inlets
+at San Diego and Wilmington, the Santa Barbara
+Channel, and the bays of Santa Monica, San Luis, and
+Monterey; but for the most part the coast of the land of
+gold stretches on unbroken, low, brown, and bare. Search
+is vain for any suggestion of orange-grove or palm. It is
+foreign-looking to one who arrives from the east of the
+United States. Lions might come prowling down such
+slopes. It might be Morocco, and we, on our travels,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[296]</span>some new Crusoe escaped in the long-boat, with Xury,
+from the Rover of Sallee, and afraid to land for the
+howlings of wild creatures.</p>
+
+<p>If, in our Pacific Mail steamer, we were discovering
+the country for the first time—as every traveller does
+discover a new country for the first time, no matter what
+accounts he may have heard of it—we should try along
+without finding a single good harbor for four hundred
+and fifty miles, from San Diego, at the Mexican frontier,
+to San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>Then all at once comes an opening through bold Coast
+Range at the water’s edge, and we are in the far-famed
+“Golden Gate.” It is a mere eyelet—a strait, giving access
+to a wide expanse of bay. So happy is the opening,
+and commodious the shelter afforded, that the reversal of
+the churlishness prevailing up to this point seems miraculous.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt, when once the site is understood, as
+to why San Francisco is located just where it is. It has
+the only natural harbor between Astoria, Oregon, to the
+north, and San Diego, to the south. It bears, besides,
+with this advantage, such a relation to the resources of
+the back country, that it could not escape a destiny of
+greatness.</p>
+
+<p>It is not simply a bay upon which we have entered, but
+an inland sea, with a great commerce of its own. Immediately
+in front rise round-backed Goat Island and Angel
+Island, resembling monsters asleep; and terraced Alcatraz,
+with its citadel, as picturesque as a bit of Malta.
+Vistas open beyond on many sides, with gleams of light
+falling on white cities under lowering atmospheres of
+smoke. San Francisco, close at hand, piles up impressively
+on steep hills, its bristling structures covering their
+undulations sharply from numerous hills. The water-front
+is full of shipping. French and Russian and British
+frigates, and a Mexican gun-boat, are lying at anchor.
+Craft of all shapes and sizes cross one another’s wakes
+in the harbor. The lateen-sails of Genoese and Maltese
+fishermen and the junks of Chinese shrimp-catchers are
+among them. Large ferry-boats, superior, as a rule, to
+those we are familiar with at the East, ply to Oakland,
+the Brooklyn of the scene—a city already of fifty thousand
+people; Alameda, with its esplanade of bathing
+pavilions; Berkeley, with its handsome university and
+institution for blind, deaf, and dumb; San Quentin, with
+its prison; and rustic Saucelito and San Rafael, under the
+dark shadow of Mount Tamalpais.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[297]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus048" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus048.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>ALCATRAZ ISLAND.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[298]</span></p>
+
+<p>From Oakland projects an interminable pier, built by
+the Central Pacific Railway. A mile in length as it is,
+it was to have gone on to a junction with vacant Goat
+Island, which would then have been made a city also, and
+become the terminus of all transcontinental journeys.
+This project was stopped by violent opposition from
+property-holders on shore.</p>
+
+<p>Patches of yellow, under the Presidio, are taken by our
+novices on the steamer for the “Sand-lots,” famous in
+the Kearneyite agitations. The Presidio is a barracks,
+which was a fort and mission in the time of the first settlement
+by the Spaniards—to what slight extent they
+ever settled the place—in the year 1776. The man who
+has “been here before” plants himself squarely on the
+deck, pulls down a silk cap over his eyes, and explains
+that the Sand-lots are not the Presidio, but nothing less
+than the large yard of the new, unfinished City-hall, in
+the centre of town. But Kearneyism is dead and buried,
+he says—as the case proved—and there will be no chance
+to see one of these traditional assemblages.</p>
+
+<p>He names for us the various hills, and points out the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[299]</span>
+Palace Hotel, the Market Street shot-tower, and the homes
+of some of the great millionnaires who have made such a
+stir in their day and generation. Three or four of these
+latter top California, or “Nob,” Hill, with a prominence
+in keeping with their owners’ station. They are those of
+the railroad kings, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins—the
+mining kings having up to this time expended their principal
+building efforts in the country. “Nob” Hill is
+three hundred feet high, plebeian Telegraph Hill nearly
+as much, and Russian Hill, to the west—the latest precinct
+taken into favor for fine residences—three hundred
+and sixty. Murray Hill, New York, be it noted, is but
+seventy-eight. The riff-raff of Telegraph Hill climb, as
+is seen, by a multitude of wooden stairways; but how in
+the world do the Crœsuses get up to their habitations,
+which cut the sky-line so imposingly? We shall see.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[300]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus049" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus049.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>“NOB” HILL, FROM THE BAY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[301]</span></p>
+
+<p>The city does not begin directly at the ocean, but a
+mile or two within. It follows the inner shore of a
+long, narrow peninsula which comes from the south to
+meet one coming from the north, and forms with it the
+strait and bay.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, an inland sea, this bay. You go southward
+upon it thirty miles, northward as far, and thirty
+miles north-eastward to the Straits of Carquinez—which
+has Benicia on one side, and Martinez, the point of departure
+for ascent of the peak of Mount Diablo, on the
+other. Through these straits you pass, again, into Suisun
+Bay, which receives the waters of the Sacramento and
+San Joaquin rivers, and is itself some twenty miles in
+extent.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>You are struck, on coming ashore from Mexico, with
+the excessive thinness of everything American. Our belongings
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[302]</span>seem all of a piece with our light-running machinery,
+with the spider lines of yon American buggy
+waiting for its owner. We evade Nature by a deft trick,
+and do not obstinately oppose her. There the old walls
+were as solid yet as the everlasting hills; here we seemed
+to be living in flying-machines.</p>
+
+<p>How strange, arriving from the other side of the world,
+to find people lining the dock dressed in the common
+way, and chattering the common speech, even to the latest
+bits of slang! A China steamer, however, had come
+in along-side just before us, and supplied a novel element
+of foreignness. Almond-eyed Celestials, in blue blouses,
+swarmed her decks and poured down her sides. Groups
+were loaded into express-wagons, and driven away uptown
+in charge of friends come down to meet them.
+Others trudged stoutly on foot, with their effects deposited
+in a pair of wicker baskets, at the ends of a long
+bamboo on their shoulders. This way of carrying burdens
+is constantly met with. The vegetable dealers hawk thus
+their wares from house to house, and present the aspect
+of the figures in cuts of the tea-fields. It is poor travelling
+when the curiosity alone and not the imagination
+is gratified, and San Francisco promises ample material
+for both.</p>
+
+<p>Had we come in the gold days of ’49 we should have
+landed some half-dozen blocks farther inland than to-day.
+By so much has the water-front since been extended and
+built into a solid commercial quarter. The ’Forty-niners
+found but a scanty strip of sand at the base of the steep
+hills.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, did they stop here, and build their city at
+such infinite pains and expense, instead of seeking a more
+convenient site elsewhere? There is, or was, some even
+more serious objection to all other locations. At Oakland,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[303]</span>insufficient depth of water; at Saucelito, where
+whalers, Russian and other, had been accustomed to refit,
+Tamalpais, 2700 feet high, as against Telegraph Hill, but
+300. Distant Benicia and Vallejo—the latter now the
+naval station of the Pacific Coast, and once briefly the
+capital of the State—were much too far away. Steam
+was little in use. The greater part of the ships came
+under sail, and there were no tugs to pull them. They
+must be able to get in and out with all greatest attainable
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p>Such ships as these were, according to the accounts
+we have of them! The most antiquated and dangerous
+hulks were furbished up once more for this last voyage.
+The eager humanity they carried took little heed of perils
+and discomforts so they were but on the way to the
+goal to which all adventurous spirits turned. When the
+port was still but a beggarly scattering of huts and tents
+it could muster two hundred sail, good and bad, at once.
+Many of them never got out again. It was not on account
+of nautical difficulties, but partly because they had
+no return cargoes, and principally because their crews ran
+away from them to the mines the moment foot touched
+shore. Certain craft were beached and converted into
+dwellings; others, utilized for a time as warehouses, rotted
+at their moorings, and to-day form “made ground.”
+The remarkable city to which they came, which had
+eight hundred and fifty souls in 1848, and twenty thousand
+in ’49, has now, in an existence of thirty-four
+years, three hundred thousand.</p>
+
+<p>The buildings on the level made ground stand generally
+on foundations of piling. The practice prevails, too,
+of tying them well together with iron rods, against the
+jar of the occasional earthquake, which is among San
+Francisco’s idiosyncrasies. It is proposed to improve the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[304]</span>water-front with a continuous, massive sea-wall, and a
+portion of this is already built. Extensive yards of attractive
+redwood lumber, which resembles cedar, and
+warehouses for grain, are seen. The elevator system,
+owing to lack of ships for properly carrying grain in
+bulk, is nowhere in use throughout California.</p>
+
+<p>We reach next an area given up to heavy traffic in the
+fruits and produce of the country. Battery and Sansome
+streets succeeding are lined with large wholesale dry-goods
+houses similar to those in the greater Eastern cities.
+Montgomery Street shows stately office buildings, exchanges,
+and hotels. Kearney Street has been hitherto
+the chief site of the more elegant retail trade. Its prestige
+is passing, however, to Market Street, a wide thoroughfare
+which recalls State Street, Chicago. Having
+unlimited room for extension in the north and south direction
+of the peninsula, whereas the others named are
+contracted, Market Street is to be San Francisco’s Broadway
+of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The financial centre is contained in the area of two
+blocks, between California and Bush, Sansome and Montgomery
+Streets. Here are those institutions whose great
+transactions and singular history are unknown now to but
+few parts of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The Nevada Bank, financial lever of the Bonanza
+kings, and point from which has been supposed to emanate
+all the weightiest influences connected with mining
+matters, is a four-story and Mansard iron building, with
+the usual classic “orders.” The Bank of California,
+whence the brilliant Ralston rushed forth from his
+troubles to drown himself in the bay, is two stories, of
+“blue stone,” of a pleasant color, and exceedingly sharp,
+agreeable cutting. The Merchants’ Exchange, erected
+so long ago as 1867, is a very ornate, town-hall-looking<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[305]</span>
+building, of iron and stone, dark-colored, with a clock-tower
+in the centre. It is adjoined by the Safe Deposit
+Company, in a similar style, in the basement of which a
+glimpse is to be had of a splendid steel treasure-chamber,
+with a dozen life-size men in armor, gilded.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[306]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus050" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus050.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CALIFORNIA STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[307]</span></p>
+
+<p>The large and agreeably proportioned Stock Exchange,
+on Pine Street, is of gray granite, with numerous polished
+columns. The board-room within is an amphitheatre,
+and a bronze railing protects the circle of seats.
+With its agreeable illumination and neat furniture, including
+Axminster rugs, it presents a much more home-like
+aspect than is the rule with such places. Mining
+stocks exclusively are dealt in.</p>
+
+<p>It is quiet enough now. We have fallen upon evil
+days. Capitalists have withdrawn their millions to the
+East; ships come only in ballast, for grain, instead of
+with valuable exchange cargoes, and charge rates almost
+prohibitory; there is not one “turn-out” now on the
+Cliff House road where there were formerly a dozen;
+and real estate has shrunk fifty per cent.—if in some
+places it have any value at all.</p>
+
+<p>This board was once the theatre of a speculative movement
+which took hold upon the community like madness.
+The aggregate value of the mining stocks on the list, at
+the period of highest prices, in the year 1875, was, in
+round numbers, $282,000,000. The aggregate value of
+the same stocks in the summer of 1881 was but $17,000,000.
+There had occurred a shrinkage of $265,000,000,
+or more than fifteen times the total value surviving.</p>
+
+<p>What had happened? The “bottom had dropped out”
+of the famous “Comstocks,” perhaps the richest mines
+known to history. “Consolidated Virginia,” valued at
+$75,000,000, was now worth less than $1,000,000. “Sierra
+Nevada” fell from $27,000,000 to $825,000. But the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[308]</span>greatest shrinkage of all was in “California.” This unhappy
+stock shrank from $84,000,000 to $351,000.</p>
+
+<p>These figures explain a depression the vestiges of
+which, though the ruinous crisis has long passed, still remain.
+The stock-gambling mania possessed the community
+without distinction of station, and hardly of age or
+sex, and when the bubble broke there was reason enough
+for gloom with all who had laid up their treasure in such
+unstable form.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the earlier buildings, now flat, thin, and unornamental,
+were obtained at expense quite out of proportion.
+The stone for the old City Hall was brought
+expressly from Australia; that of the Wells-Fargo building,
+and the Union Club, from China. The granite of
+the Branch Mint, a fine, classic design, was dressed in
+Oregon. The newer structures exhibit all the varieties
+of form and color in which the modern decorative taste
+delights. The material for most is procured in the State
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of being in a remote part of the world is
+kept before you in many ways. Here is a sign of the
+“New Zealand Insurance Company.” Fancy New Zealand,
+where a cannibal population was lately eating missionaries,
+sending us over its insurance companies! Here
+is the Alaska Commercial Company, the Bank of British
+Columbia; and here, its inscription gilded in Chinese as
+well as English, the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking
+Company. An occasional building is without the usual
+entrance-doors, its staircase, in the comparative mildness
+of the climate, left as open as the street.</p>
+
+<p>A system of alleys passes among the colossal structures,
+and these abound in refreshment resorts—“The Dividend
+Saloon,” “Our Jacob,” “The Comstock Exchange,” and
+“The New Idea”—to which the hastening business men
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[309]</span>repair in intervals of their labors. The San Francisco
+boot-blacks, a model to their class, are neatly uniformed
+men instead of ragged urchins. Favored by the climate,
+they establish their rows of easy-chairs on platforms under
+a canvas awning, have a newspaper and the gossip
+for you while you wait, and somewhat usurp the place
+so long sacred to the barber.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp90" id="illus051" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus051.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>LONE MOUNTAIN.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The corner of California and Montgomery Streets may
+be considered one of two focal points in San Francisco;
+the “Lotta Fountain” is the other.</p>
+
+<p>The Lotta Fountain—a tawdry, little, cast-iron affair,
+presented to the city by the actress after whom it is
+named—has been given a place of distinguished honor.
+Five important streets radiate from it. Its pedestal is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[310]</span>a place where the timid seek refuge when entangled in
+the throng of vehicles. Market Street extends to the
+Oakland Ferry one way, and past the Mechanics’ Institute
+and pleasure resort of Woodward’s Garden to the
+distant Mission Hills in the other. Geary Street takes
+you, by a “cable road,” westward to Lone Mountain,
+around which all the cemeteries are grouped, and Golden
+Gate Park, stretching to the ocean. On the top of Lone
+Mountain stands up to view from far and wide a dark
+cross, which weirdly recalls that of Calvary. Third Street,
+a thoroughfare of working-people, abounding in small restaurants,
+markets, and “tin-type” galleries, leads to the
+water at a different angle from Market. Finally, Kearney
+Street debouches also at the Lotta Fountain, and Montgomery
+terminates but a few steps below.</p>
+
+<p>The Palace Hotel, vast, drab-colored, of iron and stuccoed
+brick, looms up nine stories in height on Market
+Street, and closes the vista from Montgomery. Studded
+with bay-windows, it has the air of a mammoth bird-cage.
+The San Franciscan, wherever met with, never fails to
+boast of it as the most stupendous thing of its kind in the
+world. With the conviction that size is not always the
+particular in which our hotels, like some of our communities,
+most need improvement, I should say that perfection
+had hardly yet been reached.</p>
+
+<p>Within it is more satisfactory. At night an electric
+light strikes upon many tiers of columns, as white as
+paint can make them, in a large glass-roofed court, with
+an effect quite fairy-like and Parisian. Twice a week a
+band plays there, and the guests promenade up and down
+their galleries or look over the balustrade. In the bottom
+there are flowers, people sitting in chairs, and carriages
+stand in a circular, asphalt-paved driveway.</p>
+
+<p>Though the resident of San Francisco feels called upon
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[311]</span>to complain of its present stagnation, the bare existence
+of such a place strikes the new-comer with amazement.</p>
+
+<p>Its air is not ephemeral, but of a fine, massive gravity.
+Its shops are filled with costly goods, its streets with
+comely, beautifully dressed women. It has an art and
+literature. Private galleries contain foreign modern pictures
+of the best class. Some local artists have made for
+themselves a more than local reputation. There is a well-attended
+“School of Design,” which has already graduated
+several pupils whose talent has been recognized
+abroad. The “Mercantile Library” is the most handsome
+and complete in its appointments of any American city.</p>
+
+<p>San Francisco “society,” though a trifle bizarre in the
+use of its newly acquired wealth, has an under-stratum of
+unexceptionable refinement. Its most bizarre side, too, is
+certainly approved of in Europe, where its magnates entertain
+kings and give their daughters in marriage to
+lofty titles.</p>
+
+<p>The European traveller who visits “the land of Barnum”
+and “of Washington” with literary intent must
+be cruelly broken up by what he will find here. Such a
+place should be a vast, motley camp, as it is known to
+European travellers that most American cities should be.
+With its thirty-three years, and its heterogeneous elements,
+it should exhibit a combination of squalor and
+mushroom splendor. The wretched shanty should elbow
+the vulgar palace, a democratic boorishness of manners,
+blazing in diamonds, the faint, refined natures that by any
+chance have ventured into such a Babel. But, alas! we
+live in an age of expedition, of labor-saving inventions.
+With unlimited means, such as here enjoyed, the work of
+years is condensed into months. Camp there is none, but
+a luxurious city, presenting all the ordinary characteristics
+of civilization.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[312]</span></p>
+
+<p>An association comprising in a genial way most of the
+best elements of San Francisco is the Bohemian Club. It
+is found taking a very creditable interest in literature and
+the arts—it numbering the professionals and amateurs in
+these branches in its membership—and entertains and
+welcomes distinguished strangers. A monthly entertainment
+of a light, composite character is held, known as a
+“Jinks.” The grand festival of the year, however, is
+a “High Jinks,” which takes the form of an excursion
+into the country. The principal ceremonial of the High
+Jinks has sometimes been held at night, in masquerade
+costume, among the Big Trees, the enormous redwoods
+of Sonoma County, to the northward. It may well be
+believed that the doings on these occasions are as fantastic
+and amusing as the merry inventions of a couple of
+hundred bright social spirits can make them.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>A population of three hundred thousand souls is not
+extraordinary now, as populations go, but there are certain
+things which make San Francisco cosmopolitan beyond
+its actual size. An entirely new commercial situation
+gives rise to a new <i>milieu</i>. San Francisco faces
+toward Asia, the great English-speaking colonies of
+Oceanica, and the islands of the sea, as New York faces
+Europe. It enjoys already a trade with the Orient
+amounting to ten millions per annum in imports and
+eight millions in exports. The possibilities of this trade,
+extended among the teeming populations in the cradle
+of the human race, seem almost limitless. A way will be
+found sooner or later out of the imbroglio into which our
+inexperience has plunged us on the Chinese question, and
+communication will flow unimpeded. In countries separated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[313]</span>
+by water, and demanding each other’s productions,
+cities arise at the places of transfer, and proportioned to
+its volume; and for all this San Francisco has one of the
+most remarkable of situations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[314]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="illus052" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus052.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>“HIGH JINKS” OF THE BOHEMIAN CLUB AMONG THE BIG TREES.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[315]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Oriental trade is but a small item in the total. It
+has ships, besides those bound for the Eastern and European
+ports, going out to the British and Russian possessions
+in the North, Mexico, Central and South America,
+Tahiti, Feejee, Manila, the Sandwich and Friendly
+Islands—to all those far-off points in the South Pacific
+which now in their turn promise to shine with the light
+of civilization and become powers of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Coals are burned at firesides—not of the most desirable
+quality, it must be confessed—which come from the
+coast once characterized by the poet in the line—</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“The wolf’s long howl on Oonalaska’s shore.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">Seventy millions pounds of sugar a year are brought from
+those Sandwich Islands which slew Captain Cook, now a
+civilized, modern state. But it is particularly Australasia,
+and our coming relations with it, that awaken admiring
+speculations. Melbourne, Australia, has already more
+than 280,000 people, Sydney 225,000, while along the
+coasts of that once cannibal New Zealand, now sending
+us its insurance companies, scatter also a line of flourishing
+cities: Dunedin, with its 43,000 people; Auckland,
+with 40,000; Christchurch, 32,000; Wellington, 22,000;
+and I know not how many others.</p>
+
+<p>Astoria and Portland, in Oregon, San Diego, and, no
+doubt, ports to be created in time along the Mexican
+shores, will receive a share of these new influences in
+the world, but at San Francisco they touch us first and
+nearest.</p>
+
+<p>There is a definite fascination in coming to the “jumping-off
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[316]</span>place,” the final verge of the latest of the continents.
+An excellent situation in which to feel it is to lie
+on the brown heather at the point above the Golden Gate—though
+it is a raw and gusty place in which to lie too
+long—or to look down from the parapeted road or piazza
+of the Cliff House.</p>
+
+<p>Here practically nothing intervenes between you and
+Japan, except we make mention of the clump of Seal
+Rocks, upon which the grouty sea-lions are floundering
+and roaring, down there in the surf in front.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! when a man has travelled,” says Thoreau, “when
+he has robbed the horizon of his native fields of its mystery,
+tarnished the blue of distant mountains with his feet,
+he may begin to think of another world.”</p>
+
+<p>Very well. Perhaps it may do a man no harm to think
+of another world now and then, if not upon one pretext,
+on another. At evening the Golden Gate is the way to
+the sunset. The orb of day settles into the sea at the
+end of the gleaming strait, precisely in that East where
+we always figure it to ourselves as rising in the morning.
+The great circle is at last complete; and, as the extremes
+of every kind, even of love and hate, are said to be identical,
+the old, quiescent East has become the bound of the
+new, impetuous West.</p>
+
+<p>“What is a world to do,” you idly ask, “when it has no
+longer a West? How is it to get on without that vague
+open region on its borders, always the safety-valve and
+outlet for surplus population and uneasy spirits?”</p>
+
+<p>“But when the race has quite arrived at this farther
+shore, will it stop here? or will it possibly start round
+the world again? Will it go on yet many times more,
+always beginning with the highest perfection yet attained,
+weaker types dying out in front to make room,
+till it shall become in its march a dazzling army of light?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[317]</span>
+Is a millennium, perchance, to be reached in this cumulative
+way, as the power of a magnet is increased by the
+number of turns of the helix?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[318]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus053" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus053.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>GOLDEN GATE, FROM GOAT ISLAND.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[319]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The sentiment of gain,” I say, continuing these wise
+speculations, “has been the leading factor in drawing the
+nations around the globe. Gold has been dangled as a
+bait: first, the hope of it by conquest; later, in mines of
+the precious metals. It has danced, Ariel-like, will-o’-the-wisp-like,
+before them. Tantalized, disappointed, after
+floundering on a ways, they have paused to develop the
+lands upon which they found themselves.</p>
+
+<p>“But now at length, when the vacant spaces are full,
+and the need of subterfuge exhausted, the bait is cast
+down, to be gorged upon by those who find it. Never
+before, till ’49, were its followers rewarded with such unstinted
+liberality. The treasure of the earth seemed piled
+up in the fastnesses of the far Pacific.”</p>
+
+<p>I recall that their yield since the year 1848 has reached
+the sum of $2,100,000,000, and is still going on at
+$80,000,000 a year. Gold, scattered at first in the very
+sands, was later washed out of the gravel-banks, by the hydraulic
+process, and later yet got by crushing the quartz
+rock. When gold began to diminish it was followed by
+silver. The great “Bonanza” mines of Nevada were
+discovered. “Consolidated Virginia” alone produced
+$65,000,000 in seven years.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>What fabulous sums besides—to go back to town—the
+managers made by the ingenious process of “milking the
+market” I do not undertake to compute. The prices of
+this celebrated stock at successive dates, not far apart,
+were: first, $17 a share; then $1; $110; $42; $700; and
+then, in the final collapse, in 1875, little or nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[320]</span></p>
+
+<p>I have seen a poor saloon called the “Auction Lunch,”
+on Washington Street, near the Post-office, said to have
+been kept by the once barkeepers, Flood and O’Brien,
+who attained such a splendid prosperity. There is no
+historic tablet over the door, but one naturally looks with
+reverence at the place where the beginning of such things
+could be. The proprietors of the “Auction Lunch” were
+in the habit of taking gold-dust occasionally in a friendly
+way from miners, for safe-keeping while the owners were
+enjoying themselves about town. It was from such persons
+that they obtained the “points” which resulted in
+their getting possession first of “Hale and Norcross,” and
+then of the greater part of the properties of the Comstock
+lode.</p>
+
+<p>I fell in with a professed friend of theirs of early times,
+whose fortunes had not mended at all at the same pace.
+He descanted on the inequalities of fate, and what he
+termed “bull-dog” luck.</p>
+
+<p>He could prove that Flood and O’Brien were not even
+good business men—“though Jimmy Flood does go about
+with a wise air,” he said, “and Billy O’Brien left, at his
+death, half a million dollars to each of eight or ten nieces.”</p>
+
+<p>There is hardly a limit to the exceptional characters
+and exceptional doings to be heard of in San Francisco.
+Though the city affect—or has been driven into—a quiescent
+air now, it has hardly ever done anything like any
+other place. It began with the wild Argonauts of ’49,
+whom Bret Harte has so strikingly portrayed. It had
+had six great fires, which destroyed property to the
+amount of $23,000,000, when yet less than three years of
+age. It was ruled for months, in the year 1856, by a vigilance
+committee, which rid it of eight hundred evil-doers
+of one sort and another, the worst by summary execution,
+the rest by banishment.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[321]</span></p>
+
+<p>The politics of the State before the war were Democratic,
+with a rather strong Southern bias. There was a
+long feud between the two great Senatorial paladins,
+Broderick and Gwin, which resulted in the death of
+Broderick by the duelling-pistol of one of the partisans
+of the latter. There was the long fight and a final deliverance
+from an incubus of forged Spanish land titles, the
+manufacture of which “had become a business and a
+trade,” and which covered the area of the city many
+times over. Then came the war, and the peculiarities
+growing out of the retention of a solid currency, while
+the rest of the country was deluged with a depreciated
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>The brilliant period, later, when the Bonanza mines
+were pouring out their floods of riches, and the favorite
+stocks were running delightfully up and down the gamut
+from $1 to $700 a share, was followed, as I have said, by
+a depression of the deepest dye. In the unbearable disappointment
+of their losses, and the stagnation of trade,
+a part of the community snatched at a theory held out
+to them by demagogues, that it was their political institutions
+which were somehow to blame. Upon this basis a
+singular new party, wild and half-communistic in character,
+arose, and met with a brief success. The truckman,
+Denis Kearney, was its Caius Gracchus or Watt Tyler,
+and set it in motion with blasphemous mouthings from
+an improvised tribune in the Sand-lots. It elected a
+mayor who was at the same time a Baptist preacher.
+This mayor’s son—preacher, too—rode up one day and
+assassinated at his own door an editor who had passed
+strictures on their course. The party voted a new constitution,
+which was thought to be a prelude to universal
+confiscation, and capitalists fled before it in alarm.</p>
+
+<p>And, finally, this remarkable city, having become the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[322]</span>recipient of a Chinese immigration which has given to a
+part of it the aspect of a portion of the Flowery Kingdom,
+has been agitated by fears of complete subversion under
+Orientalism, and has originated new problems for political
+economy and international law.</p>
+
+<p>After but a tithe of such violent and novel experiences
+any city would be glad to rest awhile. San Francisco
+seems entering upon a new period, and likely to do things
+henceforth more in the normal way. There has been a
+time of contemplation, and the lessons of the past have
+struck in. As things have slowly improved the gloom of
+the reaction has disappeared after the unhealthy inflation
+that gave it birth. The new political craze was of but
+short duration. I never saw anywhere so quietly conducted
+an election as that of the last autumn, which
+dismissed the Kearney-Kalloch faction from power. A
+special provision prevents the approach of any person but
+the voter immediately engaged within one hundred feet
+of a polling-place. I had rather expected to see dead and
+maimed Chinamen lying at every corner, or fleeing before
+infuriated crowds. But though San Franciscans entertain
+beliefs of their own as to the undesirability of a
+great Chinese immigration, during a long stay I neither
+saw nor heard of an attempt to molest any individual on
+account of it.</p>
+
+<p>The new constitution itself proved a harmless bugaboo.
+It is a gratifying tribute, in fact, to native common-sense
+and Anglo-Saxon ideas that this instrument, produced in
+a time of great excitement, and, as was charged, with the
+most subversive intentions, should not only contain so little
+that is dangerous, but so much in a high degree commendable.
+It does not harm property. Frightened capital
+may return with entire safety. I profess myself so
+far a person of incendiary opinions as to hold that an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[323]</span>honest directness of purpose in this new constitution, its
+effort to simplify legislation and sweep away embarrassments,
+often maintained much more in the interest of legislator
+and lawyer than the public good, is well worthy of
+imitation elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Physical and commercial conditions are also changing.
+Life hereafter will depend less upon spasmodic “finds,”
+and more on the humdrum and legitimate industries.
+Mining, though the supply of treasure, with improved
+machinery, still holds out in a uniform way, takes a lesser
+rank. Agriculture and manufactures come every
+day more to the front. California produces an annual
+wheat crop of $50,000,000, a wool crop of $10,000,000,
+wines to the amount of $4,000,000, and fruits worth as
+much more, though these last two branches are but in
+their infancy. Of the greater part of all this San Francisco
+is the <i>entrepôt</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The smoke of the soft coals of Alaska, Oregon, and
+Australia too may be allowed to thicken the air to some
+purpose, since it produces manufactures to the amount of
+$75,000,000 per annum.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[324]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXIII">XXIII.<br>
+<i>SAN FRANCISCO (Continued).</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Kearney Street (sharing its distinction now with
+Market Street) is, in sunshiny weather, the promenade
+of all the leisurely and well-dressed. It abounds in jewellers,
+who often combine the business of pawnbroking
+with the other, and are fond of prefixing “Uncle” to
+their names. Thus, “Uncle Johnson,” “Uncle Jackson,”
+or “Uncle Thompson,” all along the way, make a genial
+proffer of their hospitable service. There are shops of
+Chinese and Japanese goods, though this is not the regular
+quarter, and “Assiamull and Wassiamull” invite us
+to inspect the goods of the East Indies.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps European foreigners of distinction—English
+lords, M.P.’s, and younger sons, German barons and Russian
+princes—on their way round the world, are not more
+numerous than in New York, but they seem more numerous
+in proportion. The books of the Palace Hotel
+are seldom free of them, and they are detected, at a
+glance, strolling on the streets or gazing at the large
+photographs of the Yosemite Valley and the Big Trees
+which hang at prominent corners.</p>
+
+<p>There is a genial feeling about Kearney Street, which
+arises, I think, from its being level—at the foot of the
+steep hills. The temptation is to linger there as long as
+possible. The instant you leave it for the residence portion
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[325]</span>of town you have to begin a back-breaking climb.
+The ascent is like going up-stairs, and nothing less.</p>
+
+<p>The San Francisco householder of means is “like the
+herald Mercury new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.”
+How in the world, I have asked, does he get up there?
+Well, by the Cable road. I consider the Cable road one
+of the very foremost in the list of curiosities, though I
+have refrained from bringing it forward till now. It is a
+peculiar kind of tramway, useful also on a level, but invented
+for the purpose of overcoming steep elevations.</p>
+
+<p>Two cars, coupled, are seen moving, at a high rate of
+speed, without jar and in perfect safety, up and down all
+these extraordinary undulations of ground. There is no
+horse, no steam, no vestige of machinery, no ostensible
+means of locomotion of any kind. The astonished comment
+of the Chinaman, observing this marvel for the first
+time, may be worth repeating once more, old as it is:</p>
+
+<p>“Melican man’s wagon, no pushee, no pullee; go top-side
+hill like flashee.”</p>
+
+<p>The solution of the mystery is an endless wire cable
+hidden in a box in the road-bed, and turning over a great
+wheel in an engine-house at the top of the hill. The foremost
+of the two cars is provided with a grip, or pincers,
+running underneath in a continuous crevice in the box
+with the cable. When the conductor wishes to go on he
+clutches with his grip the cable; when he wishes to stop
+he lets go and puts on a brake. There is no snow and
+ice to clog the central crevice, which, by the necessities of
+the case, must be open. The system has been applied,
+however, with emendations, in Chicago, and is about to
+be on the great Brooklyn Bridge, at New York.</p>
+
+<p>The great houses on the hill, like almost all the residences
+of the city, are of wood. It seems a pity, considering
+the money spent, that this should be so. It is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[326]</span>attributed to the superior warmth and dryness of wood
+in so moist and cool a climate, and also to its security
+against the shock of earthquakes. Whatever be the reason,
+the San Francisco Crœsuses have reared for themselves
+palaces which might be swept off at a breath and
+leave no trace of their existence. Their architecture has
+nothing to commend it to favor. They are large, rather
+over-ornate, and of no particular style.</p>
+
+<p>The Hopkins residence—a costly Gothic château, carried
+out also in wood—may be excepted from this description.
+The basement stories, however, are of stone, and
+there is enough work in these and foundations to build
+many a first-class Eastern mansion. To prepare sites for
+habitations on the steep hills has been an enormous labor
+and expense. The part played by retaining-walls, terraces,
+and staircases is extraordinary. The merest wooden
+cottage is often prefaced by works which outweigh its
+own importance a dozen to one.</p>
+
+<p>When a peerage is drawn up for San Francisco, the
+grader will follow in rank the railroad-builder and the
+miner. To hardly anybody else has such an amount of
+lucrative employment been open. What a cutting and
+filling! what gravelling and paving!</p>
+
+<p>Striking freaks of surface and arrangement result.
+The city might have been terraced up, like Genoa, or
+Naples above the Chiaja. It is picturesque still, in the
+thin, American way, through the absolute force of circumstances.
+You enter the retaining-walls of stone or
+plank through door-ways or grated archways like the
+postern-gates of castles. You pass up stone steps in tunnels
+or vine-covered arbors within these; or zigzag from
+landing to landing of long, wooden stairways, without.
+Odd little terrace streets and “places,” as Charles Place,
+with bits of gardens, are found sandwiched between the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[327]</span>regular formation. A wide thoroughfare, Second Street—cut
+through Rincon Hill, the Nob Hill of a former day,
+to afford access to water for vehicles—has been the occasion
+of leaving isolated, high and dry, some few old
+houses, with cypress-trees about them, approached by
+wooden staircases almost interminable. Dark at sunset
+against a red sky, for instance, they present effects to
+delight the heart of an etcher.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus054" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus054.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>HIGH-GRADE RESIDENCES.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In this line, however, nothing is equal to Telegraph
+Hill, which bristles with the make-shift contrivances of a
+much humbler population. Bret Harte lived there at
+one time, and asserts that the goats used to browse on his
+pots of geranium in the second-story windows. They
+also pranced on the roof at night in such a way that a
+new-comer thought there had been a fine thunder-storm.
+Elsewhere, instead of precipices, you meet with chasms.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[328]</span>Looking down from the roadway, you will see some poor
+figure of a woman sewing in a bay-window which was
+once filled with air and sunshine, but now commands
+only a patch of mildewed wall.</p>
+
+<p>The views from the hills are of no common order.
+As you rise on the Cable road you hang in the air above
+the body of the city, and above the harbor and its environment.
+The Clay Street road, one of the steepest,
+passes through the Chinese quarter. Half-way up an
+ensign, of a blue-and-crimson dragon on an orange
+field, on the Chinese Consulate-general, flies, a bright bit
+of color in the foreground. The bay, far below the eye,
+has an opaque look. On some rare days it is very blue
+in color, but oftener it is of slate or greenish gray. Passing
+vessels criss-cross their wakes in white upon the
+green like pencils on a slate.</p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere above it is rarely clear. Some lurking
+wisp of fog at best is generally stealing in at the Golden
+Gate, or under dark Tamalpais, watching to rush over
+and seize upon the city. An obscurity, part of fog and
+part of smoke, hovers in areas, now enveloping only the
+town, again the prospect, so that nothing can be seen,
+though the town itself be free. Now it lifts momentarily
+from the horizon for glimpses of distant islands and
+cities, and the peak of Mount Diablo, thirty miles away,
+and shuts down as suddenly as if these were but figments
+of a vision.</p>
+
+<p>The view down upon the lights at night is particularly
+striking. Set in constellations, or radiating in formal
+lines, they are like the bivouac of a great army. It
+might be the hosts of Armageddon were encamped
+round about awaiting the dawn. For several days, from
+California Street Hill, there was the spectacle of a devastating
+fire in the woods of Mount Tamalpais. Its dark
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[329]</span>smoke rendered the sunsets lurid and ominous, and at
+night the burning mountain, reflected in the bay, was a
+more terrible Vesuvius or Hecla.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>One is hardly supposed to “travel” as yet in America
+as in Europe. We make our journeys here for definite
+objects, chiefly on business. No doubt, if we could bring
+ourselves to the same receptive frame of mind, the same
+readiness to be amused by odds-and-ends of experience,
+a good deal the same kind of pleasure could be got out
+of it as there. San Francisco at least appears to afford
+a few of exactly the same details which receive the attention
+of the leisurely abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Italian fishermen eat macaroni, and drink red wine,
+and wait upon the tides, about the vicinity of Broadway
+and Front Streets. The Italian colony, for the rest, is
+pretty numerous. The part that remains on shore is
+chiefly composed of grocers, butchers, and restaurateurs.
+Chinese shrimp-catchers are found in the cove at Potrero,
+behind the large new manufacturing buildings of
+that quarter, and again at San Bruno Point, twelve
+miles down the bay. Their boats and junks are not
+on a large scale, but display the usual peculiarities of
+their nautical architecture.</p>
+
+<p>The French colony is also numerous, and the language
+heard continually on the street. Taking advantage of
+the variety and excellence of supplies in the markets,
+French restaurants furnish repasts—including a half-bottle
+of wine of the country—of extraordinary cheapness.
+A considerable Mexican and Spanish contingent
+mingles also with the Italians, along Upper Dupont,
+Vallejo, and Green Streets. Shops with such titles as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[330]</span><i>La Sorpresa</i> and the <i>Tienda Mexicana</i> adjoin the <i>Unità
+d’Italia</i> and the <i>Roma</i> saloon. A Mexican militia company
+turns out, under the green, white, and red tricolor,
+on every anniversary of the national independence, the
+16th of September. During the Carnival season a form
+of entertainment known as “Cascarone parties” prevails
+among the Spanish residents. The participants pelt one
+another with egg-shells filled with gilt and colored papers.
+Sometimes a canvas fort is erected in the street,
+and attacked and defended by means of these missiles
+and handfuls of flour. Such Spanish life as there is can
+hardly be said to have remained from the early days,
+since the Spanish settlement at best was infinitesimal. It
+has been attracted here in the mean time like other immigration.
+A dusky mother, smoking a cigarette, in a
+hammock, in a palm-thatched hut, on the Acapulco trail,
+told me of a son who had gone to San Francisco twenty
+years before and become a carpenter there. He had forgotten
+now, she heard, even how to speak his native
+language.</p>
+
+<p>The Latin race seems to have been especially attracted
+to the country of a mild climate and original traditions
+like their own. But German and Scandinavian names
+too on the sign-boards—Russian Ivanovich and Abramovich,
+and Hungarian Haraszthy—show that no one blood
+or influence has exclusive sway. There appears to be
+an unusually free intermingling and giving in marriage
+among these various components. They are less clannish
+than with us. Lady Wortley Montagu remarked, at Constantinople,
+some hundred years ago, a similar fusion,
+and believed it a reason for a debased and mongrel race.
+But a very different class of blood mingles here from
+that of Orientals at Constantinople. Our much more
+cheerful theory is, that we are to combine the best qualities,
+the hardihood and good looks of all, while eliminating
+their defects. Certainly the bright, intelligent aspect
+of the children of San Francisco does nothing as yet to
+discredit such a theory.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[331]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus055" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus055.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CHINESE FISHING-BOATS IN THE BAY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[332]</span></p>
+
+<p>Such vestiges of ’49 as yet remain are extremely few.
+I confess to surprise as well at the slightness of the historic
+records at the Pioneer Society. I make little doubt
+that they could be easily paralleled in many other libraries
+of the country. “North Beach,” under Telegraph
+Hill, may be visited both for its memories and present
+aspect of picturesque ruin. It is where the pioneer ships
+landed. Hence, also, the ill-fated Ralston swam out into
+the bay, and here are the remains of “Harry Meigs’s
+Wharf.” Harry Meigs was a famous prototype of
+Ralston’s in the Fifties. Defeated in brilliant financial
+schemes, and having endeavored to save his defeat by
+forgery, he was obliged to take flight. He chartered a
+schooner to take him to the South Sea Islands, which lay
+off the wharf for him at midnight.</p>
+
+<p>“This is hell,” he is reported to have said as he
+stepped on board, expressing thus his Lucifer-like sense
+of humiliation and downfall.</p>
+
+<p>He did not remain long at the South Sea Islands, but
+sailed for Peru. There he began the world again, built
+all the railways of that republic, became a great millionnaire,
+sent back and paid all his debts, and was divested,
+by act of Legislature, so far as legislation could do it, of
+the stigma of his crimes. His story is by no means a
+good one to hold up to the emulation of youth, but it is
+romantic, and in some sense characteristic of California.</p>
+
+<p>The blackened old pier is a dumping-place for city
+refuse now, and swarms of <i>chiffoniers</i> gather around it
+to pick out such scraps of value as they may before they
+are washed away by the daily tides.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[333]</span></p>
+
+<p>The leading streets of San Francisco commemorate the
+pioneers of State or place. A newer series adopts the
+names of the States of the Union, and simple numbers,
+which are carried already to Forty-fifth, for avenues, and
+Thirtieth for streets. The fast-growing, tough, fragrant,
+but scrawny, eucalyptus is much in use as a shade-tree.
+In the door-yards grow cypresses, the Spanish-bayonet,
+and the ordinary flowers, needing a great deal of sprinkling
+to keep them in good order.</p>
+
+<p>The San Francisco school of writers, developed in the
+successful days of the <i>Overland Monthly</i>, have not made
+much use of the city itself in their literature. Bret Harte
+confined his local range to the doings of certain small
+boys, some “Sidewalkings,” and the disagreeable features
+of the climate, in “Neighborhoods I Have Moved From.”
+It was from Folsom Street that the adventurous Master
+Charles Summerton, aged five, set out for his great expedition
+to Van Dieman’s Land, by way of the Second and
+Market Street cars. I had occasion to visit Folsom Street
+sometimes, and even this slight incident—such is the potency
+of the literary touch—has given it a genial interest
+which many others, as good in appearance, and even
+stately Van Ness Avenue, on the other side of town—very
+much better—by no means share.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>San Francisco offers, in my view, the advantage of
+saving a trip around the world. Whoever, having seen
+Europe, shrinks from farther wanderings may derive here
+from a compact Chinese city of 30,000 souls such an idea
+of the life and doings of the Celestial Empire as may
+appease curiosity and take the place of a voyage to the
+Orient.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[334]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Chinese immigrants, it is true, rarely erect buildings
+of their own, but fit themselves to what they find.
+They fit themselves in with all their peculiar industries,
+their smells of tobacco and cooking-oil, their red and yellow
+signs and hand-bills, opium pipes, high-soled slippers,
+sticks of India ink, silver pins, and packets of face-powder,
+their fruits and fish, their curious groceries and more
+curious butcher’s meat—they have fitted all this into the
+Yankee buildings, and taken such absolute possession that
+we are no longer in America, but Shanghai or Hong-Kong.
+The restaurants make the nearest approach to the
+national façades, but this is brought about by adding
+highly-decorated balconies, lanterns, and inscriptions, and
+not building outright.</p>
+
+<p>I had the curiosity to try one of the best of the restaurants—quite
+a gorgeous affair, at the head of Commercial
+Street—and found the fare both neatly served and palatable.
+There was a certain monotony in the bill, which I
+ascribed to a desire to give us dishes as near the American
+style as possible. We had chicken-soup, with flour
+paste resembling macaroni; a very tender chicken, sliced,
+through bones and all, in a bowl; a bowl of duck; a pewter
+chafing-dish of quail with spinach. All the food is set
+out in bowls, and each helps himself, with ebony chopsticks,
+to such morsels as he desires. The chopsticks, held
+in the fingers of the right hand, somewhat after the manner
+of castanets, are about as convenient to the novice as
+a pair of lead-pencils. We drank <i>saki</i>, or rice brandy, in
+infinitesimal cups, during the dinner, and at dessert very
+fine tea.</p>
+
+<p>The upper story of these places is reserved for guests
+of the better class. Those of slender purses are accommodated
+below. To these is served a second drawing of
+the same tea which has been used, and such meats as remain<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[335]</span>
+in a tolerable state. The upper story is decorated
+with carved work, painted scarlet, and heavily gilded, and
+screens, lanterns, and teak-wood tables and stools; while
+below pine-wood tables are deemed good enough.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[336]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus056" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus056.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CHINESE QUARTER, SAN FRANCISCO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[337]</span></p>
+
+<p>Dropping in late one evening for a cup of tea, I had
+the fortune to witness a supper-party—a novel, <i>genre</i> picture,
+glowing with color. There were a dozen dignified-looking
+men, dressed in handsome silk clothing—black,
+blue, and purple. With them were as many women—young,
+slender, and pretty, of their type, while the women
+seen walking about the streets are very coarse and clumsy.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[338]</span>Their black hair was carefully smoothed, and looped up
+with silver pins, and their complexions were daintily made
+of pink and white and vermilion, realizing exactly the
+heads painted on their silken fans. The most interesting
+girl was of Fellah or Hebrew aspect, and was probably
+not without an admixture of other blood in her veins.
+The men occupied carved teak-wood stools about a large
+table, spread with a white cloth, and covered with charming
+china. The women stood by and served them. Now
+and then one of the latter rested momentarily on a corner
+of a stool, in a laughing way, and took a morsel also. The
+whole was a bit of bright <i>Chinoiserie</i> worth a long journey
+to witness.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus057" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus057.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A BALCONY IN THE CHINESE QUARTER.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>They were very merry, and played, among other amusements,
+a game like the Italian <i>mora</i>. In this one would
+hold up fingers in rapid succession, while the others
+shouted the probable number at the tops of their voices.
+What with this, their laughter, drumming on the table,
+and general hubbub, besides an orchestra of their peculiar
+music adding its din from behind a screen, they were not
+very unlike a party of Parisian <i>canotiers</i> and <i>grisettes</i>
+supping at Bougival.</p>
+
+<p>The temple and the theatre of the Chinese emigrant
+have an identical character wherever he goes. I found
+here the same scenes in both I had witnessed in Havana
+at the beginning of my journey. The temple, economically
+set up in some upper rear room, abounds in gaudy
+signs and some good bronzes, but is little frequented.
+The theatre is far more popular. The dresses used here
+are rich and interesting. The performers are continually
+marching, fighting, spinning about, pretending to be
+dead and jumping up again, and singing in high, cracked
+voices like the whine of a bagpipe. A doughty warrior,
+who may be Gengis Khan or Timour the Tartar, and bear
+himself with the “most haughty stride and withering
+pride,” will sing you his lines in this same puny, whining
+voice, and no other. The slightness of the means of illusion
+is a naïve feature of interest in the Chinese drama.
+As one of the simple rustics in the <i>Midsummer Night’s
+Dream</i> holds up an arm to represent a wall, across which
+Pyramus and Thisbe are supposed to talk, so here, if it
+be designed, for instance, to represent the march of an
+army through the woods, a screen is put up at one side
+of the stage, bearing an inscription which no doubt says
+“Woods,” and around this the military betake themselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[339]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus058" style="max-width: 25.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus058.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>IN A CHINESE THEATRE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[340]</span></p>
+
+<p>The cemetery is more curious even than the theatre of
+Chinadom in San Francisco. I came upon it in the course
+of a long stroll one afternoon, and was almost the only
+spectator of some peculiar ceremonial rites in propitiation
+of the dead. It is not grouped in the general Golgotha at
+Lone Mountain, but adjoins that devoted to the city paupers,
+out among the melancholy sand-dunes by the ocean.
+It is parcelled off by white fences into a large number of
+enclosures for separate burial guilds, or <i>tongs</i>. These have
+large signs upon them—“Fook Yam Tong,” “Tung Sen
+Tong,” “Ye On Tong,” etc. One has almost difficulty
+to persuade himself that he is awake witnessing such doings
+as here take place in the broad sunlight of Yankee-land.</p>
+
+<p>It is the practice to convey the bones of their dead to
+China, but there are preliminary funerals in regular form.
+All the “hacks” in San Francisco are often engaged.
+The bones are left in the ground a year or more before
+removal.</p>
+
+<p>Toward three in the afternoon a number of express-wagons
+of the common sort drove up with freights of
+Chinamen and Chinawomen, and curiously assorted provisions.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[341]</span>The “hoodlum” drivers conducted themselves
+peaceably enough, but seemed to have a certain sardonic
+air at the idea of having to draw their profits from patrons
+of such a class. The provisions were unloaded, taken
+up and laid on small wooden altars, of which there is one
+at the front of each <i>tong</i>. Most conspicuous were whole
+roast pigs, decorated with ribbons and colored papers.
+There were next roast fowls, rice, salads, sweetmeats,
+fruits, cigars, and rice brandy. The participants set to
+work to fire revolvers, bombs, and crackers, kindle packages
+of colored paper, make profound genuflections before
+the graves, and scatter libations upon them of food and
+liquors. Only the roast pigs were reserved and taken
+home again; all the rest was scattered about. The din
+and smoke increased apace; the strange-garbed figures
+pranced about like sorcerers, and the decorated pigs
+loomed out with a goblin air. It seemed a veritable
+witches’ Sabbath. Some of the fruits and cigars were
+hospitably offered to me as I looked on; and I will say
+that parsimony does not seem a vice of the Chinaman,
+though he lives upon so little, and is content with moderate
+returns.</p>
+
+<p>Coming back the same way in the evening, I noted
+prowling figures of white men among the graves, gathering
+up the fragments cast down by the improvident
+heathen.</p>
+
+<p>I am glad, on the whole, not to have the mooted Chinese
+question to settle in person. On the one hand, a
+great law of political economy—the natural right of man
+to seek happiness where he will; on the other, a view that
+the best good of a community does not necessarily consist
+in mere size and value of “improvements.” The reflective
+mind will find it rather in the greatest average distribution
+of comfort. I should say that there have been no
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[342]</span>evils of consequence experienced from the presence of the
+Chinese population as yet. Without them the railroads
+could not have been built, nor the agricultural nor mining
+interests developed. With all the complaint, too, of
+competition, the wages of white labor are better here than
+at the East, and the cost of living is certainly not more.</p>
+
+<p>A proper male costume for San Francisco is humorously
+said to be a linen duster with a fur collar. The
+variability of the climate within brief spaces of time is
+thus indicated. It varies largely, in fact, in different
+parts of the same day, though the mean for the year is
+remarkably even. The mean for January—the coldest
+month—is but fifty degrees, and for September—the
+warmest—fifty-eight. It is a famous climate for work,
+but the average temperature, as is seen, is pretty low for
+comfort. People go away for warmth in the summer
+quite as much as for coolness. The rainy season—the
+winter—is really the pleasantest of the year. The air is
+clearer then, while the prospects are verdant and best
+worthy to be seen. At other times fogs prevail, or bleak
+winds arise in the afternoon, and blow dust, in a dreary
+way, into the eyes of all whose misfortune calls them to
+be then in the streets.</p>
+
+<p>We return to town from our Chinese ceremony along
+wide Point Lobos Avenue, the drive to the Cliff House.
+It is skirted on one side by the public pleasure-ground,
+Golden Gate Park, an area of half a mile by three miles
+and a half, which is being redeemed from an original condition
+of drifting sand in a wonderful way. All the outer
+tract near the ocean is as desert and yellow as Sahara. A
+few scattered dwellings appear in the sands, each with its
+water-tank and wind-mill, a yucca-plant or two, and some
+knots of tough grass about it. The city appears on the
+edge of the steep, as if it were looking over in surprise.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[343]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXIV">XXIV.<br>
+<i>THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern
+California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of
+the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts,
+displays some of those tropical features in which the idea
+of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates
+consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate
+trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the
+north of San Francisco. One of the most important districts
+for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and Marysville,
+north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five
+miles north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees
+in California. It is safe to assume, however, that all this
+will be found in the greater perfection as the low latitudes
+are approached.</p>
+
+<p>San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and
+Southern California may conveniently be taken as all that
+part south of the seaport and metropolis. It was upon
+the area just below, around the Bay, that the Rev. Starr
+King lavished his most polished eulogies, describing the
+“flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile,” which
+he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José,
+fifty miles down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[344]</span>live to be old, and note his faculties failing) to retire in
+order to renew his youth. And but seventy-five miles
+farther south are the summer resorts—and winter resorts
+as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.</p>
+
+<p>I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs,
+when the products of an agricultural country should be
+seen to particular advantage. There was held at San
+José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara
+and Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective
+point.</p>
+
+<p>There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land
+except to the southward, the long, narrow peninsula on
+which it lies being surrounded on all other sides by water.
+One may cross, however, by ferry to Oakland—the Jersey
+City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the place—and
+go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches
+San José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County,
+which raises nearly a million bushels of wheat a year
+from a single township, together with tons of sugar-beets,
+and more hay than any other county in the State. It
+comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical
+pretensions of its own, making an exhibit of orange and
+lemon trees in certain favored nooks. But the more direct
+way is the coast division of the Southern Pacific
+Railway, down the peninsula.</p>
+
+<p>Let us glance at topography a moment. California is
+fenced off into valleys by two long north and south
+ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely high, and the
+lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north
+at Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one.
+They enclose between them the vast central space known
+in its upper portion as the Sacramento Valley, and its
+lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers
+by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas
+contain the peaks of from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet
+elevation which have obtained an extensive fame in the
+world. The Coast Range, of softer materials, averages
+only from two to six thousand feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[345]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus059" style="max-width: 50.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus059.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>RAILWAY ROUTE: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[346]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength,
+but the Coast Range throws out frequent spurs parallel
+to itself. These take separate names, as Sierra Morena,
+Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and form numerous
+long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between
+themselves and the Pacific Ocean.</p>
+
+<p>Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed
+in this way in the midst of a diversified region, our first
+excursion takes us.</p>
+
+<p>By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the
+immediate environs of all American cities are passed we
+find ourselves running through a tract of small vegetable
+gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in white
+enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like
+Mexican haciendas, are “institutions” of various sorts.
+A long arm of San Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty
+miles south, and is seen gleaming to the left, with a wide
+stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on piles, at
+intervals along the water’s edge, are guard-houses, keeping
+watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has
+never yet been either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate
+with the pretensions of everything else about it.</p>
+
+<p>The conception that has gone out about Southern California
+is that it is an earthly Paradise. I will say at once
+that it is very charming, even in the dry season, but it
+is an earthly Paradise very different from the best idea
+of it one has been able to get by previous investigation.
+I found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and
+most writers have spoken of it only as viewed in the
+season of rains and verdure.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[347]</span></p>
+
+<p>The guide-book promises, “after a few minutes’ ride,
+orchards, vineyards, elegant farm-houses, prospects to
+charm all who love the beauties of nature.” But, really—one
+rubs his eyes—where are they? The ground is
+mournfully bare and brown. Hardly a tree or a bush is
+seen; not a green blade of grass. At length some small
+trees, a variety of scrub-oaks, at a little distance resembling
+the olive! Farm-houses are few, and not at all
+“elegant.” The hills are of the color of camel’s hide,
+and not unlike the camel’s humps.</p>
+
+<p>At Millbrae, finally, there is a glimpse of the wooden
+towers, in the American style, of a villa, and a large
+dairy barn. At Belmont the low hills are close at hand.
+At Menlo Park a charming flower-bed is cared for, by
+the track, as at foreign railway-stations. We are in
+the chosen site for villa residences of the San Francisco
+millionnaires. The surface is flat, and with its growth of
+oaks recalls the outskirts of Chicago, as at Hyde Park or
+Riverside.</p>
+
+<p>The valley widens till the hills are distant and veiled in
+blue, with tawny grain-fields between; but still no verdure!
+And where are the wild flowers? One hardly
+expects them now “by the acre and by the square mile,”
+it is true, since it is autumn; but of all the primroses,
+the larkspur, the lupin, the poppies of tradition, not one!
+Not a narcissus! not a chrysanthemum! Oh, my predecessors!
+what shall I think of you?</p>
+
+<p>In the spring the flowers bloom and carpet the earth
+as grass carpets it elsewhere. Speaking of the spring the
+eulogists do not say a word too much. But it is my
+originality to have seen Southern California in the autumn
+and winter—as it is for seven months of every
+year, and as it may be, in exceptional seasons, the whole
+year through.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[348]</span></p>
+
+<p>Not to make a great deal of this bareness and dryness
+would be to neglect a most essential feature. The annual
+rains begin in December, January, or February, and
+continue till June, diminishing in May, which is sometimes
+itself a dry month. In the autumn the leaves fall—what
+comparatively few there are to fall—as elsewhere,
+and are not renewed.</p>
+
+<p>“But you set up to be a land of perpetual summer,
+you know,” one argues with the Californian, in the first
+state of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“So we are,” he replies; “but that does not necessarily
+mean perpetual verdure. Look at the thermometer!
+look at the fertility of the land! You have but to run
+water on it by irrigation, and it will do whatever you
+please. Contrast this brown season with your own white
+one. The land is dry and easy to get about on, and the
+sky above is uniformly pleasant. Do you prefer your
+fields of sheeted snow, under the howling blasts? your
+quagmires of mud and slush, alternately freezing and
+thawing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Very true,” I admit, accepting this different point of
+view.</p>
+
+<p>Then, perhaps, by way of finishing touch, he adds,
+rising to a dignity well justified by the facts, “California
+sets up to be a land of relations, commercial, agricultural,
+mineral, and social, which have made it a power in the
+world. It has revolutionized values, struck the key-note
+of new social conditions, and begun a new commercial
+era. California has arrived at a point where she takes
+her place in the Union on the ordinary terms. We no
+longer depend upon a repute for astounding beauties and
+eccentricities—though of these, too, there is no lack, as
+you will find.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[349]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests
+with Sacramento the honor of being third in importance
+in the State. You alight there at the small station. In
+the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a blacksmith’s shop,
+and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These have
+a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a
+romantic Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended
+to come in search of the elixir of life. And so
+have the small picket-fences an American look, and the
+comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind
+them, with scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas.
+With the exception of an unusual number of French
+and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large,
+clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native
+wines, it is as downright a little Yankee town as ever
+was. There is much shade in the streets, and in a public
+green, but the trees are yet too small and low.</p>
+
+<p>It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural
+district. It has excellent schools and all the
+other conveniences of life. A good deal of money has
+been spent on the principal business buildings. As in
+most other provincial towns throughout the State, they
+are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be
+described as the San Francisco style of architecture. An
+iron trestle-work tower was going up at the intersection
+of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two hundred
+feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the
+town. The white Court-house, in the classic style,
+though not large, is agreeably proportioned, and quite
+a model of its kind.</p>
+
+<p>The week’s doings at the Fair Grounds resolved themselves
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[350]</span>chiefly into trotting-matches. I was told that the
+combined display of the two counties was poorer this
+year than either was in the habit of making alone.
+There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by
+young women, and those who took premiums were girls
+of but fourteen and sixteen. Another popular feature of
+these county fairs was “firemen’s tournaments,” in which
+different companies held contests of speed, equipped with
+all their paraphernalia.</p>
+
+<p>There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and
+little or no fruit. The two-hundred-pound squash, the
+twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five feet in length and
+a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with
+these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did
+not much regret their absence. I have a lurking suspicion
+that there is a standard of the vegetable as of the
+human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General
+Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure
+from it than those of the other.</p>
+
+<p>The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not
+simply of abnormal size, but fine quality—excepting the
+apple, which requires extremes of heat and cold, and
+remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested to
+need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair
+than the daily display of fruits and vegetables in the San
+Francisco market? The regular season for any and all
+of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast at corresponding
+latitudes.</p>
+
+<p>I traversed the much-eulogized “Alameda,” an avenue
+of willows and poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799,
+by Spanish friars. These founded a mission among the
+Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the avenue extends.
+There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the
+mission, with its adobe walls, five feet thick, and flat
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[351]</span>wooden ceiling, rudely painted. It is now a part of a
+flourishing collegiate institution. Across the way is a
+clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date;
+but we are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since
+we are going presently to Monterey, which has, as it
+were, a grand specialty of all that kind of thing.</p>
+
+<p>The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate
+showing for their age, and can hardly be rated equal
+to New Haven elms, for instance. Behind them, along
+both sides of the road, are houses of a <i>bourgeois</i> comfort,
+as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth
+and leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder
+of their days in peace. The Coast Mountains,
+they say, cut off the fogs and winds of the ocean, and a
+higher range on the other side bars out the heats of the
+country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior
+refinement of taste and sentiment, the abodes of
+these particular ones. It is a pleasant conception, that
+of coming here to live for the pure physical delight in
+living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters
+will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled
+with their air of superior distinction, as if they, for their
+part, had not quite so willingly consented to abandon a
+world of larger opportunities. But we do not succeed.
+Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who
+have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah;
+and, after all, the desire to live a life of physical contentment
+does not imply taste in architecture and landscape
+gardening.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness
+from these towns, of romantic “San” and
+“Santa,” and “Los” and “Del,” and feels rather aggrieved
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[352]</span>not to get so much of it. Its absence is explained
+in part by the fact that there were rarely original settlements
+corresponding to the present names. These are
+taken rather from ranches, springs, or mines in the neighborhood.
+On the arrival of the Americans in California
+there were but thirteen thousand Spanish, or Mexicans,
+all told, while the territory was as large as New York,
+Pennsylvania, and the six New England States put together.</p>
+
+<p>Let us believe that the pleasing designations will act as
+a stimulus, and these communities will live up to their
+names in time, as they never could have done were they
+simply Smithville and Jonesville.</p>
+
+<p>The impressions at San José, and in the country at
+large, resulting from a second visit a month later, were
+more agreeable. Something like the proper point of
+view had then been attained. The face of nature was to
+be parched, and the towns rather commonplace; but the
+continued cloudlessness of the sky, and quality of the air,
+were more, and the peculiar form of pleasure was settled
+where it belonged.</p>
+
+<p>The district of villa residences of the millionnaires,
+when penetrated, gained much in attractiveness. There
+are white-oaks and chestnut-oaks, as well as scrub-oaks, in
+groups of a park-like appearance, and live-oaks, with long,
+gray Spanish moss depending from them. If there are no
+wild flowers, there are plenty of the cultivated sort, with
+lawns kept green by fountains and hose. Where there is
+water, the winter, or brown season, need never extend.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, long stretches of white picket-fence surround
+the places, and the houses themselves are white.</p>
+
+<p>The bonanza kings have been invested with a greater
+air of magnificence than really belongs to them. Their
+places cost them immense sums, it is true, but a reduction
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[353]</span>should be made to Eastern standards. The outpouring of
+untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every
+commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained
+for the money than an equal expenditure would
+have procured here. The Menlo Park district is inferior
+to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others, in
+the neighborhood of New York.</p>
+
+<p>The builders have struck out a kind of style of their
+own, perhaps in too great haste to wait for imported
+ideas. The houses are chiefly of wood. Flood, of Flood
+&amp; O’Brien, and “Consolidated Virginia” when the great
+bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size,
+on an estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There
+was a terrace, with a fine bronze fountain. The main
+steps were of polished marble with bronze sphinxes, and
+bronze dragons studded the ornate stables—the whole
+glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the
+noise of a brass band.</p>
+
+<p>There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling
+the tone of rural life at the East. Such a one is
+that of ex-Governor Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here
+is a breeding farm for horses, one of the most complete of
+the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one
+hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks,
+which, at the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make
+a small city by themselves. It is inhabited by a population
+of nearly five hundred animals, who return hither
+from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks,
+and have two hundred persons employed in their domestic
+service. The spacious stables are uniformly floored
+and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the freshest
+straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable
+drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[354]</span>and trotting strains
+in the country, are
+an important influence
+in improving
+the breed of horses
+throughout the Pacific
+slope. It was
+here that the curious
+experiments were
+conducted, at the
+expense of Governor
+Stanford, for arriving
+at a better understanding of the speed of horses
+by photographing them in motion. The photographer,
+Muybridge, of San Francisco, succeeded, by an ingenious
+arrangement of electrical wires, communicating with cameras,
+in securing twelve distinct views of a single stride.
+The attitudes are of the most unexpected sort, and some
+of them even comic.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="illus060" style="max-width: 25.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus060.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PALO ALTO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[355]</span></p>
+
+<p>From the time of foaling the colts are gently handled,
+and made as familiar with the touch of harness as with
+that of human hands. As a consequence they are tame,
+gentle, and even affectionate, and never need formal
+breaking. The effect of the system of training has been
+apparent in some notable records of speed. On the Bay
+District Association track, at San Francisco, in 1880, the
+two-year-old Fred Crocker lowered the record for a one-mile
+trot to 2′ 25¼″. Last year Bonita, a two-year-old
+filly, cut it down to 2′ 24½″. At the same trotting exhibition
+Wildflower, another two-year-old, made the mile
+in 2′ 21″; and Hinda Rose, a yearling filly, added to the
+fame of the farm by cutting down the yearling record to
+2′ 36½″.</p>
+
+<p>The interiors of these fine villas are, as a rule, better
+than the exteriors. The Mills house, at Millbrae, residence
+of a banking and railway magnate, now of New
+York, is a notable collection of <i>portières</i> and Oriental
+rugs, and bed-chambers done in the finest woods, with a
+picture-gallery of works of Gérôme, Detaille, and Bouguereau,
+while from all the windows are vistas of fan-palms,
+flower-beds, greensward, and bronzes.</p>
+
+<p>Ralston’s old house, at Belmont, now the property of
+Senator Sharon, is of those of the greatest interest, through
+interest in the remarkable man who built it. Starting
+from humble origin, he rose to be a great capitalist and
+the promoter of brilliant schemes of improvement, both
+public and private. He conducted to success a hundred
+projects which in other hands would have been folly, and
+arrived thus at such an unbounded confidence in his star
+that he thought he could not fail. He was entangled at
+last, however, in schemes beyond his control. Strong and
+athletic, and in the prime of life, he went down to “Harry
+Meigs’s” wharf, in San Francisco—almost the very point
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[356]</span>from which his great prototype sailed away to Peru—and
+swam out half a mile into the bay. It was for refreshment
+in his troubles, as some say, but, as the general
+opinion is, with the purpose of suicide. At any rate he
+was never seen alive again.</p>
+
+<p>The house that was his is notched into the hill-side, in
+a rolling country, much pleasanter than the plain at Menlo
+Park. A pretty gorge behind it is dammed to furnish
+a water-supply. There are gas-works, a bowling-alley, and
+an elaborate Turkish bath among the out-buildings, and
+a grange-like barn of solid stone, ivy-grown, which cost
+$80,000. The immense house is wood, white, in the usual
+fashion, and, with its numerous stories and windows, is
+not unlike a large country hotel. A peculiar arrangement
+and great spaciousness give it a palatial air within.
+The principal rooms open into one another by glass partitions,
+which can be rolled away, so that in large gatherings
+there need be no crowding through door-ways.
+There is an arcade above, around a grand staircase, with
+tribunes projecting, in which young women in colors, at
+an evening party, for instance, would look particularly
+houri-like. What in another house would be the ordinary
+veranda is here a delightful promenade, glazed in,
+and provided with easy furniture and a parquetry floor.
+Behind a row of such main apartments as drawing-room
+and library comes a parallel row, of which one is a great
+ball-room, entirely faced with mirrors. Pianos, mantels,
+and stair-posts are of California laurel—a new industry
+encouraged by the owner among many others.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[357]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus061" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus061.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>RALSTON’S COUNTRY HOUSE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[358]</span></p>
+
+<p>We drove from Belmont back through a succession of
+cup-like dells in the lower mountains, a number of them
+dammed to form pretty lakes, the sources of supply for
+the Spring Valley Water Company—a corporation of
+great prominence at San Francisco. The slopes at first
+were tawny with grain stubble; then scattered with the
+thick bush known as chaparral; then bare. We passed
+an occasional lonely farm known as a “milk ranch,”
+or “chicken ranch.” There are no farms in California;
+no matter how small the tract is, it is always a ranch.</p>
+
+<p>In the strong, warm sunshine chance objects on the
+bare slopes cast intense, purplish shadows. That of a
+distant tree is as dark as if a pit had been dug under it.
+That of a bird, flying low, is followed as distinctly as the
+bird itself. You are reconciled at last to the brown
+tone. It is like Algeria. White stands out in brilliant
+relief against it. One would rather like it to be a different
+white, however, than that of the little wooden
+houses. The falconers of Fromentin might career or
+the rival Arab chiefs of Pasini hold conferences among
+such hills.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[359]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXV">XXV.<br>
+<i>THE VINTAGE SEASON, AND MONTEREY.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>It was the pleasant vintage season at San José. Santa
+Clara County, of which San José is the capital, boasts
+of a number of acres of grape-vines under cultivation
+(over eleven thousand) second only to Sonoma County.
+Napa, however, to the north, and Los Angeles, to the
+south, greatly surpass it in gallons of wine and brandy
+produced.</p>
+
+<p>I visited, among others, the Le Franc vineyard, which
+dates from 1851, and is the pioneer in making wine-growing
+a regular industry. Here are about a hundred and
+seventy-five thousand vines, set out a thousand, perhaps,
+to the acre. The large, cheerful farm buildings are upon
+a gentle rise of ground above the area of vines, which is
+nearly level. An Alsacian foreman showed us through
+the wine-cellars. A servant-maid bustling about the
+yard was a thorough French peasant, only lacking the
+wooden shoes. The long tables, set for the forty hands
+employed in the vintage-time, were spread with viands
+in the French fashion. Scarcely a word of English was
+spoken.</p>
+
+<p>At other places the surroundings are as exclusively
+Italian or Portuguese. One feels very much abroad in
+such scenes on American soil. The foreigners from
+Southern Europe take naturally to wine-making and go
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[360]</span>into it, from the few hundred gallons of red wine made
+by the Portuguese and Italian laborers for their own
+families, to the manufacture of an American champagne
+on a large scale by the Hungarian, Arpad Haraszthy, at
+San Francisco. The Americans, who have not acquired
+the habit of looking upon wine as a necessity in the
+family, are not yet, as a rule, very active in its production.</p>
+
+<p>A certain romantic interest attaches to this ancient industry.
+The great tuns in the wine-cellars and all the
+processes were very clean. It was re-assuring to see the
+pure juice of the grape poured out in such floods, and to
+feel that here was no need—founded on scarcity, at least—for
+adulteration.</p>
+
+<p>Teeming loads of the purple fruit were driven up, and
+across a weighing scale. The contents are lifted to an
+upper story, put into a hopper, where the stems come
+off, and the grapes fall through to a crusher. They are
+lightly crushed at first. It is something of a discovery
+that the earliest product of grapes of every hue is white
+wine. The red wine gets its hue from the coloring matter
+in the skins, which are utilized in a subsequent ruder
+squeezing.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not enter upon all the various processes—the
+racking off, clarifying, and the like—though, so much in
+the company of those who spoke with authority and were
+continually holding up little glasses to the light with
+a gusto, like figures in popular chromos, I consider
+myself to yield in knowledge of such abstruse matters
+to none. Immense upright casks, containing a warm,
+audibly fermenting mass, and others lying down, neatly
+varnished, with concave ends, are the most salient features
+in the dimly lighted wine-cellars.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[361]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus062" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus062.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>BOTTLING CHAMPAGNE AT SAN FRANCISCO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[362]</span></p>
+
+<p>They are not cellars, properly so called, either, since
+they are wholly above-ground. The casks rest on
+wooden sills upheld by short brick posts. In the cellars
+of General Naglee, a successful maker of brandy on a
+large scale, the cobwebs have been allowed to increase
+and hang like tattered banners. Through these the light
+penetrates dimly from above, or with a white glare from
+a latticed window, upon which the patterns of vine-leaves
+without are defined. The buildings are brown,
+gray, and vine-clad, with quaint, Dutch-pavilion-looking
+roofs, and dove-cotes attached. A lofty water-tank, with
+a wind-mill—a feature of every California rural homestead—here
+is more tower-like than usual.</p>
+
+<p>Round about extend long avenues of eucalyptus, pine,
+tamarind, with its black, dry pods; the pepper-tree, with
+its scarlet berries; large clumps of the <i>nopal</i> cactus, and
+an occasional maguey, or century-plant. All is glowing
+now with the tints of autumn. Poplar and cottonwood
+are yellow. The peach and almond, the Lawton blackberry,
+and the vineyards themselves, touched by frost,
+supply the scarlet and crimson. The country seems
+bathed in a fixed sunshine, or in hues of its own wines.</p>
+
+<p>The vines, themselves short and stout, and needing no
+support, yield each an incredible number of purple clusters,
+all growing from the top. They quaintly suggest
+the uncouth little men of Hendrik Hudson who stagger
+up the mountain, in “Rip Van Winkle,” with kegs of
+spirits on their shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>No especial attention is given to the frosts now, but
+those of the early spring are the object of many precautions.
+The most effectual is to kindle smudge-fires about
+the vineyard toward four o’clock in the morning, the
+smoke of which envelops it and keeps it in a warmer
+atmosphere of its own till the sun be well risen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[363]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp62" id="illus063" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus063.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A BRANDY CELLAR, SAN JOSÉ.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[364]</span></p>
+
+<p>Three to four tons of grapes to the acre are counted
+upon; while farther south, where irrigation is used, they
+expect from eight to twelve. But it is claimed, in the
+standing controversy on the subject, that the irrigated
+grapes are watery, while those of lesser yield excel them
+in quality. The best results, we were told, are got from
+such vines as the Mataro, Carignane, and Grenache, imported
+cuttings from the French slope of the Pyrenees.
+There were at Le Franc’s not less than sixty varieties,
+under probation, many of which will, no doubt, give an
+excellent account of themselves. They are assembled
+from Greece, Italy, Palestine, and the Canary Islands, so
+that we have all the chances of the development of
+something suited to our peculiar conditions.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>I left San José to drive along the dry, shallow bed of
+the Guadalupe River to the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine,
+a more remote and less visited companion of well-known
+New Almaden. The mine is in a lovely little vale, with
+a settlement of Mexican and Chinese boarding-houses
+clustered around it. Some bold ledges of rock jut out
+above, and a superintendent’s house surrounded by flowers
+hangs upon the hill-side. A weird-looking flume conveys
+the sulphurous acid from the calcining furnaces to a hill-top,
+upon which every trace of vegetation has been blasted
+by its poisonous exhalations.</p>
+
+<p>Then I made a little tour by rail southward through
+the immense “Murphy” and “Miller and Lux” ranches,
+comprising a grain country as flat as a floor.</p>
+
+<p>We turned west through the fertile little Pajaro Valley,
+the emporium of which for produce, and fine redwood
+lumber, cut in great quantities on the adjoining
+Santa Cruz Mountains, is the thriving town of Watsonville.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[365]</span>We ran along a rugged coast, past wooded gorges
+and white sea-side cottages, at Aptos and Soquel, to the
+much-frequented resort of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz has
+bold variations of level, the usual commonplace buildings,
+a noble drive along cliffs eaten into a hundred fantastic
+shapes by the waves, and shops for the sale of shells, and
+its summer boarders, who become, with change of seasons,
+winter boarders in turn. Thence finally to the long-anticipated
+Monterey.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus064" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus064.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A BIT OF OLD MONTEREY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Here at last was something to commend from the point
+of view of the picturesque without reservation. Monterey
+has a population which still, in considerable part,
+speaks Spanish only. It retains the impress of the Spanish
+domination, and little else. When you are told in
+your own country that somebody does not speak English,
+you naturally infer that it is brokenly, or only a little.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[366]</span>But at Monterey it means absolutely not a word. There
+are Spanish signs on the shops, and even Spanish advertisements,
+as, for instance, the <i>Wheeler &amp; Wilson Maquinas
+á Coser</i>, on the fences.</p>
+
+<p>My Mexican experience was a liberal education for
+Monterey, and I made the most of it. I was taken to
+call upon an ancient <i>señorita</i>, in whose history there was
+some romance.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Las rosas son muy secas</i>”—(“The roses are very dry”)
+she said, apologetically, as we entered her little garden,
+laid out in regular parallelograms, behind an adobe wall
+topped with red tiles. Large yellow and red roses were
+blowing to pieces in the wind before her long, low adobe
+house.</p>
+
+<p><i>She</i> was one of those who spoke no English. It seems
+as if there were some wilful perversity in it, after having
+been since 1846 a part of the most bustling State of the
+most active country in the world. It seems as if it must
+be some lingering hatred of the American. But the
+<i>señorita</i> is far too gentle for that. There is, perhaps, no
+reason beyond a general mental inertness by virtue of
+which the Mexican survivors have suffered all their other
+interests as well as this to go by the board.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>señorita</i> is a little, thin old lady of fifty. Her romance
+was with an American officer, it is said, thirty
+years ago, and she has never since married, but has withered,
+like her roses, at Monterey.</p>
+
+<p>As seen from a distance, scattered loosely and white
+on the forest-crested slope of the fine bay, the little city,
+which has now perhaps two thousand inhabitants, does not
+show its unlikeness to other places. But when entered
+it consists almost exclusively of whitewashed adobe houses,
+and the straggling, mud-colored walls of enclosures, for
+animals, known as “corrals.” Many of them are vacant.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[367]</span>At frequent
+intervals is
+encountered
+too some
+abandoned
+old adobe
+barracks, or
+government house, or military prison of historic fame,
+with its whitewash gone, holes in its walls, and bits of
+broken grating and balcony hanging aimlessly on, waiting
+only the first opportunity to let go.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp67" id="illus065" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus065.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>LOOKOUT STATION.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The travellers of my youth had a fashion of talking
+glibly of adobe, without explaining what adobe was. Let
+me not be guilty of the same error. Adobe is bricks
+made of about twice the usual size, and dried in the sun
+instead of being baked. Walls are made of great thickness,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[368]</span>in order that, though outside and inside crumble off,
+there may be a good deal left. Like a number of other
+things, it stands very well while not assailed; and in this
+climate it is rarely assailed by violent extremes of temperature.</p>
+
+<p>The typical adobe house of the best class is stuccoed
+and whitewashed. It is large on the ground, two stories
+in height, and has verandas. Again, it is of but one story,
+with an interior court-yard. It has green doors and shutters,
+and green, turned posts, in what we now call the
+“Queen Anne style,” and it is comfortable and home-like
+to look at.</p>
+
+<p>One of them contains the first piano ever introduced
+into California, and the owners are people who made haste
+to sell out their all at San Francisco and invest it here, in order
+to reap the greater prosperity which was thought to be
+waiting upon Monterey. Two old iron guns stand planted
+as posts at the corners of the dwelling. In front of others
+are some walks neatly made of the vertebræ of whales,
+taken by the Monterey Whaling Company. The company
+is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men, chiefly Portuguese,
+of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the
+hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They
+pursue their avocation from the shore in boats, with
+plenty of adventure and no small profit.</p>
+
+<p>Monterey, which is now not even a county seat, was
+the Spanish capital of the province from the time it was
+thought necessary to have a capital. The missionary father,
+Junipero Serra, came here from Mexico in the year
+1770. It was next a Mexican capital under eleven successive
+governors. Then it became the American capital,
+the first port of entry, the scene of the first Constitutional
+Convention of the State, and an outfitting point for the
+southern mines. Money in those early days was so
+plenty, I have heard tell, that store-keepers hardly
+stopped to count it, but threw it under the counter in
+bushelfuls.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[369]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus066" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus066.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CUTTING UP THE WHALE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[370]</span></p>
+
+<p>A secret belief in the ultimate revival of Monterey
+seems always to survive in certain quarters, like that in
+the reappearance of Barbarossa from the Kylfhäuser
+Berg, or the restoration of the Jews. Breakwaters have
+been ambitiously talked of, and it is said that the bay
+could be made a harbor and shipping-point and the rival
+of San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>The only step toward such revival as yet is a fine hotel,
+built by the Southern Pacific railroad, which may make
+it, instead of Santa Cruz, across the Bay, the leading sea-side
+resort. Though not so grandiose a direction as some
+others, this is really the one in which the peculiar conditions
+of the old capital are most likely to tell. The summer
+boarder can get a tangible pleasure out of its historic
+remains and traditions of greatness, though they be good
+for nothing else. The Hotel del Monte is a beautiful
+edifice, not surpassed by that of any American watering-place,
+and unequalled in the charming groves of live-oak
+and pine and profusion of cultivated flowers by which it
+is surrounded, and the air of comfort combined with its
+elegant arrangements.</p>
+
+<p>This is the way with our friends of the Pacific coast.
+If they do not always stop to follow Eastern ideas and
+patterns, when they really attempt something in the same
+line, they are as likely as not to do it a great deal better.</p>
+
+<p>The climate at Monterey, according to statistical tables,
+is remarkably even. The mean temperature is 52° in
+January and 58° in July. This strikes one as rather cool
+for bathing, but the mode is to bathe in the tanks of a
+large bath-house, to which sea-water is introduced, artificially
+warmed, instead of in the sea itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">[371]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus067" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus067.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE HOTEL DEL MONTE, MONTEREY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_372"></a><a id="Page_373"></a>[373]</span></p>
+
+<p>In other respects the place seems nearly as desirable at
+one time of the year as another. The quaint town is
+always there; and the wild rocks, with their gossiping
+gulls and pelicans; and the drives through the extensive
+forests. There are varieties of pine and cypress—the
+latter like the Italian stone-pine—peculiar to Monterey.
+The more venerable trees, hoary with age and hanging
+moss, are contorted into all the fantastic shapes of Doré’s
+“Inferno.” They grow by preference on the most savage
+points of rock, and the wild breakers toss handfuls of
+spray up to them high in the air, in amity and greeting.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp62" id="illus068" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus068.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CLIFFS AND FOREST AT MONTEREY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">[374]</span></p>
+
+<p>Along the beach on this far-away point of the Pacific
+Ocean we find a Chinese fishing settlement. Veritable
+Celestials, without a word of English among them, have
+pasted the usual crimson papers of hieroglyphics on shanty
+residences. They burn tapers before their gods on the
+quay, and fish for a living in just such junks and small
+boats as may be seen at Hong-Kong and Canton. They
+prepare avallonia meat and avallonia shells for their home
+market. One had rather thought of the Chinese element
+as confined to San Francisco alone, but it is a feature of
+quaint interest throughout all of Southern California.</p>
+
+<p>At Monterey is found an old mission of the delightfully
+ruinous sort. It is in the little Carmel Valley,
+which is bare and brown again, after the green woods
+are passed, four miles from the town. The mission fathers
+once had here ninety thousand cattle, and other
+things to correspond. There are now only some vestiges,
+resembling earth-works, of their extensive adobe walls,
+and, on a rise overlooking the sea, the yellowish, low,
+<i>rococo</i> church of San Carlos.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">[375]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus069" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus069.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">[376]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus070" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus070.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SAN CARLOS’S-DAY AT THE OLD MISSION.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The Mexican traditions in design and proportion accompanied
+them here, but the workmanship as they went
+farther from home became curiously rude, and speaks of
+the disadvantages under which it was done. A dome of
+concrete on the bell-tower is unequally bulged; a star window
+in the front has very irregular points. The interior
+does not yield, as a picture of sentimental ruin, to Muckross
+Abbey or any broken temple of the Roman Campagna.
+The roof, open now to the sky, with grasses and
+wild mustard growing from its crevices, was of stone
+arches, supplemented with timber-work tied with raw-hides.
+The whole body of the church—pilasters, capitals,
+frieze, and all—is set on a curve springing from
+the floor—a peculiarity I have never seen elsewhere.
+There are grasses growing within, sculptured stones
+tumbled down, vestiges of a tile pavement, tombs, bits
+of fresco, and over all the autograph scribblings of a
+myriad of A. B. Smiths and J. B. Joneses, visitors here
+in their time like ourselves.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_377">[377]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus071" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus071.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>DRYING FISH AT CHINESE VILLAGE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_378"></a><a id="Page_379"></a>[379]</span></p>
+
+<p>Once a year, on St. Charles’s-day, in early November,
+a memorial service is held, attended by all the shabby
+Spanish-Indian life remaining in the country round
+about. The place is unique. It seems even more lonely
+than ruins of the same kind in the mother country,
+through standing amid surroundings of such a different
+class. Nothing is more conducive to pensiveness of a
+pleasant kind than, lying within this ruined enclosure, to
+watch the waving in the wind of the long grasses on its
+walls and listen to the plash of the sea on the shore, but
+a few steps distant.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_380">[380]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXVI">XXVI.<br>
+<i>A WONDROUS VALLEY, AND A DESERT THAT BLOSSOMS LIKE THE ROSE.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The Yosemite, currently spoken of as the “Valley,” is
+comprised in the belt formed by drawing lines across the
+State from San Francisco and Monterey respectively. It
+is a wild, strange nook among the Sierras, one of the
+few places not only not disappointing, but worthy of far
+more praise than has ever been bestowed upon it. It is
+like one of those mysterious regions on the outskirts of
+the fairy-land of the story-books—a standing resource of
+adventure to all the characters who enter it, and it is
+proper enough that our earthly Paradise of Southern
+California should have such a region of enchantment
+also adjoining it.</p>
+
+<p>I reached it by stage-ride of sixty miles, from the Southern
+Pacific Railroad, at Madera, to Clark’s Station, and
+thence by stage and horseback of twenty-five miles to the
+Valley. The autumn days were lovely there. The foliage,
+turned by a local climate quite as severe as that of
+New England, glowed with a vivid richness. The Merced
+River, a gentle stream, pursuing a devious way in
+the bottom, which is as level as a floor, reflected the
+color from many a mirror-like pool and sudden bend.
+Walls of rock rise on either hand to an elevation of
+three-quarters of a mile, varying from one-half to one-eighth
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_381">[381]</span>of a mile in width. It is rather a chasm than a
+valley. At night the radiance of a full yellow moon invested
+all its wonders with an added enchantment. The
+cliffs are exactly what we think cliffs ought to be, but
+what they seldom are. They are of the hardest granite,
+pleasantly gray in color, and terminate in castle and dome
+like forms. The precipices are sheer and unbroken to the
+base, with almost none of those slopes of <i>débris</i> that detract
+from precipices in general. It is a little valley suitable,
+without a hair’s-breadth alteration, to the purposes
+of any giant, enchanter, or yellow dwarf of them all. It
+is such scenery as Doré has imagined for the “Idyls of
+the King.” One half feels himself a Sir Lancelot or Sir
+Gawain, riding along this lovely and majestic mountain
+trail; and as if he should wear chain-armor, a winged helmet,
+and a sword upon which he had sworn to do deeds
+of redoubtable valor.</p>
+
+<p>It was the coast valleys and some coast towns that we
+took on our first journey. This time we have come down
+the main line of the Southern Pacific Railway through
+the central plain of the State. The railway is traced
+along the great central valley known as the San Joaquin,
+on a line nearly midway between the Sierra Nevadas
+and the Coast Range.</p>
+
+<p>The road is still comparatively new, and the settlements
+have attained no great dimensions. It did not as a rule
+touch at the older towns existing, but pursued a direct
+course through a country where all had to be opened up.
+As some of the places passed by were of considerable
+size no little dissatisfaction ensued, and the mutterings
+are still heard. Frequent mention of this grievance
+is heard by the traveller through Southern California.
+Some of the neglected places even maintain that they
+would have been better without any railroad at all. References
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_382">[382]</span>are thrown out to former glories of a dazzling
+sort which it is sometimes difficult to credit, though a
+railroad naturally effects great innovations in trade. To
+the ordinary observer it would appear that the introduction
+of a splendidly equipped railway, even if it distribute
+its blessings a little unequally at first, and its tariff be
+high, must be a great and permanent advantage to everything
+remote as well as near. For the first time an adequate
+means has been afforded for the transport of immigrants
+and supplies through the whole length of the
+State.</p>
+
+<p>The Southern Pacific Railway has completed connections
+which give it a transcontinental route from San
+Francisco, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, to
+New Orleans. Immigrants are to be brought in by
+steamer from Liverpool to New Orleans, and thence by
+rail at a rate not to exceed that to the central West. The
+fares to California heretofore have been almost prohibitive,
+which is one of the reasons why so rich a country
+contains as yet less than a million of people. The languid
+movement hither of the valuable class of immigration
+which pours into the West, though ascribed by some
+alarmists to the presence of the Chinese, is due to the
+cost of travel and the lack of cheap lands for settlement.
+The Chinese are certainly not rivals in the matter
+of land, since they acquire little or none of it.</p>
+
+<p>The new opportunities opened to transportation, the
+depression of the mining interest, and rapid increase of
+the Chinese, have awakened of late an exceptional interest
+in white immigration. A committee of some of the
+most prominent persons in the State has opened an inquiry
+into the most effectual means of promoting it. It
+will no doubt set forth more clearly than has ever been
+done before an account of such territory as is open to settlers,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_383">[383]</span>whether offered by the government, the railroads,
+or the great ranches, its advantages and the methods of
+reaching it.</p>
+
+<p>It seems a little singular at first that lack of suitable
+lands can be adduced as a reason for lack of population in
+so vast a region, with the climate and other natural advantages
+of which so much has been said. It can only be understood
+by taking into account the unusual atmospheric
+dryness, and the important part played by water, which
+has to be brought upon the soil by costly contrivances;
+The locations where there is sufficient natural moisture
+for the maturing of crops are of small extent. They were
+among the first taken up. In much of the central and
+southern portions of the State the annual rain-fall is
+almost infinitesimal in quantity. At Bakersville, the
+capital of Kern County—whither our journey presently
+leads us—it is no more than from two to four inches.
+Light crops of grain and pasturage for stock may occasionally
+be got even under these conditions, but the only
+certain reliance is irrigation.</p>
+
+<p>The springs and small streams were early appreciated
+at their value, and seized upon by persons who controlled
+with them great tracts of surrounding country, valueless
+except as watered from these sources. These tributary
+tracts are used chiefly as cattle and sheep ranges. A person
+owning five thousand acres will often have for his
+stock the free run of twenty thousand more. Cultivation
+is confined to the springs and water-courses, and becomes
+a succession of charming oases in a desert the superficial
+sterility of which is phenomenal.</p>
+
+<p>The tenure of land by thousands of acres under a single
+ownership is a tradition from the Spanish and Mexican
+times. It has been much decried, as a great evil, and
+it is said that the State would be much more prosperous
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_384">[384]</span>in a series of small farms. This is probably true, and the
+system as it exists may be ascribed in part to the greed
+of individuals, but it arises principally out of the natural
+features of the country. The wealth of the large holders
+alone enables them to undertake works of improvement,
+such as canal-making, drainage, and tree-planting, on an
+effectual scale. Perhaps the State will have to lend its
+assistance, and establish a public system of irrigation and
+drainage, before the land can be fully prepared for the
+small settler.</p>
+
+<p>Water! water! water! How to slake the thirst of this
+parched, brown country, and turn it over to honest toil
+and thrift, is the great problem as we go southward, and
+the processes of irrigation are the most distinctive marks
+upon the landscape wherever it is improved.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>It is in early November that we begin to traverse the
+long San Joaquin Valley from Lathrop Junction, just below
+Stockton, southward. The side tracks of the railroad
+are crowded with platform-cars laden with wheat for the
+sea-board. The “elevator” system is not yet in use, and
+the grain is contained in sacks for convenient handling.</p>
+
+<p>Hereabouts are some of the most famous wheat ranches.
+A man will plough but a single furrow a day on his
+farm, but this may be twenty miles long. There is sufficient
+rain-fall for the cereals, but not for the more exacting
+crops. The land gives but few bushels to the acre
+under the easy system of farming, but it must be remembered
+that there are a great many acres. The stubble of
+the grain-fields is whitened with wild-fowl. At a way-station
+a small rustic in an immense pair of boots goes
+over to a pool and blazes away with a shot-gun. Presently
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_385">[385]</span>he returns, dragging by the necks an immense pair
+of wild-geese, almost beyond his strength to pull. The
+tawny color of the fields, and the great formal stacks of
+straw piled up in them, recall some aspects of the central
+table-land of Mexico. Many or spacious buildings are
+not necessary in the mild, dry climate of California.
+The prosperous ranches have, in consequence, a somewhat
+thin, unfurnished appearance compared with Eastern
+farms.</p>
+
+<p>The most prominent object at each station is a long,
+low warehouse of the company, for the accommodation of
+grain. Like the station buildings generally it is painted
+Indian red, in “metallic” paint. The station of Merced
+is one of the two principal points of departure for the
+Yosemite Valley, Madera the other. At Merced an immense
+wooden hotel, for travellers bound to the Valley,
+overshadows the rest of the town. It rises beside the
+track, and the town is scattered back on the plain.</p>
+
+<p>At Madera appears the end of a V-shaped wooden
+aqueduct, or flume, for rafting down lumber from the
+mountains fifty miles away to a planing-mill. Some of the
+hands also occasionally come down the flume in temporary
+boats. As the speed is prodigious these voyages abound
+in excitement and peril. The structure, supported on
+trestles, according to the formation of the ground, stretches
+away in interminable perspective to the mountains,
+which are rose-pink and purple at sunset. The scene is
+suggestive of the Roman Campagna, with this slight, essentially
+American work as a parody of the broken aqueducts
+and temples of the classic ancients. The lumber
+flume, however, is a bold and costly enterprise, though
+we be prone to smile at it.</p>
+
+<p>By degrees we draw away from the wheat ranches,
+more and more on the uncultivated plain. The town
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_386">[386]</span>of Fresno, two hundred miles below San Francisco, and
+about midway between two important streams, the San
+Joaquin and Kings Rivers, is in the midst of a particularly
+desolate tract, known, up to a very recent period, as
+the San Joaquin Desert. One should alight here. There
+is no better place for examining the marvellous capabilities
+of a soil which appears at first sight inhospitable to
+the last degree. Fresno is in the hands of enterprising
+persons, who push and advertise it very actively. We
+heard at San Francisco of the Fresno Colony, the Central
+Colony, American Colony, Scandinavian Colony, Temperance
+Colony, Washington Colony, and others of similar
+names clustered around Fresno. It is advertised as
+one of those genial places, alluring to the imagination of
+most of us, where one can sit down under his own vine
+and fig-tree, secure from the vicissitudes of climate, and
+find a profitable occupation open to him in the cultivation
+of the soil, and all at a moderate cost.</p>
+
+<p>The aspect of things on alighting is very different from
+what had been expected, but all the substantial advantages
+claimed seemed realized, and the process of founding a
+home may be witnessed in all its stages.</p>
+
+<p>The town has a population of two thousand, most of
+which it has gained in the past five years. It is set down
+on the east side of the railroad highway, with a thin scattering
+of foliage slightly veiling the formality of its lines.
+It consists of a few streets of two-story wooden and brick
+buildings. The streets cross one another at right angles,
+and have planked sidewalks. A slight eminence above
+the general level is the site of the County Court-house,
+which somewhat resembles an Italian villa in design, and
+has Italian cypresses in front. The court-houses of half a
+dozen counties down the line, from Modesto, the capital
+of Stanislaus, to Bakersfield, capital of Kern, are identical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_387">[387]</span>in pattern, so that it is both typical of its kind and evidence
+of an economical spirit.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp58" id="illus072" style="max-width: 34.375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus072.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>COURT-HOUSE AT FRESNO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>A sharp distinctness of outline is characteristic of these
+cities of the plain. Separated from the main part of
+Fresno by the railroad, as by a wide boulevard, is a row
+of low wooden houses and shops, as clearly cut out against
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_388">[388]</span>the desert as bathing-houses on a beach. This is the Chinese
+quarter. It tells at a glance the story of the peculiar
+people who tenant it: the social ostracism on the one
+hand, and their own indomitable clannishness on the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>There is now hardly any hamlet so insignificant, even
+in the wastes of Arizona, that the Chinese have not penetrated
+it, in search of labor and opportunities. Every
+settlement of the Pacific slope has its Chinese quarter, as
+mediæval towns had their Ghetto for the Jews. It is not
+always without the place, as at Fresno; but, wherever it
+be, it constitutes a close corporation and a separate unit.
+In dress, language, and habits of life it adheres to Oriental
+tradition with all the persistence the new conditions
+will admit.</p>
+
+<p>The Celestials do not introduce their own architecture,
+and they build little but shanties. They adapt what they
+find to their own purposes, as has been said, distinguishing
+them with such devices that the character of the
+dwellers within cannot be mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>A great incongruity is felt between the little Yankee
+wooden dwellings and the tasselled lanterns, gilded signs,
+and hieroglyphics upon red and yellow papers with which
+they are profusely overspread. Here Ah Coon and Sam
+Sing keep laundries like the Chinese laundry the world
+over. Yuen Wa advertises himself as a contractor for
+laborers. Hop Ling, Sing Chong, and a dozen others
+have miscellaneous stores. In their windows are junk-shaped
+slippers, opium pipes, bottles of <i>saki</i>, rice-brandy,
+dried fish, goose livers, gold and silver jewelry, and packets
+of face-powder and hair ornaments for the women.
+The pig-tailed merchants themselves sit within, on odd-looking
+chests and budgets, and gossip in animated cackle
+with customers, or figure up their profits gravely in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_389">[389]</span>brown-paper books, with a brush for a pen. Women—much
+more numerous in proportion to the men than
+is commonly supposed—occasionally waddle by. Their
+black hair is very smoothly greased, and kept in place by
+long silver pins. They wear wide jackets and pantaloons
+of a cheap black “paper cambric,” which increase the natural
+awkwardness of their short and ungainly figures.</p>
+
+<p>Up-stairs, in unpainted, cobwebby, second stories, are
+the joss-houses. Here hideous but decorative idols grin
+as serenely as if in the centre of their native Tartary, and
+as if there were no spires of little Baptist and Methodist
+meeting-houses rising indignantly across the way. Pastilles
+burn before the idols, and crimson banners are
+draped about; and there are usually a few pieces of antique
+bronze upon which the eye of the connoisseur rests
+enviously.</p>
+
+<p>Other interiors are cabarets, which recall those of the
+French working-classes. A boisterous animation reigns
+within. The air is thick with tobacco-smoke of the peculiar
+Chinese odor. Games of dominoes are played with
+magpie-like chatter by excited groups around long, wooden
+tables. Most of those present wear the customary blue
+cotton blouse and queer little black soft hat, and all have
+queues, which either dangle behind or are coiled up like
+the hair of women. Some, however—teamsters, perhaps
+here only temporarily—are dressed in the slop clothing
+and cowhide boots of ordinary white laborers.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinamen are servants in the camps, the ranches,
+and the houses of the better class, track-layers and section
+hands on the railroad, and laborers in the factories and
+fields. What Southern California, or California generally,
+could do without them it is difficult to see. They
+seem, for the most part, capable, industrious, honest, and
+neat. One divests himself rapidly of the prejudice against
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_390">[390]</span>them with which he may have started. Let us hope that
+laborers of the better class, by whom they are to be succeeded,
+may at least have as many praiseworthy traits.</p>
+
+<p>The town of Fresno is as yet chiefly a supply and market
+point for the numerous colonies by which it is environed.
+These colonies straggle out in various directions, beginning
+within a mile or two of the town. The intervening
+land still lies in its natural condition for settlement. It
+is difficult to convey an idea of its seemingly hopeless
+barrenness. Instead of complaining of dry grass here one
+would be grateful for a blade of grass of any kind. The
+surface is as arid as that of a gravelled school-yard. It is
+even worse, for it is undermined with holes of gophers,
+owls, jack-rabbits, and squirrels. To ride at any speed is
+certain to bring one to grief through the entangling of his
+horse’s legs in these pitfalls. As the traveller passes there
+is a scampering on all sides. The gray squirrels speed for
+their holes with flying leaps, the jack-rabbits with kangaroo-like
+bounds. They run toward us, if they chance to
+have been absent from home in an opposite direction.
+Not one considers himself safe from our clearly malicious
+designs till he has dived headlong into his own proper
+tenement.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there are tracts white with alkali. Flakes of
+this substance, at once bitter and salt to the taste, can be
+taken up in an almost pure condition. Elsewhere we pass
+through tracts of wild sunflower—a tall weed, charming
+in flower, but now thoroughly desiccated, and rattling together
+like dry bones.</p>
+
+<p>This description applies, for the greater part of the
+year, not only to Fresno, but in an almost equal degree
+to Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and nearly the whole of
+Southern California. Without it the wonders which
+have been produced by human agency could not be understood.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_391">[391]</span>The face of nature in all this district was a
+blank sheet of paper. The cultivator had absolutely
+everything to do. He discovered on trial that he had a
+soil of remarkable capacity, and, with the aid of water
+and the genial climate, he could draw from it whatever
+he pleased.</p>
+
+<p>Water is the salvation of the waste places, and makes
+the desert blossom like the rose. One’s respect for this
+pleasant element is, if possible, increased upon seeing
+what it is here capable of. It seems that, if used with
+sufficient art, it might almost draw a crop from cast-iron.
+The vegetation of Southern California is thoroughly artificial.
+It consists of a series of scattered plantations created
+by the use of water. In these the traveller finds his
+flowers, palms, vineyards, and orange groves, and, burying
+himself among them, like the ostrich with its head in the
+sand, he may refuse briefly to recognize that there is
+anything else; but, as a matter of fact, only a small beginning
+has been made. What has been done, however,
+is an earnest of what can be done. It is found that,
+as irrigation is practised, the land stores up part of the
+water, and less is needed each year. In wells, too, the
+water is found nearer the surface, proving that the soil
+acts as a natural reservoir. As time goes on, and canals
+and vegetation increase, no doubt important climatic
+changes may be looked for. In the end Southern California
+may be as different from what it is at present as
+can be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>The several Fresno colonies for the most part join one
+another, and form a continuous belt of cultivation. On
+entering their confines the change is most agreeable.
+Close along-side the desert, the home of the gopher and
+jack-rabbit, only separated from it by a narrow ditch of
+running water, are lovely vineyards, orchards of choice
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_392">[392]</span>fruits, ornamental flowers and shrubs, avenues of shade-trees,
+fields of corn, and green pastures of the alfalfa, a
+tall and strong clover, which gives half a dozen crops a
+year. Embowered among these are the homes of happy
+families, larger establishments for the drying of fruits
+and converting the munificent crops of grapes into wine.
+Many of the homes are as yet but modest wooden cottages.
+Others, of a better class, are of adobe, treated in
+an ornamental way, with piazzas and Gothic gables.</p>
+
+<p>The most important residence is that of a late member
+of the San Francisco Stock Board, who has gone into the
+cultivation of grapes here on a large scale. It is a handsome
+villa that would do credit to any town. The improvements
+of the Barton place were in but an incipient
+state at the time of our visit. A great array of young
+vines brightened the recently sterile soil, but timidly and
+as if not quite certain of approval. Young orange and
+lemon trees in the door-yard were muffled in straw till they
+should have gained a greater hardihood to withstand the
+frosts. Elsewhere water was being run out from irrigating
+ditches over fields in preparation for the first time.
+It is the custom to soak them, in order that they may be
+perfectly levelled. Knolls or any other inequalities must
+not be left to hinder the equal distribution of water to the
+crop. A wide canal stretched back from the numerous
+out-buildings toward the horizon. On the verge of the
+wide plain showed the blue Sierras, veiled by a slight
+chronic dustiness of the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_393">[393]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus073" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus073.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PRIVATE RESIDENCE AT FRESNO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_394">[394]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the more established portions of the colonies some
+charming bits of landscape are found. The Chinese farm-hand
+wears a blue blouse and a wide basket-hat which he
+calls <i>mow</i>. He pronounces this hat “heap good” if complimented
+upon it. He prunes the vines or collects the
+generous clusters of grapes; or else he digs a vegetable
+garden by the side of a canal, in which himself, his vegetables,
+his cabin, a row of poplar-trees, and the blue sky
+overhead are all reflected together. Poplars, willows, and
+cottonwoods are planted along the canals to strengthen
+their banks. At Eisen’s wine-making place, for a considerable
+distance, oleanders in flower are seen spaced between
+the trees. The water runs clear and swift. At
+Eisen’s it turns a mill. No doubt devices for bathing in
+it might also be contrived if desired.</p>
+
+<p>The long, symmetrical lines of trees have a foreign, or
+at least un-American, air. It is not difficult to recall to
+mind the mulberries and elms that bend over the irrigating
+canals of Northern Italy and drop their yellow leaves
+upon them in autumn like these. It might be Lombardy
+again, and the glimpses of distant blue the Alps instead
+of the Sierras. The locks and gates for the water are of
+an ephemeral structure as yet, made of planking instead
+of substantial brick and stone. The smaller ditches are
+often stopped with mere bits of board let down into
+grooves, instead of gates with handles. It is urged, however,
+that handles offer inducement to idlers to lift them
+up out of pure mischief, and waste the water.</p>
+
+<p>The colonies are not quite colonies in the usual sense;
+that is to say, they were not founded by persons who combined
+together and came at one and the same time. The
+lands they occupy were distributed into parcels by an
+original owner, and, after being provided with water facilities
+by an irrigation company, put upon the market at
+the disposal of whoever would buy. No doubt a certain
+general consistency rules them in keeping with the names
+respectively set up, but it is not rigorous. Probably nothing
+need prevent a native American from joining the
+Scandinavian Colony, or a Scandinavian the American
+Colony, should he desire to do so.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_395">[395]</span></p>
+
+<p>As to the Temperance Colony, it must be sorely tried
+in a locality the most liberal and profitable yield of which
+is the wine grape. It seems hardly a propitious place to
+have chosen. Scoffers say that in some instances while
+settlers will not make wine themselves they will sell their
+grapes to the wine-making establishments. This I merely
+note as “important, if true.”</p>
+
+<p>The standard twenty-acre lot, as prepared for market at
+Fresno, has its main irrigating ditch, of perhaps four feet
+in width, connecting with the general irrigating system.
+For twelve and a half dollars a year it receives a water-right
+entitling it to the use of whatever water it may
+need. The buyer must make his own minor ditches, and
+prepare his ground from this point. He usually aims to
+establish in his fields a number of slightly differing levels,
+that the water may be led to one after the other. For
+ground in the preliminary condition described about fifty
+dollars per acre is demanded. Most of the earlier settlers
+bought for less, and the price named strikes one as high,
+considering the newness of the country, and the excellent
+farming land to be had in the older parts of the country
+for less. Prices are less here, however, than at Los Angeles,
+Riverside, or San Diego, farther south.</p>
+
+<p>It is argued in answer to objectors that though land be
+not nominally it is really cheap, in consideration of its extraordinary
+productiveness. It is held that an investment
+here gives better returns than anywhere, and at the same
+time that the climate and other conditions promise a more
+pleasurable existence than could be enjoyed elsewhere.
+This Fresno land, for instance, yields four and five crops
+of alfalfa a year. Vineyards planted but two and a half
+years are shown which produce five tons of grapes to the
+acre. Five years is the period required for the vines to
+come into full bearing. It is estimated that an acre of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_396">[396]</span>vines in that condition will have cost one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, allowing fifty dollars as the price of
+the ground, and it is then counted upon for an annual
+yield of ten tons of grapes, at twenty dollars a ton. The
+rate of growth in vegetation is one of the things to note.
+Fruit-trees are said to advance as far in three years as in
+seven on the Eastern sea-board.</p>
+
+<p>The personal stories of the colonists are often interesting.
+They have generally had some previous hard experience
+of the world. Such a man, working sturdily in the
+field preparing the ground around a new cottage of his
+own, lost a fortune in the San Francisco Stock Board.
+The funds for his present enterprise were provided by
+his wife, who had turned to keeping boarders, and sent
+him her small profits monthly until he should have made
+ready a place for their joint occupancy. Instances were
+heard of where nice properties had been secured with
+no other original capital than a pair of brawny hands.
+These, however, were exceptional. The country appears
+to be one where it is most desirable for the new-comer to
+have a small capital.</p>
+
+<p>In the Central Colony a comfortable estate was owned
+by four spinster school-teachers of San Francisco. They
+had combined to purchase eighty acres. One of them
+lived on the place and managed it. The others contributed
+from their earnings until it had reached a paying
+basis, passed only their vacations there at present, but
+looked forward to making it their ultimate retreat.</p>
+
+<p>The idea seems both a praiseworthy new departure in
+the direction of female emancipation and charming in itself.
+I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of
+the resident manager of the experiment. Her experiences,
+written out, would, I think, be interesting and instructive.
+There was an open piano in the pleasant cottage
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_397">[397]</span>interior, and late books and magazines were scattered
+about. It was a bit of refined civilization dropped down
+in the midst of the desert.</p>
+
+<p>This lady had come, she said, for rest. She took pleasure,
+too, in the country, and in seeing things grow. She
+had made mistakes in her management at first, mainly
+through trusting too much to others, but now had things
+in good control. Four farm-hands—Chinamen—were
+employed. The eighty acres were distributed into vineyard,
+orchard, and alfalfa, about one-half devoted to the
+vineyard. Its product was turned, not into wine, but raisins.
+Apricots and nectarines had been found up to this
+time the most profitable orchard fruits. Almonds were
+less so, owing to the loss of time in husking them for
+market. There was among other crops a field of Egyptian
+corn, a variety which grows tall and slender, and runs
+up to a bushy head instead of forming ears. The sight
+of it carried one back to the Biblical story of Joseph and
+his brethren, and the picture-writing in the Pyramids.</p>
+
+<p>The grapes for raisin-making are of the sweet Muscat
+variety. There was a “raisin-house” piled full of the
+flat boxes in which raisins are traditionally packed. The
+process of raisin-making is very simple. The bunches
+of grapes are cut from the vines, and laid in trays in
+the open fields. They are left there, properly turned
+at intervals, for a matter of a fortnight. There are
+neither rains nor dews to dampen them and delay the
+curing. Then they are removed to an airy building
+known as a “sweat-house,” where they remain possibly
+a month, till the last vestiges of moisture are gone.
+Hence they go to be packed and shipped to market.</p>
+
+<p>One must walk rather gingerly at present not to discern
+through the young and scattering plantations the
+bareness beyond, but in another ten years the scene can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_398">[398]</span>hardly fail to be one of rich luxuriance. The site is flat
+and prairie-like, and I should prefer, for my part, to locate
+my earthly Paradise nearer the hills. Still, the taste of
+the time runs to earthly Paradises which are at the same
+time shrewd commercial ventures, and the cultivation of
+the plain is much easier than that of the slopes.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_399">[399]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXVII">XXVII.<br>
+<i>VISALIA, BAKERSFIELD, AND LIFE ON A SPACIOUS RANCH.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Visalia, capital of Tulare County, thirty-four miles
+south of Fresno, is one of the older towns left aside by
+the railroad. I put it in the most obvious way, but a
+patriotic Visalian, on the other hand, said to me with
+warmth, “Left by the railroad! Visalia left by the railroad!
+I guess not. It is the railroad that is left by
+Visalia, as it will find out.”</p>
+
+<p>Visalia is reached, from the junction of Goshen, by a
+short branch-road of its own. It is larger than Fresno,
+but less animated. It has perhaps twenty-five hundred
+people, a court-house of the pattern described, and a
+United States land-office.</p>
+
+<p>When the epithet “old” is used of any California town
+not of Spanish origin it simply means an approximation
+to the year 1849. The building of most hoary antiquity
+in Visalia dates only from the year 1852. It has been
+government-house, jail, and store in turn, and is now
+decorated with the legend “Mooney’s Brewery.” The
+town was founded by one Vise, an erratic person, who
+came across the plains from Texas, and had followed in
+his life such various professions, besides that of pioneer,
+as preacher, trader, gambler, foot-racer, and jockey. It
+happened that the quarter section of land upon which he
+settled was at the time unsurveyed, and not legally open
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_400">[400]</span>to pre-emption.
+This irregularity
+was not discovered
+till years
+later, when the
+town had grown
+up on the site.
+It was brought to
+light by an employé
+of the land-office,
+who thereupon
+ingeniously
+undertook to pre-empt
+the ground
+for himself.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp78" id="illus074" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus074.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>FIRST BUILDING IN VISALIA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“And what came of this bold attempt upon vested interests?”</p>
+
+<p>“The party was promptly fired out of town,” was the
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>Visalia is rather prolific in stories, if an “old-timer” of
+the right sort can be happened up to tell them. Cattle
+kings, whose herds once filled the San Joaquin Valley,
+have retired hither. You may hear how Cattle King
+“Pat Murray” won his wife. She was a fascinating
+person in her youth, the daughter of a landlady with
+whom Pat Murray, then struggling and impecunious,
+boarded, in company with numerous mates. There was
+great aspiration and rivalry for her hand. Pat Murray
+stole a march in this wise. As they were setting off in
+company on an expedition he said, “The trip is a rough
+and dangerous one, boys. I propose that we leave our
+money and valuables with the old lady for safe-keeping.”
+The rest agreed, and handed over to him their property
+to deliver to her. The shrewd Pat Murray represented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_401">[401]</span>it all as his own, and obtained in this way such consideration
+in her eyes—as a person exceptionally well-to-do in
+the world—that she advised her daughter to “set her
+cap” at him, and all was happily accomplished before
+the <i>ruse</i> was discovered.</p>
+
+<p>On another occasion—whether in this same courtship
+or not the chronicles do not say—Pat Murray disposed of
+rivals, who visited in the evenings a comely damsel of
+the general acquaintance, by soft-soaping the log serving
+as approach to her cabin across a small stream. Having
+thus arranged, he
+sat calmly enjoying
+the fair one’s
+society, and listening
+with appreciative
+ear to
+the splash of the
+successive victims
+as they slid off
+into the water.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="illus075" style="max-width: 26.5625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus075.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>AN OLD-TIMER.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Stories are told
+of Spanish bandits
+and treasure
+of precious metals
+in the mountains,
+and of the
+wild administration
+of justice in
+early times, when
+offenders were
+occasionally executed
+first and
+sentenced afterward.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_402">[402]</span></p>
+
+<p>The first treasurer of the county is said to have carried
+the records of his office in his hat, and, being a person
+given to travel and of an absent mind, he scattered these
+documents far and wide behind him, even to the confines
+of Utah and Arizona.</p>
+
+<p>At Visalia I first observed “Spanishtown,” a community
+which begins to appear regularly along-side of “Chinatown”
+as we go southward. It is composed of persons
+of Mexican blood, poor, shiftless, and not always of the
+most reputable character.</p>
+
+<p>Charming views of the high Sierras, now powdered
+with the first snows of winter, are had. The surface is
+more rolling than at Fresno, and strewn with fine clumps
+of chestnut-oaks. There are big trees back in the great
+mountains equalling in size those of the Yosemite.
+Lumbermen at work there cut down numbers which,
+though insignificant as compared to the very largest,
+are monstrous in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The water for the irrigation of this district is drawn
+out of Kings, Tule, and Kaweah rivers by companies,
+who give to their principal canals such names as the
+People’s Ditch, the Last Chance Ditch, the Mussel
+Slough Ditch, and the Lower Kings River Ditch. The
+main ditches or canals range from twelve to forty feet
+in width. Wing dams confine and direct into them such
+portions as are desired of the wide, meandering rivers.</p>
+
+<p>A California river of the south is something of a
+curiosity. Extravagantly wide, it is in compensation
+preposterously shallow. Only a few last over the dry
+season at all; the most evaporate and wholly disappear.
+Their dry beds, variegated by a few islets studded with
+sycamores, are more like wagon-roads than the beds of
+rivers. Sometimes these exhausted water-courses differ
+in color from the surrounding soil, and are seen stretching
+as rivers of gray or silvery sand through the general
+yellow of the desert.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_403">[403]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus076" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus076.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>LOGGING, BACK OF VISALIA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_404">[404]</span></p>
+
+<p>Though irrigation be yet in its infancy its belongings
+have attained great dimensions. There are three hundred
+miles of canals of the requisite size in Tulare
+County, and more than three thousand miles in California
+all together. One main canal, that of the San Joaquin
+and Kings River, has a length of seventy-four miles
+and a width of nearly seventy feet.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>A branch-road westward from Goshen, a continuation
+of that from Visalia, conveys the traveller to the bustling,
+fast-growing little towns of Hanford and Lemoore,
+in the Mussel Slough country. This district, adjoining
+Tulare Lake, was recently part desert and part swamp.
+It has been redeemed so as to rank now among the best
+farming land in California. Its chief product is wheat.
+The inhabitants raise hardly the vegetables needed for
+their own use. Malaria is rather prevalent, but it is said
+to arise, as in many other irrigated districts, from the
+careless use of water rather than the fundamental situation.
+The water, instead of being carefully drained off,
+is too often allowed to lie in stagnant pools.</p>
+
+<p>The Mussel Slough was the scene, in the month of
+May, 1880, of a bloody conflict between the settlers and
+railroad authorities which has become celebrated. Officers
+of the law, acting for new claimants, attempted to
+take possession of the land under a railroad title. Legally
+in the wrong, though perhaps morally in the right,
+the settlers organized to resist, put out stirring manifestoes,
+which read like the declarations of oppressed people
+struggling for their liberty, and called on gods and men
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_405">[405]</span>to witness the justice of their cause. In the fight that
+ensued five settlers lost their lives, all at the hands of a
+single man—one Crowe, a United States marshal, who
+displayed a prowess and coolness under fire never surpassed
+in any of the narratives of sensational literature.
+Crowe himself was despatched. A number of the survivors
+were tried for their part in the affair, condemned
+to eight months’ imprisonment, and served out their term
+in Santa Clara jail. They had but just been released,
+say a month before our arrival. Their brethren and
+well-wishers had received them on their return with
+an ovation, the noise of which hardly yet ceased to ring
+in the air.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Bakersfield, capital of Kern County, seventy-five miles
+farther south, somewhat smaller than Visalia, boasted at
+one time the distinction of a malady peculiar to itself.
+The Bakersfield form of malarial fever, whatever the fine
+difference that distinguished it from others, had a position
+apart in the medical works. The sanitary condition
+of the place, however, has been greatly improved by the
+extension of drainage and irrigation works, and can, no
+doubt, be made all that could be desired.</p>
+
+<p>Of the three lakes, Tulare, Buena Vista, and Kern,
+which make so large a showing on the map, the latter
+two, with their surrounding marshes, have been dried up,
+and the former is on its way to extinction also. These
+lakes had for me, on the map, a mysterious and important
+air. I seized the first opportunity to penetrate their
+mystery, by riding down to Tulare Lake on horseback.
+You cannot reach the margin, for fear of miring. Nor
+is the approach on foot much easier. The tules, or
+rushes, rise high above your head, and are infested with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_406">[406]</span>a dangerous breed of wild hogs, descended from vagrant
+deserters from the ranches. In such fragmentary glimpses
+as are had between and over the tules an expanse of
+dreary surface appears which may be either water or the
+alkali-whitened bed from which the water has receded.
+The vicinity swarms with wild fowl. Their multitudinous
+chatter has a kind of metallic clang in it. Now
+white, now dark, as they are before or against the sunlight,
+they flutter above the reeds and stubble-fields like
+autumn leaves blown by the wind.</p>
+
+<p>The drying up of the lakes is occasioned by the diversion
+of the surplus waters of the Kern River for the
+redemption of desert lands. This gave rise to a controversy,
+lately settled by a legal decision which is a step in
+the crystallization into shape of a system of water jurisdiction
+for California. The great firm of real-estate men
+and ranchmen, Miller &amp; Lux, owned the lands below;
+the almost equally great firm of Haggin, Carr &amp; Tevis,
+those, for the improvement of which the water was taken
+out, above. The first-named complained of the diversion
+of the waters as a detriment to them, and an infringement
+of their riparian rights. Riparian right, it will be
+remembered, in the English common law, gives to the
+resident on a stream the right to have it flow as it was
+wont through his grounds without diminution or alteration.</p>
+
+<p>The contest at first promised to be one of physical
+force. Miller &amp; Lux endeavored to close the sluices at
+which the water was taken out. Just, as in Scripture,
+the herdsmen of Gerara strove against the herdsmen of
+Isaac, saying, “It is our water,” the hardy <i>vaqueros</i> of
+Haggin, Carr &amp; Tevis were mustered in opposition to
+them, with orders to lasso and throw into the canal anybody
+who should interfere with the sluices. This determined
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_407">[407]</span>show of resistance prevented a conflict, and the
+case went to the civil courts.</p>
+
+<p>The decision spoken of holds that the doctrine which
+prevails in California is not that of riparian right, but
+that of “prior appropriation for beneficial uses.”</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, the greatest good of the greatest number
+is consulted. The point had been raised before in
+controversies about the diversion of water for mining
+purposes. In these cases the ruling was, that the doctrine
+of riparian right is “inapplicable, or applicable only
+in a very limited extent, to the necessity of miners, and
+inadequate for their protection.” It was farthermore
+held that all of the English common law is not in force
+in California, but only such portions of it as are adapted
+to the peculiar conditions of the State. The agricultural
+and mining interests, therefore, are now put, in this respect,
+on the same footing.</p>
+
+<p>Bakersfield takes its tone essentially from live stock.
+It has special resorts for drovers and sheep-herders. Its
+streets are generally full of horses, caparisoned in the
+Spanish style, tied to hitching-posts and awaiting their
+owners before the stores and taverns. The sheep-herders,
+a lonely race, become morose and melancholy in their
+long wanderings with their flocks apart from the habitations
+of men and human speech. They are far removed
+from the shepherds of Boucher and Watteau. Some are
+said to go insane through the monotony of their lives;
+and it is an occupation taken up only as a last resort, and
+unfitting him who pursues it for any other. Strangely
+enough, there is a rather English tone among them.
+Young prodigals of good family are found who, after
+trying their fortunes in Australia, India, and elsewhere,
+are eating the husks of repentance here in true Scriptural
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_408">[408]</span></p>
+
+<p>The shops in Bakersfield, as throughout our travels,
+are kept principally by the Jews, who are great pioneers.
+No people are growing up more ardently with the new
+West; and where they are found business is pretty sure
+to be good.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinatown is a district of compact little streets, of
+an extent that indicates a population almost equal to that
+of the rest of the place. An irrigating ditch surrounds it
+like a moat. The cabins along this, picturesquely reflected
+in it, are gray and weather-beaten, varied with
+patches of bright Orientalism, and shaded by a line of
+tall poplar-trees. The Spanishtown, close by, is a cluster
+of dance-houses and corrals, between which swarthy Josés
+and Juanitas are seen passing.</p>
+
+<p>As if this were not foreignness enough already, we
+stumble upon a camp of strolling gypsies, their tents
+pitched on the borders of Spanishtown. They are English,
+and have come from Australia, dropping their “h’s”
+all along the way, no doubt, as liberally as here. They
+are like types of Cruikshank and Dickens. An apple-faced
+Mrs. Jarley appears in a large velvet bonnet with
+plumes. A very tightly-dressed, slender individual, with
+a weed on his hat, might pass for Sam Weller. He is
+a horse-tamer and jockey. At his heels follows a belligerent
+bull-dog. Behind one of the tents a child of nine,
+Cassie by name, with fine, dark eyes, is making a toilet
+before a bit of cracked mirror. She pastes down her wet
+hair into a semblance of the “water-waves” of fashionable
+society. When interrupted with a compliment on
+the arrangement she affects displeasure, and tosses it all
+abroad again with a native coquetry.</p>
+
+<p>The Mrs.-Jarley-looking woman is the fortune-teller.
+She declares that there are persons whose fortunes she
+would not tell for twenty—no, not for fifty dollars.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_409">[409]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus077" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus077.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CHINATOWN, BAKERSFIELD.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_410">[410]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mine, however, through an especial liking she affects to
+have taken to me, and the dulness of trade, she promises
+to tell, in the most effective manner, for two dollars only.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>The possessions of some of the great land-owners are
+prodigious. It is a favorite story that certain ones can
+drive a herd of cattle from the northern counties of the
+State to San Diego, its southern limit, and quarter them
+every night on their own ground. Haggin, Carr &amp; Tevis,
+whose property I was privileged to examine in detail,
+have at Bakersfield four hundred thousand acres nearly
+in one body. Much of this was secured for a trifle in
+the condition of desert land, and has been redeemed.</p>
+
+<p>One ranchman who had acquired a great estate of this
+kind chiefly while surveyor-general of the United States
+was the occasion of drawing forth one of the best <i>bon
+mots</i> of Lincoln.</p>
+
+<p>“I congratulate you,” said our martyred President.
+“You have become monarch of about all you have surveyed.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_411">[411]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus078" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus078.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>GYPSY CAMP AT BAKERSFIELD.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_412">[412]</span></p>
+
+<p>The owners do not often live upon their estates;
+they leave them in the hands of managers, and draw
+the revenues. The Haggin, Carr &amp; Tevis property is
+divided into a number of separate ranches, each with its
+resident superintendent. The “Bellevue Ranch” is the
+centre and focus of authority. Here are the residence
+and office of the general manager, and a force of book-keepers,
+engineers, and mechanics, who keep the accounts,
+map, plan, supervise, construct, repair, and give to the
+whole the clock-work regularity of a great commercial
+enterprise. The numerous buildings constitute a considerable
+settlement. There is a “store” of general merchandise
+and supplies. A dormitory and a dining-hall
+have been erected for the laboring hands. A tower-like
+water-tank, surmounted by a wind-mill, and accommodating
+a milk-room below, rises at one side. There are
+shops for the mechanics, capacious barns, and long sheds
+filled with an interminable array of agricultural implements.
+It is worth while to take a walk past this collection
+of reapers, threshers, sulky-ploughs, and rakes, and
+study out their uses. The immense “header and separator”
+rises from the rest like a leviathan. A whole
+department is devoted to “road-scrapers,” “buck-scrapers,”
+and ploughs of various sorts used in the construction
+and dredging of the irrigating ditches. The soil is,
+fortunately, free from stones, and the work, for the most
+part, easy. One enormous plough is seen which was
+designed to be drawn by sixty yoke of oxen, and to cut
+at once a furrow five feet wide by four deep. Like the
+famous <i>Great Eastern</i>, it has defeated itself by its own
+mass, and its use has been abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>More than $500,000 has been expended in the item of
+fencing alone. An average of four hundred laborers is
+employed, and, in the harvest season, seven hundred.
+The rate of wages is from two and a half to three dollars
+per day for mechanics, and a dollar per day for common
+hands. This seems low as compared with information
+from other sources, and the chronic complaints of the
+scarcity of farm labor, in the California papers.</p>
+
+<p>No great portion of this domain appears to be in the
+market for settlers of small means, though the intention
+is avowed of offering some of it in this way when thoroughly
+reclaimed. Tracts, however, are occupied on favorable
+terms by “renters,” who take from 120 to 600
+acres. Very many of these are Portuguese and Italians.
+They are usually unmarried, and work in companies of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_413">[413]</span>from six to fifteen persons. You see them, dark and
+swarthy, going about in the traditional Garibaldi shirt,
+with hardly a word of English among them.</p>
+
+<p>The renter is provided with a house, artesian well,
+credit to a moderate amount at the store, and the use of
+some cows. He has the milk of these, but must give
+their increase to the estate. His lease runs three years,
+and he pays in rent one-third of his crop. Instances of
+large profits are frequent among these persons, and the
+same opportunities are open to others who wish to follow
+their example.</p>
+
+<p>The superintendents and upper employés on the place
+are largely Southern men. California, was a favorite
+point for Southern immigration at one time, so much
+that the course of the State in the war, influenced by the
+historic Judge Terry and Senator Gwin, was considered
+problematical. These that I speak of, however, are gentlemen
+who have come here to repair their fortunes at a
+later period. They have for the most part titles from
+the service of the extinct Confederacy, and the gentle
+voices and friendly courtesy characteristic of the Southern
+type.</p>
+
+<p>A typical ranch-house, that, for instance, of our hospitable
+friend Major McClung, on his section of the subdivided
+property, is a long, two-story dwelling, painted in
+the Indian-red so popular throughout the country. It is
+raised on posts considerably above the ground, to allow
+of a free circulation of air underneath. There is an open
+hall through the centre for the same purpose. An irrigating
+ditch resembling a moat passes in front, crossed by
+a little rustic bridge.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp56" id="illus079" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus079.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A TYPICAL RANCH-HOUSE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Traces of alkali yet show white in the soil of orchard
+and garden, but do not prevent a plentiful growth of
+oleanders, roses, pear, peach, cherry, almond, and apricot
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_414">[414]</span>trees. The
+young orange-trees
+were, as
+at Fresno, put
+up in mufflings
+of straw for
+the winter.
+The weather
+is very
+hot at noon-day,
+but so cool at
+morning and
+evening that
+wood-fires are
+burned. The
+chill in the air is of a penetrating kind, felt the more by
+contrast with the heat of the day, and fire is a necessity.
+The house-servants were clean, white-aproned Chinamen;
+those out-of-doors, Mexicans. One of these latter had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_415">[415]</span>trained a goose, “Dick,” to follow him like a pet dog,
+and nothing was more curious than to see the pride of
+both master and biped in this ridiculous relation.</p>
+
+<p>Cattle-raising is the leading industry; alfalfa, for carrying
+the stock over periods of scarcity, is the leading crop.
+Stacks of alfalfa of great size, one containing seven hundred
+tons, were seen. It is the ordinary color of hay externally,
+but when cut into is green.</p>
+
+<p>A successful experiment has also been made in the
+raising of cotton. The hands were in the field going
+about among the white pods for the second picking.</p>
+
+<p>Though out of season, a <i>rodeo</i> was organized for our
+benefit, to show the method of handling the roving cattle
+on a large scale. A number of <i>vaqueros</i> rode out in various
+directions till lost to sight. Presently traces of dust
+arose on the several horizons. The plain, on which a few
+cows had been peacefully feeding, was filled with stamping
+and lowing herds, driven toward the centre by the careering
+<i>vaqueros</i>. When gathered in sufficient numbers
+feats of lassoing the animals, by either leg or horn, separating
+special animals or classes, and the like, were undertaken,
+and carried through with marvellous dexterity. As
+a culmination, hats and ropes were picked up from the
+ground, the rider going at full speed. A silver half-dollar,
+placed on edge in the dust of the roadway, was seized
+after several attempts by a swarthy Aztec.</p>
+
+<p>The herders are usually Mexicans, equipped in the
+Mexican style, but with the greater part of the finery
+left out. The bosses, who often even excel them in pure
+horsemanship, are generally Americans.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_416">[416]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus080" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus080.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SAN LUIS OBISPO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_417">[417]</span></p>
+
+<p>The ranch known as the Livermore borders Kern and
+Buena Vista Lakes, and is the southernmost in the tier.
+The herds are gathered there in the early spring, and
+driven to the ranch of San Emidio, in the mountains.
+They pick up their subsistence at San Emidio till the
+middle of September, when they are conducted back
+again. Such migrations from plain to mountain pasture,
+and back again, recall some features of the Norwegian
+pastoral life of Boyesen’s charming romance,
+“Gunnar.”</p>
+
+<p>At the Livermore Ranch you are at the apex of the
+San Joaquin Valley. Here the Sierra Nevada and the
+Coast Range effect a junction, and oppose a natural barrier
+to farther progress. The railroad has to cross this
+barrier by a wonderful piece of engineering, the Tehachapi
+(Te-<i>hatch</i>-a-pe) Pass. At one place five different
+lengths of track pass and repass at different levels. By
+the singular “Loop” the road enters a tunnel, emerges,
+twists spirally round the mountain, and reappears directly
+above itself.</p>
+
+<p>At San Emidio we are on the boundary-line of San
+Luis Obispo County, and could make our way directly,
+no doubt, to its pretty, mountain-encompassed capital.
+This is more easily reached, however, with attractive
+Santa Barbara below, by steamer, or stage-road along
+the coast.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Bakersfield, you may ride west to the wild
+cañon of the Kern River, and the mining towns of Kernville
+and Havilah. The mining industry has never taken
+the same development south of the San Joaquin River as
+north. It is probable both that there is less ore and that
+the ventures have been managed with less skill. At Kernville
+is a quartz-mill, with a hundred stamps, which after
+many vicissitudes has fallen into the hands of its former
+workmen for debt, and is now run by them on the co-operative
+principle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_418">[418]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus081" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus081.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A RODEO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_419">[419]</span></p>
+
+<p>The rolling country by which the Kern River Cañon
+is approached is, if possible, even more desolate than the
+plain. There is almost a necessary connection in our
+usual impressions between hills and trees, and when foliage
+is missing from hills its lack is doubly notable. An
+utterly parched, verdureless surface, with a texture like
+that of gravel, here follows all the inequalities of the
+ground, up hill and down dale, to the savage and splintered
+granite gorge.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus082" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus082.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE KERN RIVER CAÑON.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>We fell in with an isolated sheep ranchman, “Captain
+Jack Barker,” an enterprising man, who had created a
+garden spot in the waste, and showed what even this is
+capable of. He was engaged on a project for leading the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_420">[420]</span>water, by means of a flume and ditches, from the river at
+the cañon’s mouth down upon several thousand acres of
+land under cultivation. In the spring-time, he told us,
+all this bareness is hidden by a perfect carpet of flowers,
+chiefly a small orange-scarlet poppy. His sheep at present
+seemed living on air. He had among them some
+Angora goats, a hardy animal, once very profitable, but
+now, since the decline in alpaca-goods, being used by
+him for food.</p>
+
+<p>The Kern River tumbles down a gorge four miles in
+length, between granite walls six hundred feet high.
+Its water is translucent green in deep, untroubled pools,
+again churned into milk-white floods, with black bowlders
+among them. The cañon is all but impassable. It
+acts like a funnel, and produces a local disturbance of its
+own on the atmosphere. While all around is still, a column
+of air will blow out of it, and, striking the table-land
+a quarter of a mile away, raise a chronic dust at the
+point of contact, like a cannon-shot.</p>
+
+<p>Driving across the front of it we were nearly blown
+out of our wagon. We descended into it, nevertheless,
+and upon this experience returned to dine on ribs of
+Captain Jack Barker’s Angora goats, and then take the
+railway and cross the Tehachapi Pass.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_421">[421]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXVIII">XXVIII.<br>
+<i>LOS ANGELES.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Over the Tehachapi Pass, we are in Southern California
+proper. We have met already, it is true, with pretty
+Spanish names, old missions, leather breeches, jingling
+spurs, vineyards, raisin-making, and occasional orange and
+palm trees. But when the dividing mountain-range, four
+thousand feet above the sea at Tehachapi, is passed, all
+these are found in their greatest development. The country
+is older, the Spanish names are more musical; orange
+and lemon are not grown for ornament, but as a
+principal crop; and the climate is of that genial mildness
+which is most to the taste of seekers for health.</p>
+
+<p>Famed Los Angeles, City of the Angels, is the terminus
+of the first day’s journey which brings us into it.
+The watering-place of Santa Monica and the important
+points of San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara are not
+far distant to the west, while San Diego lies at a moderate
+remove to the southward, near the Mexican frontier. In
+the intervals scatter colonies of vine and orange growers,
+the numbers and dimensions of which are rapidly increasing.</p>
+
+<p>The mountain barrier across the State is deemed by
+some to be of such importance that it should be a political
+as well as a natural division. They call for the construction
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_422">[422]</span>of a distinct new State, to be called South California, its
+capital at Los Angeles.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus083" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus083.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>TEHACHAPI PASS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“We are
+different peoples,”
+writes
+one of them
+in the <i>Californian</i>.
+“We are different
+in pursuits, in tastes,
+manner of thought, and
+manner of life; ... our
+hopes and aspirations for
+the future are different.
+The restless, uneasy population of the North, ever drifting,
+without local attachments, has no counterpart in
+Southern California; neither has the wild spirit of mining
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_423">[423]</span>speculation ever flourished here. With this peaceable
+life, possibly in part as a result of it, there has
+grown up in the people an intense love of their land.</p>
+
+<p>“And it is for their own section of the State,” he goes
+on, “that this love exists. They call themselves, not Californians,
+but Southern Californians. The feeling is intense.
+I can only liken it to the overmastering love of
+the old Greek for the sunny shores that lay around the
+Ægean.</p>
+
+<p>“For myself, I feel more and more each time that I
+visit the upper portion of the State that I am going into
+a strange land. And the impression never leaves me till
+upon my return I look down from the crest of the Tehachapi
+over the warm South-land.”</p>
+
+<p>I have thought it worth while to quote these passages,
+partly because they are amusing, partly because they accentuate
+the topographical situation, and also because
+they attribute a character almost the opposite of that
+which exists. Everywhere is bustle, push, and enterprise.
+This people will sell you a corner lot or quarter-section
+of land with as great a gusto as any other, and at its full
+value. Whatever effect lapse of time may have upon
+them, the present inhabitants, few of whom are born
+here or even drafted from indolent climes, if lotus-eaters,
+are of a very wide-awake sort.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>The City of the Angels is, in general, only another
+San José, upon a more hilly site. Its population must
+be about fourteen thousand. The long thoroughfare of
+Main Street proceeds, from the depot, at first through a
+shabby Spanish quarter, locally known as “Sonora,” consisting
+of one-story, whitewashed, adobe houses. Passing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_424">[424]</span>a small Spanish plaza, set with pointed cypresses, and the
+principal hotel, the Pico House, it becomes lined with excellent
+buildings of the modern pattern. Of these the
+handsome “Baker Block” is most notable. Continuing to
+the ornate “Los Angeles Bank,” Spring Street diverges
+at a small angle, and contributes, with Main Street, to
+give the commercial skeleton of the town the shape of
+a Y with a very long stem.</p>
+
+<p>On Spring Street you find a common little post-office,
+the municipal offices, and a brown, Dutch-looking, brick
+building, standing free, originally constructed for a market,
+and now the Court-house. If you look into the lobby
+of the small adobe jail you will find that some leisurely
+prisoner of the frescoer’s trade has converted it into a
+resemblance to a dungeon scene at the theatre. These
+two streets, with a shorter one, Los Angeles Street, parallel
+to Main, containing fruit and produce commission
+houses, comprise the commercial portion of the city.</p>
+
+<p>New buildings are seen going up; the shops are large
+and well-appointed, and placards offer, in the usual shibboleth
+of trade, “To Reduce Stock!” “At Wholesale
+Slaughter,” and “For the Next Sixty Days.”</p>
+
+<p>A serious depression afflicted Los Angeles in 1875, at
+the time of the general depression throughout the State,
+but that has been succeeded by a new reign of activity.
+Trim, large residences of the more prosperous merchants
+are seen in the outskirts of the town. Farther out yet
+these become villas, in the midst of plantations of orange
+and lemon, ruled off into formal plots by ditches for irrigation.
+The class of modest means abide in the side
+streets, in frame cottages. The German Turn-hall serves
+also the purpose of theatre for such companies as come
+this way.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp56" id="illus084" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus084.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It is held that Los Angeles, with its port of Wilmington,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_425">[425]</span>thirty miles
+away, should be
+now, upon the completion of the
+Southern Pacific railroad, the <i>entrepôt</i>
+and Pacific terminus of a
+new commercial departure. San
+Francisco, it is said, has too long
+sat at the Golden Gate “levying
+toll on every pound of freight that passes through,”
+and this selfish greed is to be properly rebuked by the
+diversion of a part of its trade. Enthusiastic San Diego
+expects also to have its share. The wickedness of the
+proceeding would seem to depend largely upon who it is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_426">[426]</span>that takes the toll. Los Angeles, it is held, is to be the
+Lyons, and San Diego the Marseilles, of the State, San
+Francisco still remaining its Paris.</p>
+
+<p>The pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries and fern-like
+leaves, forms the leading shade and ornament of Los
+Angeles streets. Apart from these a clump of palms
+grows on San Pedro Street, and, before an odd, octagon-shaped
+house on Main Street, a Mexican nopal of the
+size of an apple-tree. In the court-yard of the principal
+hotel droops a single ragged banana. Tropical features
+in the vegetation are scarce, but it is evident that this is
+not the fault of the climate, but of failure to encourage
+them. In the door-yards are the Mexican aloe and the
+Spanish bayonet, from the adjacent deserts of Mohave
+and Arizona. The castor-oil plant grows a tall weed in
+neglected places. The extraction of castor-oil was at one
+time an industry of the place, but is now abandoned.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>The Mexican element must be something like one-third
+of the entire population of the place. In the Spanish
+town, “Sonora,” the recollection of Mexico is revived,
+but a very shabby, provincial Mexico. You find <i>mescal</i>
+and <i>tequila</i>, the two varieties of intoxicating liquor distilled
+from the <i>maguey</i>, or aloe. The dingy little adobe
+shops contain samples of dingy little stocks of goods in
+their shuttered loop-holes of windows. A few swarthy,
+lantern-jawed old-timers hang about the corners, and gossip
+in <i>patois</i>, and women with black shawls over their
+heads pass by. Much of the quarter is in a ruinous condition.
+There remain vestiges of the arcade system of
+the kind known in some form to all tropical or semi-tropical
+climates. The arcades of Sonora are not of massive
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_427">[427]</span>brick and stone, but are wooden roofs, such as are put out
+by our corner grocers, on light wooden posts. Here and
+there only the battered skeletons remain, attached to
+ruinous houses. Most California municipalities have
+borrowed something of this Spanish idea. At Sacramento
+the thriving but flat and not attractive capital of
+the State, you can walk nearly all over the business part
+of town under cover.</p>
+
+<p>There is a very respectable-looking restaurant—a vine-embowered
+cottage—opposite the Pico House, where the
+familiar <i>tortillas</i>, or pancakes, and <i>frijoles</i>, or stewed
+beans, may be had. Along-side is an adobe church,
+quaint in pattern, but modern and devoid of farther interest.
+From its belfry the chimes jangle loudly several
+times a day in familiar Mexican fashion. Out of Sonora
+emerges, on the 16th of September, the Juarez Guard,
+which escorts a triumphal car bearing the national colors
+of red, white, and green, and, aided by a <i>cortége</i> of dark
+little maidens, in white muslin and slippers, proceeds to
+celebrate with appropriate ardor the anniversary of Mexican
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>This people, who have gone so much to the wall,
+wear no very pathetic aspect in their adversity. They
+are for the most part engaged in coarse labor, are improvident,
+and apparently contented. It is only rarely
+that a Spanish name—a Pacheco, a Sepulveda, or Estudillo—rises
+into prominence in the public affairs of the State
+of which they were once owners. Old Don Pio Pico, the
+last of the Spanish Governors, resides here, impoverished,
+in a little cottage, in sight of property of great value
+which was formerly his, and of the plaza once the centre
+of his authority.</p>
+
+<p>Don Pio is one of the picturesque features of Los Angeles,
+and with his history would be esteemed interesting
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_428">[428]</span>anywhere. Above eighty years of age, with stocky figure,
+square head, and bright eyes, contrasting with his bronzed
+skin and close-cropped white hair and beard, he has a certain
+resemblance to Victor Hugo. He has a rather florid
+taste for jewelry. He carries himself about town, in his
+short overcoat with velvet collar and cuffs, with a bearing
+still erect and stately. It is strange to tell, but true, and
+it is evidence of the conservatism and lack of adaptability
+of his race, that the old gentleman, though once Governor
+of the State, and a continuous resident of it, as an
+American citizen, since he surrendered it to Fremont and
+Stockton in 1847, does not yet speak a word of any other
+language than Spanish. The talk of this historic personage
+gave but a rude picture of the state of society in his
+youth. Was there anything in the world so remote as
+the California of the years 1810 to 1848?</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus085" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus085.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>DON PIO PICO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_429">[429]</span></p>
+
+<p>“I am but a plain and unassuming person,” he said to
+me. “My father did not leave me a mule nor a vara of
+ground. I worked for the padres at the San Gabriel
+Mission when I was a boy, and I had little opportunity
+to learn book knowledge.”</p>
+
+<p>He disclaimed being an authority even on the events
+of his own fall and the encroachments of the Americans.
+“There are many,” he said, “who have a better head for
+those things than I, and who will tell you better than I.”...
+“I was a just man, however. I treated the rich
+no better than the poor. Hence when they asked who
+was <i>lo mas justo y honrado</i>—the most just and honest
+man—for Governor, it was answered with one accord,
+‘Don Pio Pico.’”</p>
+
+<p>There are differences of opinion about those ancient
+officials. Some of them have been charged with a wholesale
+issue of land-patents after the American occupation,
+which patents ostensibly belonged to their respective administrations.
+Edwin M. Stanton, sent out to look into
+these matters by the Attorney-general of the United
+States, reported at the time that “the making of false
+grants, with the subornation of false witnesses to prove
+them, has become a trade and a business.”</p>
+
+<p>The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1847, by which
+the war with Mexico was concluded, made valid and of
+full force whatever had been done before the American
+occupation. Spanish governors were numerous in those
+last days, and went in and out of office with extraordinary
+frequency, by reason of plots, counterplots, and the inability
+of the home government to enforce its own will.
+Alvarado, Carillo, Micheltorena, and Pio Pico reigned
+separately, or together, or by turns, in a revolutionary,
+confused, and overlapping way, which furnished excellent
+opportunity for fraud. One prefers, however, not to linger
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_430">[430]</span>upon unpleasant suspicions, but rather to esteem these
+fallen dignitaries, few of whom now survive after their
+misfortunes and romantic histories.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus086" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus086.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>MONGOLIAN AND MEXICAN.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Even the Chinese, singularly enough, show greater enterprise
+than the Spanish. Perhaps they may have a
+somewhat better warrant for coming in here than elsewhere,
+since a Chinaman is found in the list of the twelve
+original settlers of the town, in 1781. They have pushed
+into the best of the old Spanish adobe houses, once the
+best of their kind in the State. They occupy all those
+which flank the little plaza with an entire street, others
+debouching from it.</p>
+
+<p>The populace, however, have not always been the better
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_431">[431]</span>reconciled to the hapless Mongolians. In an outburst
+of deadly prejudice, in the year 1871, they were dragged
+out of their Spanish houses and hung to lamp-posts, wagon-tongues,
+and their own door-ways, to the number of
+eighteen, of all ages and sizes. The riot was occasioned
+by their resistance to some process of a deputy-sheriff.
+My informant described them to me as hanging like
+bunches of carrots.</p>
+
+<p>At present they were putting up, near the site of these
+sanguinary scenes, an ornate open-air theatre or temple,
+for a triennial religious festival, to last a week or more.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>One of my pleasantest days at Los Angeles was that
+which I spent in a drive with the Zanjero.</p>
+
+<p>The Zanjero, indeed! who or what is a Zanjero?</p>
+
+<p>His title is derived from the Spanish <i>zanja</i>—ditch—continued
+down from the times of the original settlement,
+and he is the official overseer of water and irrigation.
+He took me about with him to observe this
+important and entertaining part of the economy of civilization
+in these thirsty regions. Not that Los Angeles
+is so dry in comparison, for it has thirteen inches of rain
+against two at Bakersfield, but it is in abundant need of
+irrigation.</p>
+
+<p>The Zanjero is elected by the City Council annually.
+Six deputies aid him in the summer, reduced to three
+in the winter, when the rains render irrigation hardly
+necessary. All are invested with the authority and
+badges of policemen.</p>
+
+<p>The city, the Zanjero tells us, as we ride along, controls
+in its corporate capacity all the waters of the Los
+Angeles River. The Los Angeles River is a Southern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_432">[432]</span>California stream of the typical sort. It has a wide,
+shallow bed, almost dry at the moment, but in spring
+and winter it brawls in dangerous fashion, and often
+carries away its bridges. We ride up to the point near
+a certain railroad bridge where the water is first diverted.
+It is taken out by two small canals, one for the city
+proper, one for the thriving suburb of East Los Angeles.
+We find that the dam by which the river is checked for
+this purpose is constructed of earth, with a facing of
+stout posts and planking. At the beginning of winter
+the planking is removed, and the stream allowed to
+sweep away the rampart of earth, which is replaced by
+a new one, the succeeding spring. Chain-gangs of convicts
+from the prison are set upon this labor.</p>
+
+<p>A canal is taken out of the same river twelve miles
+above, which supplies water for drinking and irrigating
+the higher levels. There are two very different levels
+in the configuration of the city, one rising from the
+other with great abruptness, as at Santa Cruz.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the height are remains of the fort built by Fremont
+when he entered the city. Directly at its foot is
+the cottage of Pio Pico; the big hotel, still bearing his
+name, in which he sunk a handsome share of his fortune;
+the little cypress-studded plaza; and the shabby white
+quarter of Sonora. The mass of the city lies to the right,
+without striking features. Beyond it, toward the river,
+stretch breadths of a russet bloom which we know to be
+vineyards, together with lines and parallelograms of
+orange and eucalyptus, as formal as the conventional
+trees in boxes of German toys. Across the river,
+“Brooklyn Heights” and “Boyle Heights” rise to a
+wide, rolling table-land (<i>mesa</i>), which extends back to the
+blue Sierra Madre Mountains. Toward most of the
+horizon stretch expanses of a garden-like vegetation of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_433">[433]</span>a mysterious quality—the dreamed-of orange-groves in
+mass.</p>
+
+<p>The city has created a considerable part of its debt
+by its water system, in which it has spent probably
+$200,000. The works are of an ephemeral character,
+which will in time be replaced by something more substantial.
+The simple trenches and wooden flumes permit
+of wasted water, and are costly to keep in repair. One of
+the principal ditches, however, is carried through a hill
+some three-quarters of a mile in a tunnel of six feet in
+section. There have been formed also numbers of durable
+reservoirs or artificial lakes for the storage of additional
+water in winter to supplement the river at its
+lowest.</p>
+
+<p>We rode out among the villas and gardens and observed
+the practical application of the water. The main
+ditches are three feet by two, the lesser about two by
+one. The “head” is the nominal standard of measurement
+of the babbling fluid. The head should be a section
+of one hundred square inches, delivered under a
+certain uniform pressure, but it is in practice loosely
+administered.</p>
+
+<p>“The irrigators want their work <i>done</i>” says the Zanjero;
+“that is the main point. Some lands take more,
+others less, according as they are sandy or hold water.
+A head of fifty inches on the east side will do as much
+as one hundred and twenty around the city.”</p>
+
+<p>Fan-palms, India-rubber-trees, and tall bananas grow
+freely on the lawns where a little pains is taken. You
+stop now to exclaim at a comfortable home embowered
+in myrtle, orange, and vines, the dark, glossy foliage
+starred with golden fruit and red roses, a spot for any
+romance. Again, it is a long arcade or temple of arborvitæ,
+extending across the whole front of a garden, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_434">[434]</span>framing in its arches delicious views of distant blue
+mountains, their tops now powdered with snow.</p>
+
+<p>This land of running brooks should be a famous place
+for the children to sail their boats, though as a matter of
+fact we do not see them doing it. Perhaps there is a law
+against it. There are laws, at any rate, against stealing
+the water, wantonly raising the gates to waste it, or transferring
+it to irrigators outside the city limits. These
+latter are entitled to it only upon an extra payment and
+after those within the city have been supplied.</p>
+
+<p>As all irrigators cannot be supplied at once, the manner
+of serving it out is as follows: Applications have
+to be made in the last week of each month. The Zanjero
+then apportions the supply so that it may go round
+among the applicants in the most convenient way. The
+complete circuit takes about twenty days. The applicant
+receives a ticket, on the payment of a fee, entitling him
+to receive the water on such a day at such an hour. The
+right for that time is exclusively his. The rates are so
+fixed as to reimburse the public treasury, and are not
+intended as a source of profit. The average charge for
+water is about fifty cents an hour, two dollars a day, and
+a dollar and twenty-five cents a night.</p>
+
+<p>The subscriber has the water delivered to him by the
+deputy at his connecting-gate. At all other times the
+gate must be kept fastened with a padlock. The wooden
+gate, sliding smoothly in its grooves, is like a little guillotine.</p>
+
+<p>Chop! goes the guillotine, when it has been raised
+long enough, and off goes the head, as it were, of the
+little stream. Thus surprised on its way among the
+orchards and gardens, it writhes and twists a while,
+rises again in its confining box, and is soon ready to
+begin life again on a new basis.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_435">[435]</span></p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>Los Angeles is the metropolis of the orange trade, but
+the greater part of the culture itself is in tracts of the
+surrounding country, each with a thriving settlement as
+its nucleus. The lands are usually laid out and subdivided
+by capitalists, under the “colony” system, as described.
+Ten or even five acres in a crop of such value
+are a comfortable property. On Lake Guarda half an
+acre in lemons is sufficient for the support of a family.
+It is in evidence here that returns of from $500 to $1000
+an acre are had from orange, lemon, and lime, after the
+trees have arrived at full bearing.</p>
+
+<p>The piazzas of the orange-planters command attractive
+views; rose and heliotrope bloom round them; and specimens
+of all the fruits are offered for our tasting with
+lavish hospitality and honest pride in their perfection.</p>
+
+<p>We begin with Pasadena, which is reached by a drive
+of ten miles from Los Angeles. Pasadena, the Indiana
+Colony, San Gabriel, the Lake Vineyard tract, the Alhambra,
+Santa Anita, and Sierra Madre tracts, and others,
+all of the same general character, adjoin one another.
+The dwellings in them are those of people of means and
+a certain taste. Even the least show ambition. There
+are pretty chapels in the Gothic style, and neat schoolhouses.
+Well-dressed children of a city air are met
+with on the roads. The roads are excellent. No violent
+storms or thawing snows in this climate tear them
+up, and they are kept in order with little trouble.</p>
+
+<p>The door-yards are enclosed with hedges of lime, arborvitæ,
+or rose-bushes. Curious small circles from time to
+time attract attention, either filled with water, or dry,
+like the rings of a departed circus. These are reservoirs,
+supplementing the irrigation system. They are usually
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_436">[436]</span>filled by artesian wells, which flow from iron pipes a
+few feet above the ground, the water overspreading the
+top in a thin film, like a globe of glass, reflecting neighboring
+objects. Such globe-like films, sparkling from a
+distance, are a frequent item in the prospect. As there
+has never been any forest, no unsightly stumps indicate
+recent clearings. The country, in consequence, does not
+look new. Where settled at all, it has a surprisingly old
+and civilized air.</p>
+
+<p>The temperature, this late November day—on which
+there are telegrams in the papers of snow-storms at the
+North and East—is perfection. It is neither hot nor
+cold. A sybarite would not alter it. Bees hum in the
+profuse clusters of heliotrope about the porches. A single
+Jacqueminot rose on a tall stem, a beauty whose sway
+will not be gainsaid, makes its vivid crimson felt from
+the greensward a long way off. Among the older estates
+this is pointed out as the home of “Don Benito,”
+that of “Don Tomas,” so and so, the family name being
+usually American. Audacious in love as in other things,
+enterprising Americans have married into the Spanish
+families, both before and since the conquest, and succeeded
+to their acres. Very few of Spanish stock still
+retain any property of note.</p>
+
+<p>If there be or ever existed any real earthly Paradise, I
+think it might bear some such complexion as that of the
+Sierra Madre Villa, on the first bold rise of the mountains
+at San Gabriel. I cannot vouch for it as a hotel, for hotel
+it is, but I vouch for it as a situation.</p>
+
+<p>The air was heavy with the fragrance of extensive avenues
+of limes as I came up to it. The orange-trees were
+propped up, to prevent their breaking under their weight
+of fruit. Forty oranges on a single bough! I saw it with
+my own eyes. Some of the trees, by the freak of a recent
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_437">[437]</span>gale, had been denuded of their leaves, which left only the
+globes of golden fruit, a lovely decorative effect, on their
+bare stems. A view of thirty miles is had across the garden-like
+San Gabriel Valley, to a strip of blue sea on the
+horizon. On the strip of blue sea rests a slight brown
+spot, the jewel of Santa Catalina Island.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp68" id="illus087" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus087.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PARADISE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Flowering vines clustered along a piazza, part enclosed
+in glass. In a warm nook a couple reclined in steamer-chairs,
+one reading aloud a novel in a gentle murmur.
+They were a couple of recent date, and as the place for a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_438">[438]</span>honey-moon it was ideal. The orange bears a close resemblance
+to the formal tree which the mediæval painters
+used to represent as the “tree of the knowledge of good
+and evil” of Genesis. It is appropriately placed, therefore,
+in our earthly Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>Hist! The young woman who had been reading takes
+her stand archly at one side of such a tree. The man
+who had been listening rises also, and, with a slight yawn,
+places himself on the other. Oh, what is this? Is she a
+new Eve? She plucks a fruit, and hands it to him. Oh,
+this is terrible! Is there to be a fall again in Eden, and all
+its direful consequences? There should be some Cranach
+or Dürer here to take down once more the particulars of
+the distressing scene. What does Eve wish Adam to do?
+Perhaps she wishes him to buy lands—above their value—and
+go into orange-planting himself. Alas! he will be
+lost forever to the higher financial life. Perhaps Satan
+is the invidious real-estate man.</p>
+
+<p>But really there is no pressing need of such a display
+of fancy because a young matron offers her husband a
+fresh orange before dinner.</p>
+
+<p>Certain drawbacks—drawbacks attending upon an injudicious
+entering into this apparently fascinating kind of
+life—should not be overlooked. The orange-tree grows
+all the time, and calls for incessant care, winter as in summer.
+Not a few invalids who had looked to its culture
+as a pastime have broken down through this cause, and
+through having taken up more land than they could manage.
+The lesson of such cases is, not to attempt too much,
+but to keep to the five, or ten, acres, as the case may be,
+within one’s capacity. Nor has it been politic to put
+everything into the single crop of oranges. The smaller
+fruits—peaches, plums, and especially apricots—for canning,
+which come into bearing quickly, are useful in tiding
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_439">[439]</span>over the tedious period of waiting for the orange-trees
+to mature, and are always in profitable demand. To start
+existence comfortable here the new-comer should have a
+capital of from five to ten thousand dollars, though peculiar
+energy may do with less.</p>
+
+<p>It requires about nine years to bring an orange-tree
+from the seed into full bearing. On the other hand, it
+is found that by deftly inserting an orange-bud into the
+bark of a lemon-shoot slitted in an X, and setting this in
+the ground, a tree can be obtained which bears marketable
+fruit after the second year. The controversy rages
+as to whether it is worth while to do this, since the product
+is dwarf, like the dwarf pear-tree. Though it yield
+early it will never yield much, and its fruit does not stand
+shipment as well as that of the seedling. Against this it
+is maintained that it lives longer than the seedling, and
+yields choicer varieties of fruit, and that the fruit is more
+uniform in size and quality, and not subject to a singular
+form of destruction which sometimes overtakes that of
+the seedling—being dashed upon its own thorns.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way conflicting theories of irrigation prevail.
+A person who bought grapes in large quantities for
+the purpose of making them into wine told me that over-irrigation
+was rendering them watery and insipid. He
+proposed to meet this by establishing a standard. He
+would pay twenty dollars a ton for grapes containing twenty-three
+per cent. of sugar, and for those below standard
+less. Plentiful irrigation, however, is relied upon to counteract
+that fatal pest of the vine, the phylloxera. Some
+advocate the theory of irrigation in the winter or rainy
+season only. All the water possible is to be conducted
+upon the land at the time it naturally falls, leaving the
+soil to act as its own reservoir, and store up a portion for
+the dry season ahead. Others even deny the need of irrigation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_440">[440]</span>altogether. They write to the papers that it is
+only necessary to keep the surface well scratched with a
+cultivator, and a supply of moisture will always be found
+a few inches below it. It is certain that crops both of
+grapes and the cereals have been produced from unirrigated
+ground, even for a series of years. But then comes
+a dry year, in which everything, animals as well as plants,
+is scorched from off the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainty is what is wanted,” says a lively informant.
+“You may not need water, as you may not a revolver,
+all the time; but when you do, you need it awful bad.”</p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>In the plain, just under the mountains, lies the old village
+and mission church of San Gabriel. The mission
+dates from 1761. It was founded, like the other missions
+of California, by friars sent out from the college of San
+Fernando, in the city of Mexico. I recollect well the
+original San Fernando. It stands on the street which
+was the scene of Cortez’s disastrous retreat from the
+city, and is marked with an inscription commemorating
+the famous Leap of Alvarado.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_441">[441]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus088" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus088.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A MEXICAN WEDDING AT SAN GABRIEL.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_442">[442]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Mission of San Gabriel is worthy of its picturesque
+origin. It has the same massiveness, color, and quaint rococo
+details, including the peculiar battlement, or Spanish
+horn of dominion. Six old green bronze bells hang in as
+many niches together. The fern-like shadows of a line
+of pepper-trees print themselves in the sunshine against
+the time-stained wall. No more than the church edifice
+now remains. Great agricultural establishments connected
+with all these missions were swept away, years
+before the American occupation, by edict of the Mexican
+government. Some bits of broken aqueduct, and a
+few orange-trees, above a hundred years old, in what was
+once the mission garden, are the only vestiges of former
+prosperity. The interior of the church contains a few
+battered old religious paintings, the worst of their kind.
+It is doubtful if the luxury of really good pictures was
+ever superadded to the excellent architecture, for which
+there was a natural instinct. It is a commentary on the
+popular estimate in which the poor old masters are held,
+I fear, that I was told by the neighborhood:</p>
+
+<p>“You <i>must</i> see them. They are all Raphaels and
+Michael Angelos.”</p>
+
+<p>The village is piquantly foreign. Its single street is
+composed entirely of white adobe houses. One of them,
+with a tumbling, red-tiled roof, is so full of holes that it
+looks as if it had been shelled. All the signs are in
+Spanish. Here is the <i>zapatero</i>, or shoemaker, and here
+the <i>panaderia</i>, or bakery. The south walls are hung
+with a drapery of red peppers drying in the sun to prepare
+the favorite condiment. The population are a humble
+class, who gain their livelihood for the most part by
+day-labor on the surrounding estates. They are not too
+poor, however, to retain their taste for festivity still. On
+the occasion of some notable wedding among them they
+will manage to mount on horseback, and, surrounding a
+bridal carriage, driven postilion-fashion, return from the
+ceremony, at the old mission, whooping and firing pistols
+in the air, in the most gallant and hilarious fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Near by is the large estate of Sunny Slope, known as
+one of the most successful instances of the putting in
+practice of the sanguine theories about the country. It
+has been acquired, and developed, from very small beginnings.
+It consists of some nineteen hundred acres of
+land, most of it in vines and oranges. There is a large
+wine and brandy making establishment. Eight thousand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_443">[443]</span>boxes of oranges and lemons, four hundred thousand gallons
+of wine and one hundred thousand of brandy, have
+been produced in a year.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp93" id="illus089" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus089.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE VINTAGE, SAN GABRIEL.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The dwelling-house was approached by a stately avenue
+of orange-trees, in double lines, three-quarters of a mile
+in length. The road to the large, substantial buildings
+of the winery was bordered by an orchard of orange on
+one side and olive on the other. The vineyards stretched
+out in distant effect like vast reddish-tawny meadows.
+At the winery, blacksmithing and cooperage were going
+on on a large scale, and a deft Chinaman was constructing
+the orange-boxes. The rich juice of the grape
+poured in floods, and its more concentrated form as
+brandy came from its still as clear as water. All distilled
+spirit is naturally colorless, and the hues it obtains
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_444">[444]</span>for market are given by burned sugar, to gratify an artificial
+taste.</p>
+
+<p>The hands are Chinamen and Mexicans. The superintendent
+tells us that the former do the most work and
+get less pay, but that there are certain things which they
+cannot do. They cannot plough, nor prune the vines,
+and they are awkward in the management of animals.
+Indeed, a Chinaman on horseback, or even in a wagon,
+seems almost as incongruous as Jack Tar.</p>
+
+<p>We visited, one evening, the Chinese quarters, and it
+would have been hard to find a more clean, domestic-looking
+interior among men of any other nationality in
+the same circumstances of life. They seemed much
+more orderly in their arrangements than the Mexicans,
+either those from the village or those who had a settlement
+on a bold slope of the estate above.</p>
+
+<p>There is much native Indian blood among these latter,
+and their dwellings were half wigwams, patched up of
+rubbish. Mongrel dogs, a donkey, and a foundered horse
+wandered at ease among them. A reddish-brown urchin,
+with large, liquid eyes, coming out, paused to gaze at us.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Cor-r-re, demonio de muchacho!</i>” (R-r-run, demon of
+a boy!) cried a slatternly mother, who appeared behind,
+endeavoring to urge him upon some errand of peculiar
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p>But the demon of a boy, exemplifying the traits of his
+race, had no idea whatever of being in a hurry. On the
+contrary, having removed to a safe distance, he dawdled
+in the most exasperating way, and continued to stare
+round-eyed during all of our critical tour of inspection.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_445">[445]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus090" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus090.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>IRRIGATING AN ORANGE-ORCHARD.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_446">[446]</span></p>
+
+<p>The work of the year was now the pruning of the
+vines. Stripped of every superfluity, the rugged little
+stocks, regimented veterans, were to stand bare till the
+exuberance of a new spring should again break forth in
+leaves. Faustino, Gaetano, Incarnacion, and the rest, for
+so they are called, appear to picturesque advantage in
+this work. Their swarthy faces are framed in slouch
+sombreros. They wear red-and-blue shirts, and bright
+handkerchiefs about their necks. They move forward in
+a line, pruning-knife in hand, and a small saw at the belt
+for the tougher knots. The spots of color twinkle upon
+the russet of the vineyard; the pruning-knives flash as
+they turn to the sun; the ground has a gentle, agreeable
+fall; and splintered granite mountains, with deep cañons
+among them for exploration, softened by a veil of atmosphere,
+back up the whole.</p>
+
+<p>The orange-tree, even at a great age, is not as large as
+one may have expected. Even those of a hundred years
+in the mission garden are not above two feet in diameter.
+It is gratifying to be at full liberty to examine this
+attractive vegetation, known heretofore only in its tub
+in the conservatory, or on the staircase at a ball. There
+seems but one drawback to an orange-grove, and that is
+that it cannot have greensward below to lie upon. It is
+very exacting—requires all the nourishment the soil can
+give, and the soil must be kept loose and open around
+the roots. It is irrigated about once a month, and the
+surface gone over with a cultivator afterward, to prevent
+baking up in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The orange-grove is lovely at all times, mysterious
+when the long alleys are dark against the red sunset, the
+fruit glimmering like a feast of lanterns at twilight; and
+in the pleasant mornings sparkling among the glossy
+leaves like little suns newly risen; while we catch the
+perfume of blossoms heralding in a new crop, though the
+last still hangs upon the bough. Here and there is an
+example of the enormous shaddock, which resembles the
+orange in appearance but the lemon in character. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_447">[447]</span>lemon is less hardy to rear than the orange, and is not
+cultivated on as large a scale. Chinamen, with ladders
+and baskets, gather the fruit, and chatter to one another
+from the trees like magpies. It is irrigation-day, and
+all at once the water is let on. Twisting and turning
+this way and that, it runs out upon the thirsty soil, as if
+with an eager curiosity in the embrace. Chinamen with
+hoes follow it, here throwing up little dams, which it tries
+to evade; there, when it runs sluggishly, opening little
+channels, and leading it where it should go. The whole
+orchard is soon babbling musically with running water,
+and in process of being thoroughly soaked.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_448">[448]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXIX">XXIX.<br>
+<i>TO SAN DIEGO, AND THE MEXICAN FRONTIER.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>These and kindred scenes are to be met with in fifty,
+I know not how many more, localities of a similar sort.
+San Fernando, Florence, Compton, Downey City, Westminster,
+Orange, Tustin City, Centralia, Pomona, and
+Artesia may be mentioned as leading examples. The
+“colony” government is of a simple sort, and consists
+of a justice of the peace, constable, water overseer, and
+school trustees. Anaheim, settled by Germans, was
+one of the first established colonies, and has become a
+town of importance. Santa Ana had a special bustle
+at present, as the terminus, for the time being, of the
+railroad in process of building from Los Angeles to San
+Diego.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, however, the greatest general air of distinction
+is worn by Riverside. This colony seems to have been
+sought to an exceptional degree by persons in good circumstances.
+It is fifty-seven miles lower down than Los
+Angeles, and reached by a drive of seven miles southward
+from the Southern Pacific Railroad at Colton. Four
+miles north of Colton, on the other hand, takes you to
+San Bernardino, an important place of six thousand people,
+originally settled by Mormons. The regular Mormons
+withdrew to Utah by order of Brigham Young on
+the threat of the coercive war there in 1857, and only
+a few “Josephites” now remain, whose practices do not
+differ greatly from those of other people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_449">[449]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus091" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus091.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A SYLVAN GLIMPSE AT RIVERSIDE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_450">[450]</span></p>
+
+<p>At Riverside is found a continuous belt of settlement
+and cultivation twelve miles long, by two miles in average
+width. It will be twenty long when all complete. The
+population is not large, but revels in a great deal of room.
+The general situation is a valley of about forty miles
+square, at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the
+sea. The access to this valley is by four several passes,
+one each on the north, south, east, and west, as if so many
+doors had been providentially left open in the encompassing
+mountain ranges. The settlement forms an oasis
+in the midst of the desert, after the general plan. Its
+fresh greenness, and canals of clear water, along which
+sylvan glimpses, almost English, are met with, derive
+added charm and interest from the desert. The rest of
+the high, quadrangular valley, capable, no doubt, of as
+great development, if water can be brought upon it, remains
+in its natural condition.</p>
+
+<p>A lovely drive, called Magnolia Avenue, planted with
+double rows of pepper and eucalyptus trees, extends
+through the length of the place from north to south.
+It is bordered with homes, making pretensions to much
+more than comfort. The best of these are at the division
+called Arlington, four miles below the post-office of Riverside
+proper. The native adobe, or sun-dried brick, supplemented
+with ornamental wood-work, has been used as
+material with excellent effect. In the interiors are found
+rugs, <i>portières</i>, Morris’s wall-papers, and all the paraphernalia
+of the latest Eastern civilization; and there is an
+archery club and a “German.”</p>
+
+<p>Invalidism is heard of with considerable frequency as
+an excuse for the migration hither. Certainly many advantages
+offer to the invalid. The climate permits him
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_451">[451]</span>to be almost constantly out-of-doors. The sky is blue, the
+sun unclouded, nearly every day in the year, and he can
+go into his orchard and concern himself about his Navel
+or Brazilian oranges, his paper-rind St. Michaels, and his
+Tahiti seedlings, with little let or hinderance. Orange
+culture affords him both a career and a revenue. If the
+unchanging blue of the sky grow sometimes monotonous,
+there are other distractions in the noble mountain ranges.
+Riverside has in this resource a touch of the charm of
+Switzerland. Your entertainer points out to you from
+his piazza the great peaks of Greylock, San Bernardino,
+and San Jacinto, from ten to twelve thousand feet in
+height, and crowned with snow for a considerable part
+of the year, just as the Jungfrau is pointed out from
+Interlaken and Mont Blanc from Geneva.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp93" id="illus092" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus092.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It is a description that applies to all of Southern California,
+that, however great the heat by day—in midsummer
+often a hundred and five in the shade—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_452">[452]</span>nights are always cool and refreshing. Sunstroke is not
+known. Nor are the violent thunder-storms with which
+Nature, with us, endeavors to restore equilibrium after
+having exhausted its most oppressive warmth. The
+great drawback here, as there must always be some
+drawback, consists in occasional heavy “northers,” which
+gather up the dust from the dry surface and produce
+painful dust-storms of two or three days’ duration.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp93" id="illus093" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus093.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>ADOBE RESIDENCE AT RIVERSIDE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In autumn and winter the temperature is chilly enough
+to make fires a necessity morning and evening, and even
+all day long in apartments shut off from the influence of
+the sun. I was astonished to find the air so keen at
+these times, and a scum of ice forming upon water in the
+mornings even as far down as San Diego. The cold has
+a penetrating quality beyond its register by the thermometer.
+This, though usually overlooked, is important,
+since fuel is very scarce and correspondingly dear.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_453">[453]</span>Fagots of the prunings of the cottonwoods, sycamores,
+and mesquit-trees along the beds of the streams are the
+principal resource. Such coal as can be obtained is both
+costly and of poor quality.</p>
+
+<p>The water for the irrigation of Riverside is taken from
+the swift little stream of the Santa Ana River, which
+falls so rapidly within a short compass that it is feasible
+to take out two separate canals with a difference of thirty-five
+feet in their levels. On all sides lands are held at
+$200 and $300 per acre, and when the orange-trees have
+come into good bearing, at $1000, which but a few years
+ago were purchased at a dollar and a quarter an acre.</p>
+
+<p>All these places have their local rivalries, though
+Southern California as a whole is ready to unite in vindicating
+its peculiar claims, against the outside world.
+All have their pamphlets to distribute, containing their
+tables of mean temperatures, altitudes, analyses of soils,
+and claims to regard, as based upon nearness to, or absence
+from, some particular natural feature. Thus the
+coast counties take leave to pride themselves upon a
+genial average of temperature, owing to their proximity
+to the sea. They are free, they say, from the extremes
+of heat and cold afflicting those which are shut in behind
+the mountain barriers. The inland counties, on the other
+hand, congratulate themselves that their lot is cast where
+the mountains form an efficient defence against the raw
+fogs and gusts which must necessarily afflict those directly
+exposed to the chilly ocean.</p>
+
+<p>These petty rivalries are a part of the history of all
+new countries, and pass away with the development of
+population and trade. There seems no need of jealousies,
+since there is encouragement enough for all in
+their several ways. The Territories of Arizona and New
+Mexico have just been opened to transportation by rail
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_454">[454]</span>from this quarter. The lands suitable for the cultivation
+of the “citrus fruits” are limited in extent. The market
+is much more likely to improve than decline, even
+when production shall have largely increased beyond its
+present rate. High railroad freights were at one time a
+cause of alarm. The making of an “orange wine” was
+proposed as a resource for using up the surplus crop of
+this kind. The experiment was not a success, but it is
+not likely to be needed. Freights have declined, and
+will decline more with the building of projected new
+roads. Shipments of oranges have been successfully
+made from this section as far away as Denver, Chicago,
+and St. Louis.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>Great things are predicted for Wilmington, a little
+port twenty-two miles to the south-west of Los Angeles.
+The extensive works undertaken here by the railroad and
+the United States government are still incomplete, and
+it is but a dreary little place in its present condition.
+However, great ports have never been selected primarily
+for picturesqueness, but in accordance with such commercial
+necessities as short lines of transit, easy grades, and
+convenience for shipping. Wilmington had few natural
+conveniences to offer. There were originally but eighteen
+inches of water on its bar. This has been increased
+to ten feet. An enormous jetty, 6700 feet long, extending
+out to what is called Dead Man’s Island, is under
+construction. It is to force the tide itself to do the duty
+of scouring out the bottom, so that a ship channel several
+miles long will eventually be secured.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Monica is another small port at the end of a
+branch railroad from Los Angeles, sixteen miles directly
+west, and somewhat famed as a sea-side resort. It has a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_455">[455]</span>hotel of considerable size, and a bold situation on a pretty
+horseshoe bay. The beach is of fine, hard sand; and
+the temperature admits of bathing, if one be inclined for
+it, all the year round. The hopes which were at one
+time entertained by capitalists, like Senator Jones, of
+Nevada, of making the place a great shipping point,
+have been for the present abandoned. It was to have
+been the Pacific terminus of a new through line from
+the East, coming by way of the Cajon Pass. A wharf
+1500 feet long was built, and a breakwater proposed.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus094" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus094.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>OLD MISSION AT SANTA BARBARA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>From here, or from Wilmington, you sail up the coast
+to San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara—favored by invalids.
+These places have as yet no railroad, but must
+before long come into the general system. Both are on
+that sheltered stretch of the coast which, from Point
+Conception, makes a sharp turn to the eastward, and has
+direct southern exposure and a view of the islands of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_456">[456]</span>Santa Barbara Channel. Santa Barbara, on its practical
+side, has devoted more attention than most places to the
+culture of the olive—an industry still much in its infancy.
+Some of the cultivators have provided themselves
+with a machinery, which costs about a thousand dollars,
+for expressing the oil. As a condiment the fruit is not
+pickled green here, like the Spanish olive, but ripe and
+black. It may be that a special education is needed for
+liking each variety of olives, as it is for acquiring the
+taste in the beginning. Those here are of a small variety,
+descending from the old mission times, and it is hard
+not to find them either insipid or bitter. The leading
+shipment from San Buenaventura is honey. A million
+pounds per annum from Ventura County, of which it is
+the capital, is not an unusual product.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>I sailed from Wilmington to San Diego. I embarked
+in the evening in a small tug, which steamed down the
+tortuous windings of the channel, past black lighters that
+Whistler would have liked to etch, and past Dead Man’s
+Island, and transferred us on board a coast steamer waiting
+without. Next morning we were at our destination,
+a hundred miles below. San Diego, rising on a gentle
+slope, makes a pretty appearance from the water. A
+United States barracks (yellow), with a flag-staff rising in
+the centre, is the most prominent object in front. You
+round an immensely long, narrow sand-spit of a peninsula,
+which contributes to form the excellent small harbor,
+and make fast to an immensely long mooring wharf.
+It is a feature of all California ports to have immensely
+long wharves. To the left is “Old Town,” its beach
+where Dana once loaded hides in his famous “Two
+Years Before the Mast,” now the site of a Chinese fishing
+village. To the right is brand-new “National City,”
+the location of the shops and extensive depot grounds
+for the new railway. In the centre, at about four miles
+from either, lies “New Town,” San Diego proper. All
+together have a population of about five thousand.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_457">[457]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus095" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus095.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PLAZA OF SAN DIEGO, OLD TOWN.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_458">[458]</span></p>
+
+<p>As we came up to the wharf a locomotive, starting
+from National City on the new track, made the circuit
+of the water-front, with one long, shrill scream, which
+was taken up by the hills and echoed back. Gods and
+men were no longer to remain ignorant that San Diego
+had at last caught up with its future and had its railroad.</p>
+
+<p>It was cruelly disappointed when it was to be the terminus
+of the Texas Pacific, transcontinental, road. The
+panic of ’73 prevented the capitalist “Tom Scott” from
+negotiating the foreign loan which was needed for its
+completion. That enterprise was abandoned, and a half-mile
+of graded road-bed alone remains as a sort of tumulus
+to the blighted hopes and bitter memories of the
+time. The name of the unfortunate “Tom Scott”—since
+defunct—remains also a byword and a reproach.
+Now, however, the “California Southern” is actually at
+work, and under contract to complete the one hundred
+and sixteen miles necessary to meet the Southern Pacific,
+at a point near San Bernardino, within a short time. It
+is to be a link in the new “Atlantic and Pacific,” which
+is to follow the thirty-fifth parallel, and become a transcontinental
+road by means of connection with the Atchison,
+Topeka, and Santa Fé.</p>
+
+<p>The capital and management of the California Southern
+are largely supplied by the same Boston company directing
+the Mexican Central, the line to Guaymas from the
+Arizona frontier, and others. A farther road is projected
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_459">[459]</span>by them eastward from San Diego to Calabasas, passing
+through Port Ysabel, at the head of the Gulf of California.
+This can be more cheaply built below the Mexican
+frontier than on this side, owing to special exemptions
+there to be had from taxation, and the lower rates of
+labor. It is thought that the Southern Pacific will also
+be compelled by competition to build across from Yuma.
+Hopes are still entertained also of the derelict Texas Pacific.
+With all this in prospect, it will be seen that San
+Diego has justification for making a good deal of stir. It
+claims to be hundreds of miles nearer, than San Francisco,
+to New Orleans and New York, on the one hand, and
+the Orient on the other, and is correspondingly cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>A hand-car on the long wharf conveyed our baggage
+into the town while we walked beside it. The town, being
+reached, is found a place of loose texture. It has a
+disproportionately large hotel, the Horton House, built in
+anticipation of the rapid arrival of its future greatness,
+and a loss to its original proprietor. The blue shades
+were down and the plate-glass windows dusty also, with
+an expectant look, in much of the “Horton Block,” opposite.
+After ’73 half the shutters in San Diego were
+put up. They have come down now, however, and probably
+to stay.</p>
+
+<p>There is a charming view of the harbor and blue ocean
+from the upper slopes of the town. Part of the view is
+a group of bold Mexican islands, the boldest of these,
+Coronado, a solid mass of red sandstone, which Americans
+have tried to get for a quarry, without success.
+Yes, here is Old Mexico once more; we have come back
+to it. The high, flat-topped peak of Table Mountain marks
+it unmistakably. It is customary to drive down to “the
+Monument,” set up on the dividing line of Baja (Lower)
+California, but the excursion is without special interest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_460">[460]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus096" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus096.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>OLD MISSION AT SAN DIEGO.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The chronic condition of shutters in San Diego “Old
+Town” is to be “up,” that is, so far as it can be said
+to have any shutters yet remaining. It dates from
+1769. Disadvantageously situated in regard to the bay,
+it began to be deserted in favor of the newer site about
+ten years ago. Nothing could seem more desolate than
+it is now. The usual old mission, with a few palms and
+olives about it, stands in a valley, up the pretty San Diego
+River, and the earth-works of Commodore Stockton, who
+threw them up one night before the enemy knew he was
+ashore, are seen on a hill. Rents should be cheap in Old
+Town, but, according to the gossips who still sit around
+the decayed old plaza, they are not. The owners hold
+them stiffly yet, on what theory Heaven only knows.
+The plaza has a toppling flag-staff, a decayed music-stand,
+and vestiges of a number of burned edifices, which have
+never been worth anybody’s while to build up again.
+The “Merchants’ Exchange” will never supply cocktails
+to thirsty soul again; the Cosmopolitan Hotel is without
+a guest; whole rows of weather-beaten adobes—whole
+quarters—stand vacant. It should be a great place for
+ghosts. But perhaps they do not care for one another’s
+society. The children, coming from school—for there is,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_461">[461]</span>it seems, a school—amuse themselves with knocking at
+and rattling the vacant doors; then they peer in at the
+broken window-panes and shout, and run laughing away.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp60" id="illus097" style="max-width: 25.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus097.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>DON JUAN FORSTER.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In leaving San Diego I traversed the surveyed line of
+the new railroad almost due northward. A thirty-mile
+section of the railroad was already built. The rest of the
+journey was made by wagon, with an occasional half-day’s
+pedestrianism, for which the dry, smooth surface of the
+ground is well adapted. It afforded opportunity of making
+the acquaintance in a leisurely way of some of the
+ranchmen, small and great, of the old school. The principal
+one of these was Don Juan Forster (deceased since
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_462">[462]</span>this visit), well known in his section. He was English by
+birth, but sailed with his father in a trading vessel, and
+became a Mexican subject and resident of California long
+before the American conquest. It was so long before
+that he had well-nigh forgotten his English, and had to
+learn it over again when the Americans arrived. The
+Señora, a sister of Governor Pio Pico, never learned it
+at all, any more than her conservative brother.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus098" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus098.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SEÑORA FORSTER.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Don Juan’s estate, the Santa Margarita Ranch, comprised
+an area of twenty-seven miles by fourteen, or one
+hundred and forty-five thousand acres of land. There
+was one fence seventeen miles in length, and another
+ten. The owner had made two distinct efforts to colonize
+a portion of his land, without great success. He
+had offered in London to give forty acres and the use of
+three cows and two horses to whoever would put upon
+the land improvements, in the shape of houses, vineyards,
+etc., to the amount of $1000.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_463">[463]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus099" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus099.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>FORSTER’S RANCH.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_464">[464]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Santa Margarita ranch-house is of adobe, very
+thick-walled, with a terrace in front, and an interior
+court. The waiting at table was by a broad-faced Indian
+woman in calico. All the domestic service was performed
+by mission Indians, except the cooking, for which
+a Chinaman had lately been secured, with the view of
+having meals on time. The manner of living on these
+great places was found comfortable, but without the
+“princely” features attributed to it in some of the highly
+colored narratives of former travellers.</p>
+
+<p>The greater part of the available land in the section
+was devoted to pasture. The cereals were cultivated, but
+not much fruit. Barley is the favorite cereal, as less liable
+to “rust” and spoil than wheat. Hay is made, not of
+grass, but of wheat and barley straw, cut green, with the
+milk still in it. Bee-culture is an important industry. A
+number of varieties of wild sage, wild buckwheat and
+sumac, furnish the bees exceptionally good provender.
+Rows of the square hives, painted in colors, were often
+seen districted into little streets on the hill-side, or at
+the mouth of some small cañon, like a miniature city.</p>
+
+<p>Before reaching Don Juan Forster’s the old mission of
+San Luis Rey is encountered, in the hamlet of the same
+name. It is almost Venetian in aspect. The whole exterior
+was at one time faced with a diagonal pattern recalling
+that of the Ducal Palace. The pile was ruined
+by a Mormon contingent of the American forces engaged
+in the conquest of the State. Parts of the heavy adobe
+walls and buttresses have fallen in, and resolved themselves
+back into their original element as mere earth-heaps.
+The images have been shot and hacked down,
+and a yawning cavern was excavated behind the main
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_465">[465]</span>altar in search of fancied treasure. Upon a floor strewn
+with such <i>débris</i> and with fragments of red tiles the daylight
+falls curiously, through holes in the broken roof
+and dome.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus100" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus100.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>SAN LUIS REY.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The railroad traverses some striking natural scenery.
+Most notable is the Temecula Cañon, a gorge of a wild
+and grand description, ten miles in length, through the
+Coast Range. A brawling stream runs down its centre.
+The gorge was filled with a busy force, as we passed, terracing
+up the track along its sides, sometimes on the
+natural rock, sometimes on a cyclopean retaining-wall of
+immense bowlders. Toward evening every day the firing
+of heavy blasts reverberated up the defile like a cannonade.
+The main part of the laboring force consisted of
+Chinamen. They had utilized the shelving ledges and
+random nooks by the stream for their tents and cooking-ovens
+with great ingenuity. The Mexicans and Indians,
+who formed the contingent next in importance, were in
+every way less provident. The surveyors were found
+pleasant and hospitable fellows, as surveyors at the scene
+of their labors are apt to be. Compactness and convenience
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_466">[466]</span>had been reduced to the lowest terms, but a pleasant
+existence seemed possible in their small tents. A Chinese
+cook was attached to each camp, and the provisions
+and fare were excellent.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus101" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus101.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A TICHBORNE CLAIMANT.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>While coming up in the construction-train over the
+section of already completed road we had the distinction
+of being waited on by a servant of rather uncommon
+pretensions. This was a certain “Charley,” a shock-headed
+boy of fourteen, son of a later Tichborne claimant,
+who had strangely arisen at San Diego just then,
+and announced his purpose of again contesting the title.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_467">[467]</span>Though serving in a menial capacity—while his father,
+who claimed to have good and sufficient reason for having
+kept quiet till now, was taking the necessary steps to
+secure the long-lost title and fortune—“Charley” was
+deaf to all banter on the subject. He was supercilious
+and firm in the faith that he too was a Tichborne.</p>
+
+<p>“And don’t you forget it,” he threw out to us by way
+of a parting injunction.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the cañon, at the van of the construction work,
+we were on the Temecula Plains, a part of the Upper
+Santa Ana Valley. The course of the road was marked
+henceforth only by an occasional surveyor’s stake. We
+rode over fifty miles of absolutely treeless, verdureless
+desert. It was desert, however, with a certain fascination
+in its sterility. It had a distinct beauty of coloring.
+The brown, drab, and blackish waste, catching sparkles
+of light on its flinty surface, shimmered in the sunshine.
+The heat was tempered by a gentle breeze. Crags of
+black, water-worn rock, which had once been reefs in
+an inland sea, rose in bold, fantastic shapes, and noble
+mountain ranges stood up along the distant horizons,
+their rugged harshness softened into blues and purples
+by a delicious veiling atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way across we fell in with a single sign of human
+life, in the shape of an abandoned pine shanty. On going
+around to the rear the boards were found to have
+been knocked off, probably to be used for fuel. Some
+former travellers, halting here like ourselves, had occupied
+a part of their leisure with writing inscriptions in
+lead-pencil. One had written a direction about drinkable
+water in the neighborhood. Another, apparently
+finding this erroneous, had inscribed below it, with much
+more vigor than regard for adopted usages in spelling,
+“Lyor!!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_468">[468]</span></p>
+
+<p>The sole piece of furniture remaining was a rusted
+cooking-stove, standing on three legs. It had a certain
+almost diabolic, knowing air. You suspected it of having
+lost its other leg in waltzing about and holding high
+carnival, as no doubt it did, with the coyotes, gophers,
+tarantulas, and lizards who dropped in to pay it visits.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_469">[469]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXX">XXX.<br>
+<i>ACROSS ARIZONA.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>If there be anything politically disrupting in mere topography,
+the section cut off by the range below the Los
+Angeles and Riverside country should also be made a
+separate State. It should clamor at any rate to be joined
+to Arizona, since it is Arizona that it follows in climate,
+and not California. South-east of the low San Gorgonio
+Pass the seasons are the same as those of Mexico; that is
+to say, the rains fall in summer, while northward they fall
+in the winter and spring. Thunder-storms on each side
+of the mountains may be plainly visible from the other,
+but do not pass the limit.</p>
+
+<p>I myself saw, from the Arizona side, in December, in
+hot, clear sunshine at the time, murky clouds billowing
+above the range, and the lightnings playing in them, and,
+on returning to Los Angeles, found it drenched in its
+first showers of the season.</p>
+
+<p>There is one excellent reason why the inhabitants of
+the section do not raise such a clamor, which is, that there
+are no inhabitants worth mentioning. For a hundred
+and fifty miles, from the pass, to the Arizona frontier at
+Yuma, the railroad hardly knows any local traffic. Its
+route is over the celebrated “Colorado Desert,” in comparison
+with which previous deserts are of small importance.
+There are various stopping-places, with designations
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_470">[470]</span>on the map, but these are rarely more than signal-stations
+where the locomotive, like the passengers, stops
+to slake its thirst at a series of artesian wells.</p>
+
+<p>The plain is not of great extent laterally. Black and
+purplish mountains are always in sight, and spurs cross
+the track. Bowlders and pebbles are scattered thickly on
+the surface at first, among patches of bunch-grass. Then,
+near Seven Palms, the jaws of the black and purple mountains
+open and receive us into the genuine desert. It is
+strewn with bowlders still, but is itself a waste of drifting
+white sand, with large dunes and hills of sand. One might
+be riding on the shores of Coney Island or Long Branch.</p>
+
+<p>A singular depression below the level of the sea for a
+hundred miles, and at its lowest point nearly three hundred
+feet, is traversed. At Dos Palmas, in the very bottom
+of it, a board shanty, covered with signs in amateurish
+lettering, indicating that it is a saloon, stands entirely
+alone. Surely the bar-keeper must consume his own
+drinks, and lead an existence unprecedented among his
+kind. No; a horseman in Mexican accoutrements dashes
+across the plain—though where he should dash from,
+and how he should ride anything, here in the bottom of
+the sea, but the skeleton, say, of a dolphin or a sea-horse,
+is a mystery—pulls up, and enters.</p>
+
+<p>And it appears, on a better acquaintance with Dos
+Palmas, that a stage starts every other day for points
+on the Colorado River, and Prescott, the capital of Arizona
+Territory, and that this is but a faint survival of
+bustle which once reigned here before the advent of the
+railroad. The route of the Southern Overland Mail then
+came this way, and long trains of immigrant and freight
+wagons, carrying water in casks for two and three days’
+supply, were passing continually over these wastes.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, on general principles, would appear more depressing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_471">[471]</span>than such a country, but as a matter-of-fact it is
+a stimulus to the curiosity, and furnishes real entertainment.
+One would not wish to be abandoned there without
+resources, it is true, but he does not tire of looking
+at it from the car-window. Its blazing dryness is disinfectant
+and preservative. There can never exist the
+last extreme of sadness where the element of decay by
+damp and mould is not present. Chemical processes
+are those which are principally going on. Wonders of
+almost any sort may be expected, and you almost look
+for phantoms not of earth among the shifting mirages.</p>
+
+<p>A considerable part of Arizona, as well, is of the same
+character, but it is estimated by competent authority that
+with irrigation thirty-seven per cent. of that Territory can
+be redeemed for agriculture, and sixty per cent. as pasturage.
+It will be called to mind that even the apparently
+hopeless Colorado Desert, which is below the level of the
+sea, is also below the level of the Colorado River, from
+which water might perhaps be spread over it with comparative
+ease.</p>
+
+<p>The truly patriotic Arizonian in their neighborhood
+is not ashamed of his encompassing deserts, but rather
+proud of them, and with a certain reason. The desert is
+in reality a laboratory of useful products. Paper is made
+from the yucca, or Spanish-bayonet, which abounds in
+parts of it. There are tracts of salt, borax, gypsum, sulphur,
+asbestos, and kaolin, and quarries of pumice-stone,
+only waiting shipment. It is maintained, also, that it
+has deposits of the same precious metals which, mined
+in places where water is more accessible, have given the
+Territory most of its present fame.</p>
+
+<p>Our train runs out upon a long wooden drawbridge,
+across the Colorado River, and we arrive at Yuma. The
+company has placed here the first of its series of hotels
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_472">[472]</span>of uniform pattern. It is both station and hotel. Such
+provision on an equal scale of comfort would hardly have
+been judicious yet as an investment for private persons.
+These structures therefore become not only a typical
+feature of the scenery, but an indication of the extent to
+which the railroad has had to, and has been able to, by
+reason of its ample resources, take this bare new country
+into its own hands. They are of the usual reddish-brown,
+two stories in height, and surrounded by piazzas of generous
+width—an indispensable adjunct under the dazzling
+light and heat of the country.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>The heat of Yuma is proverbial. The thermometer
+ranges up to 127° in the shade. There is an old story
+of a soldier who died at the fort and went to the place
+which Bob Ingersoll says does not exist, and, finding it
+chilly there by comparison, sent back after his blankets.</p>
+
+<p>Great heat, nevertheless, is not equally formidable
+everywhere. It is well attested that there is no sunstroke
+here, and no such suffering as from a much lower
+temperature in moister climates. Distinct sanitary
+properties are even claimed for this well-baked air. So
+near the sea-level, it is said to be less rarefied, and to
+comprise, therefore, a greater quantity of oxygen to a
+given bulk, than that of mountain districts, which, in purity
+and dryness, it resembles. It is thought to be beneficial
+in lung troubles. Yuma, among its arid sand-hills, has
+aspirations to be a sanitarium. Civilized people also may
+yet resort there to engage in a sensible sun-worship, basking
+in the genial heat, and then plunging into the river,
+after the fashion of the resident Indians, who make of it
+in this way a kind of natural Turkish bath.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_473">[473]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus102" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus102.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>THE COLORADO RIVER AT YUMA.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_474">[474]</span></p>
+
+<p>A transition state may have disadvantages, even when
+a step toward something better. Yuma has now its railroad,
+and is to have a shipping-port of its own, by the
+construction of another to Port Ysabel, on the Gulf of
+California. Still, it laments a greater activity it once enjoyed,
+as chief distributing point for the mines and upper
+river towns. It expects the Port Ysabel Railroad to have
+the effect of doubling its population in two years. It will
+not be a very stupendous population even then, as it is
+but fifteen hundred at present.</p>
+
+<p>The town is a collection of inferior adobe houses, a few
+of the very best being altered from the natural mud-color
+by a coating of whitewash. The ordinary part of it resembles
+more the poor tropical hamlets on the trail to
+Acapulco than even the ordinary villages of Mexico.
+The houses consist of a framework of cottonwood or
+ocotilla wattles, plastered with mud inside and out,
+making a wall two or three inches thick. The roof is
+thatched, the floor is the bare ground. Around them
+are generally high palisades of ocotilla sticks, and corrals
+of the same adjoining.</p>
+
+<p>The waiters in a Yuma hotel are of a highly miscellaneous
+character. You are served, in the same dining-room,
+by Mexicans, Chinamen, Irish, Americans, and a
+tame Apache Indian. One and all had a certain astounded
+air, ending in something like confirmed depression,
+on finding that we were to remain, would dine at our
+leisure, and did not wish to have the dishes shot at us as
+if out of a catapult, after the practice with the ordinary
+traveller pausing here his allotted half-hour. One does
+not expect too much of his waiter in Arizona, however.
+There are reported instances in which he makes you eat
+your steak with his hand on his pistol-pocket, and the
+threat of wearing it out on you if you object.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_475">[475]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Colorado at Yuma makes about the same impression
+as to width as the Sacramento at Sacramento, the
+Ohio at Pittsburg, or the Connecticut at Hartford. It
+is a turbulent yellow stream. It cuts into high sand
+bluffs on the Arizona side, and spreads out their contents
+in wide bars on the California side. It is without wharves.
+The light-draught, high-decked steamboats, or barges,
+that ply up and down its interminable reaches tie up
+when necessary to the banks.</p>
+
+<p>Mountains of a jagged, eccentric formation follow its
+general course northward. Peaks impressively counterfeiting
+human work, Castle Dome, Chimney Peaks, Picacho,
+and Cargo Muchacho, loom up along the horizon,
+a fitting prelude to the marvels of Arizona.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the close of an Indian war that this visit was
+made. It had been said, in rumors much exaggerated,
+that the whole white civilization of the Territory was in
+danger by the outbreak, and troops—but now on their
+return—had been hurried thither from all sides. The
+first view of Indians, therefore, at Yuma was of a double
+interest. They were not Apaches, it is true, but a
+subsequent acquaintance with the general field proved
+them to be even more picturesque. They are of that
+highly satisfactory style of savages who wear but little
+clothing, and none of it European. They are to be seen
+in numbers about the railway-station by the most casual
+passenger. The railroad is still new to them, and they
+have not satiated their curiosity. They bring friends
+from a distance to see it, and are observed describing to
+these visitors how the drawbridge swings, and how the
+cars are switched from one track to another.</p>
+
+<p>They are met with coming across this bridge from the
+patch of river-bottom near the fort on the California side,
+where their principal settlement is. The young men run
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_476">[476]</span>or stride at great speed, so as to throw out behind them a
+long red sash or band, depending from the breech-cloth,
+which is, in summer, the principal part of their attire.
+To this is added, in winter, a close-fitting gray or crimson
+under-shirt. They wear their thick, coal-black hair
+“banged” low on their foreheads, and bushy about their
+necks. The effect at a little distance is not unlike that of
+the Florentine period, when the young gallants wore jerkins
+and trunk hose fitting them like their skins, and just
+such bushy locks, which they crowned, however, instead
+of going bare-headed, with jaunty velvet caps.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp71" id="illus103" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus103.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>PASQUAL, CHIEF OF THE YUMAS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The fort is without guns, other than a howitzer for firing
+salutes, and has no strength, as it no longer needs to
+have, except from its position on a commanding bluff.
+The military policy of the government now is to station
+its troops along a railroad or other easy line of communication,
+where they can be quickly massed for mutual support.
+All the Arizona posts, such as Camp Lowell, with
+its grassy parade and fine avenue of cottonwoods; Camp
+Grant, on its table-land; and Camp Apache, at the junction
+of two charming trout streams, in the White River
+Cañon; and the others, have only this strategic importance,
+and no intrinsic strength. The barracks at Yuma
+consist of a series of comfortable, large, adobe houses, plastered,
+and painted green, around an oblong plaza. They
+have in front a peculiar screen-work of green blinds,
+which shuts out the glare arising from the yellow ground,
+and makes both a cool promenade and comfortable sleeping
+apartments for the summer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_477">[477]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus104" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus104.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>YUMA INDIANS AT HOME.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_478">[478]</span></p>
+
+<p>The chief of the Yumas, on whose settlement the fort
+looks down, chooses his sub-chiefs, but is himself appointed
+by the military commandant. The last investiture was
+made as long ago as 1852, by General, then Major, Heintzelman.
+He conferred it upon the now wrinkled and decrepit
+Pasqual, described at the time as “a tall, fine-looking
+man, of an agreeable disposition.”</p>
+
+<p>Pasqual’s people cultivate little patches of vegetables
+and hay in the river-bottom, fertilized by the annual
+overflow. Their principal sustenance, however, is the
+sweet bean of the mesquit-tree. This they pound, in
+mortars, into a kind of flour. Sometimes, when on the
+move, the Indians float their hay across the river on rafts,
+which they push before them, swimming. They propel
+the small children in the same way, placing them in their
+large, Egyptian-looking <i>ollas</i>, or water-jars.</p>
+
+<p>The crop of mesquit beans was so large one year as to
+be beyond their unaided capacity to consume, and they
+hospitably invited in their friends, the Pimas, to aid them.
+Old Pasqual describes with graphic gestures how haggard
+and lank were these visitors on their arrival, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_479">[479]</span>what an unctuous corpulence they had attained in the
+end, when, after nearly eating their hosts out of house
+and home, they were only got rid of at last by force.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>Few things are more curious at this time of day than
+to look back at the old maps of our Western possessions
+previous to the annexation of Texas. Texas was not then
+ours; nor were a considerable part of Indian Territory,
+Kansas, half of Colorado, all of Utah, Nevada, California,
+Arizona, and New Mexico. All of this belonged
+to our sister republic of Mexico, which, as I have said,
+was within an ace as large as ourselves, and, except for
+its internal dissensions, could by no means be considered
+a puny antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>An impressive vagueness attended the delineation of
+most things west of the Mississippi. There were great
+tracts hardly more known than the centre of Africa.
+The upper regions of Mexico were distinguished as Interna;
+New Mexico and Arizona were simply Apacheria—Apache
+Land. Our frontier ran along the line of the
+Sabine River to the Red, from the Red to the Arkansas,
+and from the Arkansas, on the 42d Parallel of latitude,
+straight west to the Pacific Ocean. By the peace of
+Guadalupe Hidalgo our frontier became the Rio Grande
+and Gila instead, and the line had dropped from Parallel
+40° to Parallel 32°.</p>
+
+<p>I have called this territory heretofore, by way of figure
+of speech, an Alsace-Lorraine of Mexico, though it is not
+probable, vacant as it was, and Americanized as it now is,
+that a serious grudge is still borne us for it, or that there
+will ever be momentous wars for its recovery. However
+this may be, it has been the making of us. We
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_480">[480]</span>should be in but sorry shape indeed had we to go back
+to the limits of the thirteen original British Colonies,
+or even to these with Florida, purchased from the Spaniards,
+and Louisiana, purchased from the French, added.
+The Mexican acquisition gave us one-third of our domain—that
+which is now most open to the teeming millions
+of Europe and that which avails us our repute for
+essential Americanism abroad. It gave us the field of
+the Bret Harte school in literature, our chief marvels
+and wonders, our mines of the precious metals, and the
+command of the Pacific Ocean.</p>
+
+<p>The lower belt of Arizona was not even comprised in
+this. An area of 460 miles by 130, below the Gila River,
+was not obtained till “the Gadsden Purchase,” in 1853.
+By the payment of the sum of $10,000,000 under this
+treaty we obtained a number of decided advantages.
+We rectified our boundary line, confused through the inaccuracy
+of the map of one Dwinelle, on which it was
+based. We got rid of an embarrassing engagement, of
+the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, to protect the Mexican
+frontier from Apaches—leaving them to regulate this service
+for themselves. We secured the right of way for a
+railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which was
+thought desirable for speedier communication with our
+new possessions of California.</p>
+
+<p>But above all we acquired, in the easy levels below
+the Gila, the natural route for a Southern Pacific transcontinental
+railway. The files of the Congressional
+<i>Globe</i> of that date are full of the necessity of binding
+our Pacific acquisitions securely to the rest of the country,
+and the most effectual of all the means proposed was
+considered to be a transcontinental railway.</p>
+
+<p>Well, we are bowling at last along that now actually
+constructed Southern Pacific Railroad, once discussed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_481">[481]</span>in musty debates of the Congressional <i>Globe</i>. It increases
+our respect for predecessors to whom we may not have
+given any great consideration heretofore to find how
+sagacious they were. We reach Stanwix, with its lava
+beds; Painted Rock, named from huge, mysteriously-decorated
+bowlders; Casa Grande, from its architectural
+ruins of the Toltecs; and Tucson.</p>
+
+<p>Adopting the policy of leaving Tucson to be examined
+on the return, let us push on to the extreme end of the
+Territory—to the eccentrically-named Tombstone. Benson,
+the point of departure, from the railroad, for Tombstone,
+is 1024 miles from San Francisco, and probably
+2500 from New York.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_482">[482]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXXI">XXXI.<br>
+<i>TOMBSTONE.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Tombstone is the very latest and liveliest of those
+mushroom civilizations which so often gather around a
+“find” of the precious metals. They live at a headlong
+pace; draw to them wild and lawless spirits; confer great
+fortunes here, the grave of the drunkard, the suicide, or
+the victim of violence elsewhere. A school of literature,
+with Bret Harte as its exponent, has arisen to celebrate
+their doings. At the present rate of advance of population
+and conventional usages westward they must shortly
+disappear as effectually as the dodo of tradition. While
+things go well with them the prices of commodities are
+hardly considered. Nobody haggles. The most expensive
+of everything is what is most wanted.</p>
+
+<p>“Diamonds—two-hundred-dollar watches and chains—Lord!
+we couldn’t hand ’em out fast enough,” says an
+ex-jeweller, describing his experience at one of the camps
+in its palmy days. “Champagne wasn’t good enough
+for me then,” says a seedy customer, recalling his doings
+after the discovery and sale of a rich mine. He sighed
+for a repetition of the event, not to make provision for
+his old age, which sadly needed it, but that he might
+have “one more glorious spree” before he died.</p>
+
+<p>Oftentimes this rush of life departs as quickly as it
+came. Some fine day the “lead” is exhausted, there is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_483">[483]</span>found to be no more treasure in the mines. The heterogeneous
+elements scatter, and the town, be it never so
+well built, is left as desolate as Tadmor of the Wilderness.
+In a certain Nevada mining town, which once
+numbered some thousands of inhabitants, Indians are
+living in rows of good brick houses, having adapted
+them to their peculiar conditions by taking out doors
+and windows and knocking holes in the roof.</p>
+
+<p>A six-horse Concord coach carried us, not too speedily,
+over the twenty-five miles of dusty road to Tombstone.
+It was called the “Grand Central,” after one of the
+prosperous silver mines of the place. A rival line was
+named the “Sandy Bob,” from its proprietor; who preferred
+to be himself thus known, instead of by a conventional
+family appellation such as anybody might have.
+We should certainly have taken the “Sandy Bob Line”
+for its greater suggestiveness, except that it seemed to be
+coming down when we wanted to go up, and always coming
+up when we wanted to go down.</p>
+
+<p>Our own proved to have plenty of suggestiveness too.
+A guard got up with a Winchester rifle, and posted himself
+by the Wells-Fargo Express box, and the driver began
+almost at once to relate robber stories. His stage
+had been stopped and “gone through” twice within the
+past six months. The affair had been enlivened on the
+one occasion by a runaway and turnover, and on the
+other by the shooting and killing of the driver. Of this
+last item his successor spoke with a natural disgust. If
+the line could not be drawn at drivers, he said, things
+had indeed come to a pretty pass. He respected a man
+who took to the road and robbed those who could afford
+it. At least, he considered it more honorable than borrowing
+money of a friend which you knew you could
+never repay, or than gobbling up the earnings of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_484">[484]</span>poor, like a large
+firm lately suspended
+in Pima
+County. But as
+to shooting a driver,
+even in mistake
+for somebody else,
+he had no words to
+express his sense of
+its meanness.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="illus105" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus105.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>DISTANT VIEW OF TOMBSTONE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>He threw stones
+at his horses, as in
+Mexico, that is, at
+the leaders, beyond the reach of his long lash. The
+same stone was made to “carom” from one to the other,
+such was his skill, and startle them both. Long string-teams
+of mules or Texas steers, sixteen to a team, with
+ore-wagons, were met with along the road. Mexican-looking
+drivers trudged beside them in the deep, yellow
+dust, cracking their animals lustily with huge “black-snakes.”
+Mesquit-bushes, and long grass dried to hay—not
+as good as it looked—covered portions of the
+surface; the rest was bare and stony.</p>
+
+<p>We rode for a certain distance beside the branch railroad
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_485">[485]</span>in course of construction between Benson and Tombstone.
+A series of lateral valleys along the tributaries of
+the Gila, north and south, as the Santa Cruz, Salt River,
+San Carlos, San Pedro, and San Simon Valleys, afford excellent
+stock ranges, promise of a flourishing agriculture,
+and easy routes for tributary railways. They have already
+begun to be utilized. The San Pedro has the Southern
+Pacific branch above mentioned, and the Santa Cruz will
+have the Arizona Southern, connecting the centre of the
+Territory at Florence, on the Atlantic and Pacific, with
+Mexico at Calabasas. The transcontinental road—or
+roads, when the Atlantic and Pacific shall have been
+built—will draw through these tributary valleys, as the
+Gila draws its waters, a trade from Northern Mexico,
+where mining enterprises in particular, in the hands of
+Americans, are making great headway.</p>
+
+<p>The route began to be very much up-hill. We changed
+horses and lunched at Contention City. One naturally
+expected a certain belligerency in such a place, but none
+appeared on the surface during our stay. There were
+plenty of saloons—the “Dew-drop,” the “Head-light,”
+and others—and at the door of one of them a Spanish
+señorita smoked a cigarette and showed her white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>Contention City is the seat of stamp-mills for crushing
+ore, which is brought to it from Tombstone. The latter
+place is without an efficient water-power. The stamps
+are rows of heavy beams, which drop upon the mineral,
+on the mortar and pestle plan, with a continuous dull
+roar, by night as well as day.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s the music I like to hear,” said our driver, gathering
+up his reins, “poundin’ out the gold and silver.
+There ain’t no brass bands ekils it.”</p>
+
+<p>The route grew steeper yet. On the few wayside
+fences that exist were painted flaring announcements, as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_486">[486]</span>“Go To Bangley and Schlagenstein’s At Tombstone.
+They Are The Bosses, You Bet.”</p>
+
+<p>Then over the edge of bare hills appeared Tombstone
+itself, a large, circular water-tank, big enough for a fort,
+painted with advertisements, the most conspicuous object
+in the foreground.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>At the beginning of the year 1878 there was not so
+much as a tent at Tombstone. One “Ed” Schieffelin
+and his brother started thither prospecting. It was supposed
+to be an adventure full of dangers. At the Santa
+Rita silver mines, in the Santa Cruz Valley, for instance,
+nothing like so far away, three superintendents had been
+murdered by Indians in rapid succession.</p>
+
+<p>His friends therefore said to Ed, “Better take your
+coffin with you; you will find your tombstone there, and
+nothing else.”</p>
+
+<p>But Ed Schieffelin—a young man yet, who has not
+discarded a picturesque way of dressing of which he was
+fond, nor greatly altered his habits otherwise—found instead
+the Tough Nut and Contention Mines. He made a
+great fortune out of them, and was so pleased at the difference
+between the prediction and the result that he
+gave the name of Tombstone to the town itself.</p>
+
+<p>One of two well-printed daily papers has assumed the
+corresponding title of the <i>Epitaph</i>. The unreliability of
+epitaphs—if the remark may be safely ventured even at
+this distance—is proverbial. Nevertheless, they may occasionally
+tell the truth. From appearances it would
+seem that this was one of the occasions. Almost any
+eulogy of its subject by the <i>Epitaph</i> would seem justified.
+The city, but two years old at this date, had attained
+to a population of 2000, and a property valuation,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_487">[487]</span>apart from that of the mines, of $1,050,980. A desirable
+lot of 30 by 80 feet, on Allen Street, between Fourth
+and Sixth—such was the business-like nomenclature used
+already in this settlement of yesterday—was worth $6000.
+A shanty that cost $50 to build rented for $15 a month.
+A nucleus of many blocks at the centre consisted of substantial,
+large-sized buildings, hotels, banks—Schieffelin
+Hall, for meetings and amusements—and stores stocked
+with goods of more than the average excellence in many
+older and larger towns.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus106" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus106.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>“ED” SCHIEFFELIN.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_488">[488]</span></p>
+
+<p>The mining claims run under the city itself. From
+the roof of the Grand Hotel you look down at the shafts,
+hoist-works, and heaps of extracted ore of the Vizina, the
+Gilded Age (close to the Palace Lodging-house), the
+Mountain Maid, and other mines, opening strangely in
+the very midst of the buildings. This circumstance has
+given rise to disputes of ownership, so that whoever
+would be safe purchases all the conflicting titles, both
+above ground and below. On a commanding hill close
+by, to the southward, are the Tough Nut and Contention,
+and above them many others later discovered. The
+larger mines had extensive buildings, of wood, and in
+handsome draughting and assay rooms within were regularly
+educated scientists, ex-college professors and the
+like, in charge. The lesser mines put up in the beginning
+with commoner sheds and poorer appliances of
+every kind. About them all lie heaps of a blackish
+material, resembling inferior coal and slate, the silver
+ore in its native condition. A laborer above-ground
+earned $3.50, and below-ground $4, for a “shift” of
+eight hours, and the work went on night and day, Sundays
+and all.</p>
+
+<p>I leave to others to estimate the bulk of treasure in the
+place. I was told that it was “the biggest thing since
+the Comstock,” and there were forty million dollars in
+sight. I was offered, daily, fractional interests in mines,
+now by a young surveyor who was going to be married
+and needed money for his wedding outfit; now by new
+friends who were straitened for assessment funds to
+carry out the provisions of the law; and again by others
+who would kindly make any sacrifice for the pleasure of
+associating a traveller from a distance with the interests of
+the place; and yet it will be well for the novice to be wary
+of these seductive openings at Tombstone, as elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_489">[489]</span></p>
+
+<p>This I know, however, that I descended four hundred
+feet or so into the Contention Mine, and found great
+chambers hollowed out, from which mineral had been
+taken, showing a generous width in the vein. The
+yield, from its discovery up to March, 1881, had been
+$2,000,000. The Tough Nut, with the Lucky Cuss,
+Good Enough, Owl’s Nest, and Owl’s Last Hoot—the
+racy vernacular of their names will be observed—had
+yielded $1,000,000.</p>
+
+<p>The outskirts of Tombstone consisted still of huts and
+tents. A burly miner could be seen stretched upon his
+cot in a windowless cabin, barely large enough to contain
+him. There were some tents provided with wooden doors
+and adobe chimneys. New as it was, the business portion
+of the place had been once swept out of existence
+by a devastating fire, which originated from a characteristic
+incident—the explosion of a whiskey-barrel in the
+Oriental Saloon. Within fourteen days all was rebuilt
+far better than before.</p>
+
+<p>I took the pains to count the number of establishments
+in a single short block of Allen Street at which intoxicating
+liquors were sold. There were the bar-rooms
+of two hotels, the Eagle Brewery, the Cancan Chop-house,
+the French Rôtisserie, the Alhambra, Maison
+Doré, City of Paris, Brown’s Saloon, Fashion Saloon,
+Miners’ Home, Kelly’s Wine-house, the Grotto, the
+Tivoli, and two saloons apparently unnamed. At these
+places gambling also went on without let or hinderance.
+The absence of savings-banks or other opportunity for
+depositing money, in these wild communities, and the
+temptation arising from having it always under the eye,
+no doubt has something to do with the general passion
+for gambling. Whiskey and cold lead are named as
+the leading diseases at Tombstone. What with the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_490">[490]</span>leisure that seems to prevail, the constant drinking and
+gambling at the saloons, and the universal practice of
+carrying deadly weapons, there is but one source of
+astonishment, and that is that the cold-lead disease
+should claim so few victims. Casualties are, after all,
+infrequent, considering the amount of vaporish talk indulged
+in, and the imminent risks that are run. The
+small cemetery, over toward Contention Hill, so far from
+being glutted with the slaughtered, is still comparatively
+virgin ground.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>A farther element in addition to that of the miners is
+to be cited as having a good deal to do with the exceptional
+liveliness of Tombstone—the “Cow-boys.”</p>
+
+<p>The term cow-boy, once applied to all those in the cattle
+business indiscriminately, while still including some
+honest persons, has been narrowed down to be chiefly
+a term of reproach for a class of stealers of cattle, over
+the Mexican frontier, and elsewhere, who are a terror in
+their day and generation. Exceptional desperadoes of
+this class, such as “Billy the Kid,” “Curly Bill,” and
+“Russian George,” have been the scourges of whole
+districts in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and
+have had their memories embalmed in yellow-covered
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>I bought on the train, on leaving, a pamphlet purporting
+to be an account of the exploits of Billy the Kid.
+He had committed, it appeared, at least a score of horrid
+murders, but “so many cities have claimed the honor of
+giving him birth,” said my pamphlet, “that it is difficult
+to locate with any accuracy the locality where he passed
+his youth.” It was finally determined, however, in favor
+of New York. “It was on the Bowery,” said the author,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_491">[491]</span>whose ideas of morality were peculiar even for a sensationalist,
+“that his mates learned to love him for his daring
+and prowess, and delighted to refer to him as Billy
+the Kid.”</p>
+
+<p>This promising life was cut off at the early age of
+twenty-two. “Curly Bill,” also died young, and so did
+“Man-killer Johnson.” I remarked upon this peculiarity,
+of their youth, to a philosopher of the region itself.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said, “they <i>don’t</i> seem to live to be very
+old; that’s so.”</p>
+
+<p>The recipe for a long life in this country was described
+as being very quick and getting “the drop” on an antagonist;
+that is to say, being ready to shoot first. Unless
+this can be done, it is the custom even to put up with
+some ignominious abuse at the time, and await a more
+favorable opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>The cow-boys frequenting Tombstone were generally
+from the ranches in the San Pedro and San Simon
+valleys. There were said to be strongholds in the San
+Simon Valley where they concealed stolen cattle until
+re-branded and sent to market, and where no officer of
+the law ever dared to venture. They looked upon the
+running off of stock from Mexico, as far as that was
+concerned, only as a more dashing form of smuggling,
+though it was marked by frequent bloody tragedies on
+both sides.</p>
+
+<p>Not to fix upon all the misdeeds of but a few, no
+doubt there were on the streets of Tombstone plenty of
+cow-boys of a legitimate sort, whose only faults were
+occasional boisterousness and too free lavishing of their
+money. There appeared to be something of a standing
+feud between the miners and the cow-boys, and there was
+besides a faction of “town cow-boys” organized against
+the “country cow-boys.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_492">[492]</span></p>
+
+<p>The leading cattle-men had a Southern cut and accent,
+and hailed originally from Missouri or Texas. Some appeared
+in full black broadcloth, accompanied by the usual
+wide sombrero. The landlord of our hotel described
+them as “perfect gentlemen,” some of them good at the
+bar for as high as $20 or $25 a day.</p>
+
+<p>The great object in life of the various factions, or of
+individuals who arose from time to time in search of
+notoriety, was to “run the town.” This consisted largely
+in the privilege of blustering in the saloons, whooping
+and firing occasional pistol-shots, if thought good, in the
+streets, and having a moderate security from arrest, inspired
+by dread of their prowess.</p>
+
+<p>This was necessarily a very insecure preëminence.
+New aspirants and rebels were continually piqued into
+appearing against it whenever it seemed fairly attained.
+Our visit happened upon the heels of a conflict making
+the most tragic page yet written in the annals of Tombstone.
+Opinions seemed divided about it—even official
+opinions. The sheriff extended his sympathy to one
+side, the city marshal, who was, in fact, its leader, to the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>City Marshal Earp, with his two brothers, and one
+“Doc Holliday,” a gambler, had come down the street,
+armed with rifles, and opened fire on two Clanton brothers
+and two McLowry brothers. The latter party had
+been practically first disarmed by the sheriff, who feared
+such a meeting, and meant to disarm the others as well.
+Three of the assailed men fell, and died. “Ike” Clanton
+alone escaped.</p>
+
+<p>The slayers were imprisoned, but released on bail.
+The Grand Jury was now in session, hearing evidence
+in the case. It was rumored that the town party—the
+Earps—would command a sufficient personal influence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_493">[493]</span>to go free of indictment. The cow-boys were flocking
+into town to await the result, and on a certain quiet
+Sunday wore an ominous look. It was said that, should
+justice fail to be done them, the resolute-looking men
+conferring together darkly at the edges of the sidewalk
+would take the matter into their own hands. The jury,
+I have since learned, did not find an indictment, and the
+remaining parties to the affair, with many others, I believe,
+have since died with their boots on in the same
+cause. If anything could reconcile us to the untimely
+taking-off of these paladins, it would be partly their own
+contemptuous indifference to it.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that we ought to have at least half a
+dozen lives apiece, to account for such an indifference,
+but to be ready to toss away the only one on any and
+every pretext or no pretext is not at all so intelligible.
+It is certainly not the desperation of poverty by which
+it is occasioned. Many of them are in very good circumstances.
+The younger McLowry, a boy under twenty,
+had $3000 in his pocket, the proceeds of a sale of
+cattle, the day he fell.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Clanton had played cards most of the night
+before with two of his deadly enemies, both parties keeping
+a hand on their pistols meanwhile. When “Billy”
+Clanton, a boy, like McLowry, lay prone on the ground
+in the fight, dying of his mortal wound, he still managed
+to get out a pistol, steadied it on a shattered arm, and
+fired once more at “Doc Holliday,” saying,</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll get one of you, any way.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are a daisy if you do,” replied Doc Holliday,
+continuing to advance as coolly as if at target practice,
+and emptying another barrel of his own into him.</p>
+
+<p>And the last words of Billy Clanton, in the Nibelungen-like
+contest—which I am quite aware will not be quoted,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_494">[494]</span>in school-readers, with those of Lawrence, Nelson, and
+Montcalm, since there was no sense at all in this frenzied
+display of pluck and tenacity—were: “For God’s
+sake more cartridges!”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp71" id="illus107" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus107.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>A TOMBSTONE SHERIFF AND CONSTITUENTS.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Meantime the whistles of the mining works were shrieking
+notes of alarm, the miners pouring forth from underground,
+and the reputable citizens, who might have
+exclaimed, “A plague o’ both your houses!” arming
+themselves in hot haste, and coming to their doors, to
+prevent the spread of general anarchy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_495">[495]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is a grimly humorous element in it all. It
+seems such an excellent joke to idly snuff out the most
+precious of human possessions. A cow-boy shoots a tumbler
+from the hand of another, just raised to his lips, saying,
+“When you drink with me I will teach you to take
+whiskey plain, and no mixtures.”</p>
+
+<p>A group of others sit around in a saloon where lies
+a fresh-made corpse. An officer of the law enters, and
+says, “Who claims this man?” whereupon all jump to
+their feet to dispute the honor.</p>
+
+<p>There is a large supply of these amusing stories. To
+kill your man seems a way of winning your spurs, as it
+were, and establishing yourself on a proper footing in the
+community. Even the defunct, in various cases, could he
+be heard from, would probably find no great fault with
+the manner of his taking off, but only with the “luck”
+of it which had gone against him.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_496">[496]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="XXXII">XXXII.<br>
+<i>CAMP LOWELL, TUCSON, AND SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.</i></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The night journey returning by stage to Benson was
+enlivened by more shooting stories. I heard, among others,
+of the doings of the late Brazelton of Tucson, and
+at Tucson I bought his photograph, taken, after death,
+in his mask and other paraphernalia of his craft. He
+robbed stages for years while apparently working quietly
+as a hostler in a corral. He was finally tracked to his
+fate through some peculiar marks of the horse he rode.</p>
+
+<p>One of our passengers had just recovered from wounds
+received in a fight over cards with a Mexican, whom he
+had killed, and was now able, with the aid of morphine,
+to pursue his journey toward his home in New Mexico.
+The train men at Benson were chary of carrying their
+lanterns about the depot yard, a habit having arisen, it
+seemed, among the cow-boys of trying to snuff out these
+moving targets with revolvers from a distance.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed a certain tameness even in the Apaches
+after this wild product of the higher civilization of the
+whites. The principal group of prisoners taken after the
+attempted massacre of General Carr’s command was found
+in confinement at Camp Lowell, nine miles north of Tucson.
+There were forty-two of them, with Sanchez, their
+chief. They were of fairly regular features, and their
+expression, with the war-paint washed off, not unamiable.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_497">[497]</span>They were handcuffed together in couples, their legs also
+manacled, and now wore gray army under-shirts and cotton
+drawers, the rags in
+which they had come
+having been taken from
+them. Their long black
+hair hung about their
+ears, not frowzy, like
+that of the Yumas, but
+smoothly parted in the
+middle, and brushed
+back. A number wore
+red bands or kerchiefs
+around their heads.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus108" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus108.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>APACHE PRISONERS AT CAMP LOWELL.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_498">[498]</span></p>
+
+<p>Seen obscurely in the chief prison-room by side-light
+from a grated window, they had a certain resemblance to
+Greek insurgents, or the <i>sans culottes</i> of 1793, or, again,
+the wild Vendean peasants who fought with Rochejaquelein
+and Jean Chouan for religion and the king.</p>
+
+<p>They were taken out for an airing in the mornings,
+and allowed to squat in the sun at the edge of the pleasant
+parade-ground, flanked by its well-shaded row of
+officers’ dwellings. The recent rising had been the result
+of a fanatical delusion. A medicine-man persuaded
+them that he had received a revelation to drive all the
+whites from the land. As soon as the corn was ripe, he
+said, their dead brethren would arise and take arms to aid
+them in carrying out the decree of Heaven. He had, as
+many prophets have not, the courage of his convictions.
+Though taken in charge himself by the troops, he gave a
+signal agreed upon for the massacre of these to begin, calling
+to his people not to be concerned about his fate, as
+he would come to life and join them again in three days.</p>
+
+<p>The bluff Arizonians are apt to indulge in a derisive
+way of talking of the army and its relation to the savages.
+They would make but short work of these latter, they say,
+if they took the matter into their own hands. They imply
+that the army does not wish to kill off, or even wholly
+put down, the Indians, but rather to preserve them, as a
+gentle stimulus to public dread, to hasten promotions,
+and also to furnish occasion for profitable supply-contracts.
+However this may be, it would seem that after
+the repression of this revolt, and the rapid penetration of
+railroads into the Territory, Indians need no longer be a
+deterring influence of great moment with the intending
+settler. This old historic source of apprehension seems
+as good as abolished from its last stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>Eight miles to the north brings us to a ranch called
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_499">[499]</span>Fuller’s Hot Springs. This is one of the few places
+where a beginning of systematic cultivation has been
+made, and interesting besides as a typical Arizona summer
+resort. There was a young orchard of twenty-five
+acres, sheltered by a wind-break of three rows of ash-trees,
+doing very well in an alkali soil. The buildings
+consisted of a number of unpainted adobe houses, each
+of a single large, comfortable room, roofed with strips of
+cactus.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp62" id="illus109" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus109.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>AN ARIZONA WATERING-PLACE.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_500">[500]</span></p>
+
+<p>There was a “summer dining-room” made of ocotilla
+sticks, the intervals open; and a “winter dining-room,”
+with tight walls, and a fireplace, in which a wood-fire
+was burned mornings and evenings. The hot spring, a
+clear, pleasant water, said to resemble English Harrogate,
+ran out from below a bath-house, consisting of a patched
+canvas tent. It became, below, a pretty brook, a pond for
+the cattle, and source of supply for irrigating the orchard.
+The mountains behind the place, the Santa Catalinas, are
+like the Sierra Madres behind Los Angeles. They are of
+the same sharp fracture, but higher and grander, jutting
+up here and there into as perfect castles as those of
+Harlech, the Trostberg, or Rheinstein. Forests of pine of
+large dimensions crown a part of their summits. South
+and south-west, across the wide plain, appear the Rincons
+and silver-bearing Santa Ritas.</p>
+
+<p>There was a fascination in being able to examine at
+leisure the strange growths of the plain, and not merely
+to know them in glimpses from the car-windows. I
+made haste especially to cut down for inspection an example
+of the enormous saguara, the organ-cactus. Taller
+than that on the hill-sides of Guerrero along the Acapulco
+trail, it often rises to a height of sixty feet, bristles over
+the landscape like masts or columns, or, again, like the
+seven-branched candlestick of the Mosaic law. Inside it
+consists of a white, juicy pulp, imbedding a bundle of
+fibres in the form of long wands, which, when dried,
+serve a number of useful purposes. It has a palatable
+fruit, which the Indians collect from its top in August
+with forked sticks.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus110" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus110.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>CACTUS GROWTHS OF THE DESERT.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The ocotilla is simply a shrub growing as a wattle of
+sticks, fifteen or twenty together, only waiting to be cut
+down and turned into palings. The bisnaga is a thorny
+cactus like an immense watermelon growing on end. One
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_501">[501]</span>need never die of thirst where it is found.
+The cholla is a mass of spines, which are even
+barbed, on the fish-hook principle. It is considered
+funny to hear of somebody’s falling into a
+cholla, and nothing could better represent the
+traditional “bramble-bush” in which the
+man who was so wondrous wise met with
+the famous adventure of scratching out
+his eyes. The “deer-brush” somewhat
+resembles the horns of the animal. The
+palo verde—green stick—grows as large
+as an apple-tree, with the texture of a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_502">[502]</span>mammoth sea-weed. The “grease-wood” is a large bush,
+said to burn just as well when green as dry. Most of
+this vegetation is leafless, or rather the plant seems a
+leaf itself, since coarse bark is lacking, and the green of
+chlorophyll and the tenderness of structure seem equally
+distributed throughout.</p>
+
+<p>There are homely legends and superstitions about these
+plants of the desert. A certain one, for instance, poisons
+any white spot on a horse, but not one of any other
+color. Another, eaten by horses, makes them lazy and
+imbecile. The loco, or rattle-weed, on the other hand,
+drives them raving crazy, and they try to run themselves
+to death. I do not know whether this last be
+wholly a superstition, for I rode in California a horse
+whose eccentric proceedings could hardly be accounted
+for on any other basis.</p>
+
+<p>Tucson, from a distance, in early morning or late afternoon,
+is level, low, square, and brown, with a mellow
+light upon it and the castellated mountains behind it.
+In the foreground you see lazy ox-wains, a prospector,
+perhaps, with his pots and kettles, and a mounted Mexican
+towing by a lariat a bull, which ducks its head in
+vain resistance. From a distance it is thoroughly foreign,
+and of attractive promise. There is something of
+the Dead Sea apple in the realization of this promise.
+If Ruskin be right in holding that a house should be of
+the general color of the soil on which it stands, Tucson
+may lay claim to great artistic merit. It is entirely of
+adobe brick of the natural mud-color. Violent rainstorms
+occur, to the detriment of paint and kalsomine,
+on such a friable surface, and their use becomes a serious
+question of economy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_503">[503]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp95" id="illus111" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus111.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>STREET VIEW IN TUCSON.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_504">[504]</span></p>
+
+<p>Tucson has great antiquity as a mere corporate existence.
+It was founded by one of the early Spanish expeditions
+that came up the Santa Cruz Valley in quest
+of the reputed treasure of the Aztecs in the fabled “land
+of Cibola,” but retains no visible trace of age. If there
+were ever any monuments of importance, they have effectually
+vanished. Even the church is new. Such foreignness
+as there is consists of a very provincial Mexican
+squalor.</p>
+
+<p>The considerations of interest about it are of a purely
+utilitarian character, as: how it is to be paved, drained,
+lighted, provided with an adequate water supply, so as
+not to have to pay four cents a bucket for it, as at present;
+and how it is to get rid of its malarial fevers and
+shabby rookeries.</p>
+
+<p>A writer in one of the papers one day paid a glowing
+eulogy to its peculiar situation, in the desert. He held
+that this was a matter not only of those material products
+which I have mentioned, but also of the highest
+moral and intellectual advantages. It was apropos of the
+establishment of a public library. No great idea has ever
+been evolved in the usual scenes of human habitation (so
+the argument ran), and that there is no place for study
+and contemplation like the desert. Christ, Mahomet, Zoroaster,
+and Confucius all formulated their creeds in the
+desert. I gathered that we are to expect from Arizona,
+at the proper time, some new prophet or sage, to sway
+again the destinies of men in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>The correspondent was satisfied, at any rate, that, with
+a public library, Tucson could shortly become another
+Alexandria of the desert, “a seat of learning and fountain-head
+of ideas, to be sought by students from Mexico,
+from the Pacific Islands, from China and Japan, and the
+mountains and valleys of the Rio Grande,” and I for one
+shall be very glad to see it so.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_505">[505]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp48" id="illus112" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus112.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>EXTERIOR OF MISSION CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_506">[506]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is the commercial centre of the important Southern
+mining district, and has an eligible situation for future
+development. It has derived in its time considerable
+profit from furnishing supplies to the army, and from a
+smuggling trade with Mexico. The goods for this latter
+were taken out in teams, then “packed” over the mountain
+passes, on donkeys, to the objective points of Altar
+and Magdalena, in cactus-grown, arid Sonora.</p>
+
+<p>The traders at Tucson, again, are largely Jewish. A
+certain kind of “life” prevails freely, as at Tombstone.
+Roulette, faro, and other games of chance are played in a
+large way in the leading saloons, while the poor Mexicans
+gamble for small stakes at <i>fondas</i> of their own, where
+some wretched lithograph of Hidalgo or Zaragoza looks
+down on them from the walls. There is lacking, however,
+the choleric and dangerous air of Tombstone.
+People make way for you to pass if you wish, and do
+not seem exclusively occupied with looking about for
+somebody to tread on the tails of their coats.</p>
+
+<p>If Tucson be without historic remains of its own, it
+has one of the loveliest possible in its vicinity, the old
+mission church of San Xavier del Bac.</p>
+
+<p>San Xavier is on the reservation of the Christianized
+Papago Indians, in the Santa Cruz Valley, ten miles to
+the southward. It is a new sensation even for one from
+Mexico who may have flattered himself that he knew the
+style completely. This ancient landmark of a frontier
+civilization which, since its destruction, has not been even
+faintly approached in its kind, is not surpassed either in
+Mexico or out of it for the quaintness, the qualities of
+form and color, and the gentle sentiment of melancholy
+that appeal to the artistic sense. Old Father Time has
+trodden with heavy step on green wooden balconies in
+its front, broken out their floors, and left parts of them
+dangling free. The original sweet-toned bronze bells
+still hang in one of the towers. The space, terminating
+in a scrolled gable, between the towers is enriched with
+escutcheons and rampant lions, wreathed in foliage.
+Niches hold grotesque broken statues, and complicated
+pilasters flank the entrance door-way, the whole formed
+in stucco upon a basis of moulded bricks. Where a portion
+has fallen away it can be seen that the pilasters are
+constructed upon or held together by a centre consisting
+of a stick of timber.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_507">[507]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="illus113" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus113.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+    <p>INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN XAVIER DEL BAC.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_508">[508]</span></p>
+
+<p>The designer, whoever he may have been, was inspired
+by Venetian-Byzantine traditions. It is roofed with
+numerous simple domes and half-domes. The interior
+of these, frescoed with angels and evangelists, the chancel
+walls, almost covered with gilding, but stained and
+battered, and the painted and gilded lions on the chancel
+rails, recall to the least observant Saint Mark’s at Venice.
+The style is not quite consistently carried out, however.
+A later rococo decoration, as exuberant as the vagaries of
+East Indian work, mingles with and at places overrides
+it. A Henri II. candlestick will give a certain idea of
+the pattern of the columns.</p>
+
+<p>The date has disappeared from the façade, but it is believed
+to be about 1768, and the present edifice was built
+on the ruins of a former one, going back much nearer to
+1654, when the mission to the Papagos was first begun.
+Large angels, with bannerets, their draperies formed of
+<i>papier-maché</i> or gummed muslin, are attached to the
+main chancel piers; and a painted and gilded Virgin,
+with a long face, and hair brushed up from a high forehead,
+as in the sculptures of Jean Goujon, looks down
+from a high altar niche.</p>
+
+<p>All within is of a mediæval richness and obscurity.
+All without is broad sunshine falling upon the peaceful
+Papago village. A few old men trudge about, concerning
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_509">[509]</span>themselves with their bake-ovens and some water-jars
+and strings of dried squashes, and women pass by
+with tall loads of hay and other produce carried in the
+<i>kijo</i>, a singular hamper of sticks and netting, on their
+backs. Nobody concerns himself about visitors, except
+a foolishly smiling boy, one Domingo, who has brought
+us the key.</p>
+
+<p>To have come from that spasm of aggressive modernism,
+Tombstone, and to be at ancient San Xavier del Bac—it
+seemed to me that contrast could little farther go.</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage">THE END.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_510">[510]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="FOOTNOTES">FOOTNOTES</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> Detailed figures of our trade with Mexico, and other useful matters,
+will be found in the “Border States of Mexico,” by Leonidas
+Hamilton. Chicago, 1882.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> Brocklehurst’s “Mexico To-day.” John Murray: London, 1883.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Si á lo lid contra hueste enemiga</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Nos convoca la trompa guerrera,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">De Iturbide la sacra bandera,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Mexicanos valientes, seguid!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak"><span class="smaller">VALUABLE AND INTERESTING WORKS<br>
+<span class="smaller">FOR</span><br>
+PUBLIC &amp; PRIVATE LIBRARIES,</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">Published by HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, New York</span>.</h2>
+
+<p>☞ <i>For a full List of Books suitable for Libraries published by
+<span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span>,see <span class="smcap">Harper’s
+Catalogue</span>, which may be had gratuitously on application to the publishers
+personally, or by letter enclosing Nine Cents in postage stamps.</i></p>
+
+<p>☞ <i><span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span> will send their
+publications by mail, postage prepaid, on receipt of the price.</i></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="hanging mt2">MACAULAY’S ENGLAND. The History of England from the Accession
+of James II. By <span class="smcap">Thomas Babington Macaulay</span>. New
+Edition, from New Electrotype Plates. 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels,
+Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, 5 vols., in a Box, $10 00 per set.
+Sold only in Sets. Cheap Edition, 5 vols., in a Box, 12mo, Cloth,
+$2 50; Sheep, $3 75.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MACAULAY’S MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. The Miscellaneous
+Works of Lord Macaulay. From New Electrotype Plates. In Five
+Volumes. 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt
+Tops, in a Box, $10 00. Sold only in Sets.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HUME’S ENGLAND. History of England, from the Invasion of
+Julius Cæsar to the Abdication of James II., 1688. By <span class="smcap">David
+Hume</span>. New and Elegant Library Edition, from New Electrotype
+Plates. 6 vols., in a Box, 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels, Uncut
+Edges and Gilt Tops, $12 00. Sold only in Sets. Popular Edition,
+6 vols., in a Box, 12mo, Cloth, $3 00; Sheep, $4 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GIBBON’S ROME. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire. By <span class="smcap">Edward Gibbon</span>. With Notes by Dean <span class="smcap">Milman</span>,
+<span class="smcap">M. Guizot</span>, and Dr. <span class="smcap">William Smith</span>. New Edition, from
+New Electrotype Plates. 6 vols., 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels,
+Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $12 00. Sold only in Sets. Popular
+Edition, 6 vols., in a Box, 12mo, Cloth, $3 00; Sheep, $4 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HILDRETH’S UNITED STATES. History of the United States.
+<span class="smcap">First Series</span>: From the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization
+of the Government under the Federal Constitution. <span class="smcap">Second
+Series</span>: From the Adoption of the Federal Constitution to the
+End of the Sixteenth Congress. By <span class="smcap">Richard Hildreth</span>. Popular
+Edition, 6 vols., in a Box, 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels, Uncut
+Edges and Gilt Tops, $12 00. Sold only in Sets.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_2">[2]</span></p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MOTLEY’S DUTCH REPUBLIC. The Rise of the Dutch Republic.
+A History. By <span class="smcap">John Lothrop Motley</span>, LL.D., D.C.L. With a
+Portrait of William of Orange. Cheap Edition, 3 vols., in a Box,
+8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $6 00.
+Sold only in Sets. Original Library Edition, 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth,
+$10 50; Sheep, $12 00; Half Calf, $17 25.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MOTLEY’S UNITED NETHERLANDS. History of the United
+Netherlands: From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve
+Years’ Truce—1584-1609. With a full View of the English-Dutch
+Struggle against Spain, and of the Origin and Destruction of the
+Spanish Armada. By <span class="smcap">John Lothrop Motley</span>, LL.D., D.C.L.
+Portraits. Cheap Edition, 4 vols., in a Box, 8vo, Cloth, with Paper
+Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $8 00. Sold only in Sets.
+Original Library Edition, 4 volumes, 8vo, Cloth, $14 00; Sheep,
+$16 00; Half Calf, $23 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MOTLEY’S JOHN OF BARNEVELD. The Life and Death of John
+of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland. With a View of the Primary
+Causes and Movements of the “Thirty Years’ War.” By <span class="smcap">John
+Lothrop Motley</span>, LL.D., D.C.L. Illustrated. Cheap Edition,
+2 vols., in a Box, 8vo, Cloth, with Paper Labels, Uncut Edges and
+Gilt Tops, $4 00. Sold only in Sets. Original Library Edition,
+2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $7 00; Sheep, $8 00; Half Calf, $11 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GOLDSMITH’S WORKS. The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Edited
+by <span class="smcap">Peter Cunningham</span>, F.S.A. From New Electrotype Plates.
+4 vols., 8vo, Cloth, Paper Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops,
+$8 00. Uniform with the New Library Editions of Macaulay,
+Hume, Gibbon, Motley, and Hildreth.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GEDDES’S JOHN DE WITT. History of the Administration of
+John De Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland. By <span class="smcap">James Geddes</span>.
+Vol. I.—1623-1654. With a Portrait. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HUDSON’S HISTORY OF JOURNALISM. Journalism in the
+United States, from 1690 to 1872. By <span class="smcap">Frederic Hudson</span>. 8vo,
+Cloth, $5 00; Half Calf, $7 25.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">SYMONDS’S SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE.
+By <span class="smcap">John Addington Symonds</span>. In Two Volumes. Post
+8vo, Cloth, $4 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">SYMONDS’S GREEK POETS. Studies of the Greek Poets. By
+<span class="smcap">John Addington Symonds</span>. 2 vols., Square 16mo, Cloth, $3 50.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_3">[3]</span></p>
+
+<p class="hanging">TREVELYAN’S LIFE OF MACAULAY. The Life and Letters of
+Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, <span class="smcap">G. Otto Trevelyan</span>, M.P.
+With Portrait on Steel. Complete in 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, Uncut
+Edges and Gilt Tops, $5 00; Sheep, $6 00; Half Calf, $9 50.
+Popular Edition, 2 vols. in one, 12mo, Cloth, $1 75.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">TREVELYAN’S LIFE OF FOX. The Early History of Charles
+James Fox. By <span class="smcap">George Otto Trevelyan</span>. 8vo, Cloth, Uncut
+Edges and Gilt Tops, $2 50; 4to, Paper, 20 cents.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MÜLLER’S POLITICAL HISTORY OF RECENT TIMES. Political
+History of Recent Times (1816-1875). With Special Reference
+to Germany. By <span class="smcap">William Müller</span>. Revised and Enlarged
+by the Author. Translated, with an Appendix covering the Period
+from 1876 to 1881, by the Rev. <span class="smcap">John P. Peters</span>, Ph.D. 12mo,
+Cloth, $3 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">LOSSING’S CYCLOPÆDIA OF UNITED STATES HISTORY.
+Popular Cyclopædia of United States History. From the Aboriginal
+Period to 1876. By <span class="smcap">B. J. Lossing</span>, LL.D. Illustrated by 2 Steel
+Portraits and over 1000 Engravings. 2 vols., Royal 8vo, Cloth,
+$12 00. (<i>Sold by Subscription only.</i>)</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">LOSSING’S FIELD-BOOK OF THE REVOLUTION. Pictorial
+Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations by Pen and Pencil
+of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the
+War for Independence. By <span class="smcap">Benson J. Lossing</span>. 2 vols., 8vo,
+Cloth, $14 00; Sheep or Roan, $15 00; Half Calf, $18 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">LOSSING’S FIELD-BOOK OF THE WAR OF 1812. Pictorial
+Field-Book of the War of 1812; or, Illustrations by Pen and Pencil
+of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the
+last War for American Independence. By <span class="smcap">Benson J. Lossing</span>.
+With several hundred Engravings on Wood by Lossing and Barritt,
+chiefly from Original Sketches by the Author. 1088 pages, 8vo,
+Cloth, $7 00; Sheep, $8 50; Roan, $9 00; Half Calf, $10 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">PARTON’S CARICATURE. Caricature and Other Comic Art, in
+All Times and Many Lands. By <span class="smcap">James Parton</span>. 203 Illustrations.
+8vo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $5 00; Half Calf, $7 25.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MAHAFFY’S GREEK LITERATURE. A History of Classical
+Greek Literature. By <span class="smcap">J. P. Mahaffy</span>. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth,
+$4 00; Half Calf, $7 50.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_4">[4]</span></p>
+
+<p class="hanging">DU CHAILLU’S LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN. Summer
+and Winter Journeys in Sweden, Norway, and Lapland, and Northern
+Finland. By <span class="smcap">Paul B. Du Chaillu</span>. Illustrated. 2 vols.,
+8vo, Cloth, $7 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">DU CHAILLU’S EQUATORIAL AFRICA. Explorations and Adventures
+in Equatorial Africa: with Accounts of the Manners and
+Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, Crocodile,
+Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By <span class="smcap">P. B.
+Du Chaillu</span>. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Sheep, $5 50;
+Half Calf, $7 25.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">DU CHAILLU’S ASHANGO LAND. A Journey to Ashango Land,
+and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. By <span class="smcap">P. B. Du
+Chaillu</span>. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Sheep, $5 50; Half
+Calf, $7 25.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">DEXTER’S CONGREGATIONALISM. The Congregationalism of
+the Last Three Hundred Years, as Seen in its Literature: with
+Special Reference to certain Recondite, Neglected, or Disputed
+Passages. With a Bibliographical Appendix. By <span class="smcap">H. M. Dexter</span>.
+Large 8vo, Cloth, $6 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">STANLEY’S THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT. Through
+the Dark Continent; or, The Sources of the Nile, Around the Great
+Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and Down the Livingstone River to the
+Atlantic Ocean. 149 Illustrations and 10 Maps. By <span class="smcap">H. M. Stanley</span>.
+2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10 00; Sheep, $12 00; Half Morocco,
+$15 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">BARTLETT’S FROM EGYPT TO PALESTINE. From Egypt to
+Palestine: Through Sinai, the Wilderness, and the South Country.
+Observations of a Journey made with Special Reference to the History
+of the Israelites. By <span class="smcap">S. C. Bartlett</span>, D.D., LL.D. With
+Maps and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">FORSTER’S LIFE OF DEAN SWIFT. The Early Life of Jonathan
+Swift (1667-1711). By <span class="smcap">John Forster</span>. With Portrait. 8vo,
+Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $2 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GREEN’S ENGLISH PEOPLE. History of the English People.
+By <span class="smcap">John Richard Green</span>, M.A. Four Volumes. With Maps.
+8vo, Cloth, $2 50 per volume.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GREEN’S MAKING OF ENGLAND. The Making of England.
+By <span class="smcap">J. R. Green</span>. With Maps. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_5">[5]</span></p>
+
+<p class="hanging">SHORT’S NORTH AMERICANS OF ANTIQUITY. The North
+Americans of Antiquity. Their Origin, Migrations, and Type of
+Civilization Considered. By <span class="smcap">John T. Short</span>. Illustrated. 8vo,
+Cloth, $3 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">SQUIER’S PERU. Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in
+the Land of the Incas. By <span class="smcap">E. George Squier</span>, M.A., F.S.A., late
+U. S. Commissioner to Peru. With Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth,
+$5 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">BENJAMIN’S CONTEMPORARY ART. Contemporary Art in
+Europe. By <span class="smcap">S. G. W. Benjamin</span>. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">BENJAMIN’S ART IN AMERICA. Art in America. By <span class="smcap">S. G. W.
+Benjamin</span>. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">REBER’S HISTORY OF ANCIENT ART. History of Ancient
+Art. By Dr. <span class="smcap">Franz von Reber</span>. Revised by the Author. Translated
+and Augmented by Joseph Thacher Clarke. With 310 Illustrations
+and a Glossary of Technical Terms. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">ADAMS’S MANUAL OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE. A Manual
+of Historical Literature. Comprising Brief Descriptions of the
+Most Important Histories in English, French, and German. By
+Professor <span class="smcap">C. K. Adams</span>. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">KINGLAKE’S CRIMEAN WAR. The Invasion of the Crimea: its
+Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord
+Raglan. By <span class="smcap">Alexander William Kinglake</span>. With Maps and
+Plans. Four Volumes now ready. 12mo, Cloth, $2 00 per vol.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">MAURY’S PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. The Physical
+Geography of the Sea, and its Meteorology. By <span class="smcap">M. F. Maury</span>,
+LL.D. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HALLAM’S LITERATURE. Introduction to the Literature of Europe
+during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries.
+By <span class="smcap">Henry Hallam</span>. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4 00; Sheep, $5 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HALLAM’S MIDDLE AGES. View of the State of Europe during
+the Middle Ages. By <span class="smcap">H. Hallam</span>. 8vo, Cloth, $2 00; Sheep,
+$2 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">HALLAM’S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. The
+Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry
+VII. to the Death of George II. By <span class="smcap">Henry Hallam</span>. 8vo, Cloth,
+$2 00; Sheep, $2 50.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Ad_Page_6">[6]</span></p>
+
+<p class="hanging">ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. Edited by <span class="smcap">John Morley</span>.
+The following volumes are now ready. Others will follow:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><span class="smcap">Johnson.</span> By L. Stephen.—<span class="smcap">Gibbon.</span> By J. C. Morison.—<span class="smcap">Scott.</span>
+By R. H. Hutton.—<span class="smcap">Shelley.</span> By J. A. Symonds.—<span class="smcap">Goldsmith.</span>
+By W. Black.—<span class="smcap">Hume.</span> By Professor Huxley.—<span class="smcap">Defoe.</span>
+By W. Minto.—<span class="smcap">Burns.</span> By Principal Shairp.—<span class="smcap">Spenser.</span> By R.
+W. Church.—<span class="smcap">Thackeray.</span> By A. Trollope.—<span class="smcap">Burke.</span> By J. Morley.—<span class="smcap">Milton.</span>
+By M. Pattison.—<span class="smcap">Southey.</span> By E. Dowden.—<span class="smcap">Chaucer.</span>
+By A. W. Ward.—<span class="smcap">Bunyan.</span> By J.A. Froude.—<span class="smcap">Cowper.</span>
+By G. Smith.—<span class="smcap">Pope.</span> By L. Stephen.—<span class="smcap">Byron.</span> By J.
+Nichols.—<span class="smcap">Locke.</span> By T. Fowler.—<span class="smcap">Wordsworth.</span> By F. W. H.
+Myers.—<span class="smcap">Hawthorne.</span> By Henry James, Jr.—<span class="smcap">Dryden.</span> By G.
+Saintsbury.—<span class="smcap">Landor.</span> By S. Colvin.—<span class="smcap">De Quincey.</span> By D. Masson.—<span class="smcap">Lamb.</span>
+By A. Ainger.—<span class="smcap">Bentley.</span> By R. C. Jebb.—<span class="smcap">Dickens.</span>
+By A. W. Ward.—<span class="smcap">Gray.</span> By E. W. Gosse.—<span class="smcap">Swift.</span> By
+L. Stephen.—<span class="smcap">Sterne.</span> By H. D. Traill.—<span class="smcap">Macaulay.</span> By J. C.
+Morison.—<span class="smcap">Fielding.</span> By Austin Dobson. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents
+per volume.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="hanging">NEWCOMB’S ASTRONOMY. Popular Astronomy. By <span class="smcap">Simon
+Newcomb</span>, LL.D. With One Hundred and Twelve Engravings, and
+five Maps of the Stars. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50; School Edition, 12mo,
+Cloth, $1 30.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">PRIME’S POTTERY AND PORCELAIN. Pottery and Porcelain
+of All Times and Nations. With Tables of Factory and Artists’
+Marks, for the Use of Collectors. By <span class="smcap">William C. Prime</span>, LL.D.
+Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $7 00; Half
+Calf, $9 25. (In a Box.)</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">CESNOLA’S CYPRUS. Cyprus: its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and
+Temples. A Narrative of Researches and Excavations during Ten
+Years’ Residence in that Island. By <span class="smcap">L. P. di Cesnola</span>. With
+Portrait, Maps, and 400 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Extra, Gilt Tops
+and Uncut Edges, $7 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">TENNYSON’S COMPLETE POEMS. The Poetical Works of Alfred
+Tennyson. With numerous Illustrations by Eminent Artists,
+and Three Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, Paper, $1 00; Cloth,
+$1 50.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">VAN-LENNEP’S BIBLE LANDS. Bible Lands: their Modern Customs
+and Manners Illustrative of Scripture. By <span class="smcap">Henry J. Van-Lennep</span>,
+D.D. 350 Engravings and 2 Colored Maps. 8vo, Cloth,
+$5 00; Sheep, $6 00; Half Morocco or Half Calf, $8 00.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE. 12 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $18 00;
+Sheep, $22 80; Half Calf, $39 00.</p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77881 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77881
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77881)