Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

BULL-FIGHTING.

The Aztec in his palmy day offered human sacrifice. He daily made war upon his neighbors to secure the victims, and washing his hands in gore has been his profession for six hundred years; this is why bull-fighting with its fascination and danger and death is to him so dear.

Every Sunday afternoon and every feast-day is given up to this bloody pastime and everybody goes. The foreigner goes once, sometimes twice, but rarely three times, but he never forgets what he sees. Four dead bulls, three dead horses, from one to three maimed or dead men is the possible result of a Sunday’s sport. Each city has its plaza de torus or bull-ring, just as we have theaters, and the bull-fighters go from town to town as our opera companies. The stars of the company are the swordsmen. The bull-ring is a circular amphitheater, after the manner of the Roman Coliseum, and will seat from four to twenty thousand. The government takes a strong hand in lotteries and bull-fights, and in the latter, receives twenty-one per cent. of the gate receipts. In the federal district, the secretary of the republic presides at the fight.

Four different haciendas are licensed by the government to breed bulls for fighting purposes, Durango and Cazadero being the most noted. Poncama Diaz, a nephew of the president, is called the star matador of the world, and owns the Bucarelli bull-ring in the city, which is capable of seating 20,000 people. The arena is a circle 200 feet in diameter, and open to the sky. Around this is an eight foot wall to protect the people, and at intervals along this wall are “escapes” for the fighters when the bulls decide there is not enough room in the ring. Receding from the ring are the tiers of seats arranged in the manner of a circus. Those on the shady side usually selling for a dollar, while the “bleachers” sell for 25 or 37 cents. Over these seats are the private boxes, and above all the gallery for the olla podrida.

An ordinary troupe consists of two matadores or swordsmen, four banderilleros or dart stickers, two or four picadores or lancers, and the lazadores who lasso and drag the dead animals from the ring. The program usually consists of the killing of four bulls in an hour, with sometimes an extra. The president of the function, (every thing here is a function) may reject any part of the performance or fine any member who commits a breach of ring etiquette. The performance is set for four o’clock and is always the same. The crowd waits, grows impatient, the band plays. The crowd grows more impatient, the band plays again—plays all the time. Finally the judge appears, (every function must have a mediator between the people and the event) and is seated in his decorated box, and the band plays again.

The judge makes a sign to the bugler who blows the opening of the gates, through which comes a snow-white horse bearing a rider dressed in green and gold, with knee pants and silver buckles, flowing cape, cocked hat and waving plume. This is the president of the company, and he begs the permission and approval of the fight. The judge assents and throws him the keys of the bull-ring, (what else is he there for?) and the rider retires. Again the bugler blows and the company enter in full force, and the costume of each is worth a thousand dollars in gold. No two are dressed alike as to color. Silk jackets that reach the waist, knee pants and silk stockings and a cockade hat, all present the prismatic colors of the rainbow. Around each is a Spanish cloak, held around the waist with the left hand. As they make their bow to the audience, the cloak is let loose with the left hand and swings around gracefully pendant from the left shoulder.

Again the bugle blows, and through the open gate a fierce bull from the mountain is ushered in. As he passes the gate a man overhead thrusts a steel dart into his shoulder, and on the dart is a rosette and a silk ribbon bearing the name of the hacienda whence he came. Maddened by the wound and frightened by the noise and people, he seeks the cause, and sees two horsemen in the arena. The horse is blindfolded to prevent his shying, and has a piece of sole-leather covering his side for protection. The horseman has a lance and endeavors to thrust it into his shoulder to ward him off. The lance point is short and is not meant to do serious harm, but to wound and irritate the bull and make him furious for the final battle. Sometimes the lance fails to score, sometimes it holds in his tough hide and the handle breaks and the bull buries his horns in the horse’s belly, and hurls both horse and rider in the air.

The horse was intended for the sacrifice from the beginning, and this was a part of the program. When the bull has killed one or two horses, he is encouraged to fight, and that is just what the whole thing is for. A man with a red flag draws the bull’s attention to the other side while the dead horse is dragged out, and sometimes a dead man. Again the bugle blows and the ring is cleared, and two banderilleros enter. With a red flag one gets the bull’s attention, and a banderillero runs to the center. In each hand he holds a banderilla, a sharp steel dart about a foot long, and ornamented with rosettes and streamers. When the bull charges, he must reach over his horns and plant both of his banderillas in a shoulder at the same time. Sometimes the spread of horns is four feet, and the banderillero must make the pass and escape in a flash. As the bull makes the charge in a frenzied run, you find yourself unconsciously rising from your seat in anticipation of the almost certain death of the man, and women who see it for the first time usually faint and are promptly carried out.

Should the man succeed in planting the banderillas, the crowd shower cigars and flowers and fans upon him and shout bravo! bravo! Should the bull succeed in thrusting his horns through the man’s equatorial region and toss him in the air, the crowd shout bravo torus! just the same and cheer and whistle. They paid their money to see blood and what does it matter if it be man or bull’s? At this point it is proper for the American ladies to faint and come to and hurry out, while the Mexicans laugh at people who leave before the fun begins. The idea of fainting for such a small thing! The dead man is carried out and the other banderillero takes his place, and as the bull charges he must plant his banderillas in the other shoulder. Sometimes the experts vary the program by sitting in a chair until the bull is within six feet of him, and then rises and makes his thrust in time to escape, and the bull goes off writhing in pain and trying to shake the cruel darts from his shoulder.

Sometimes a detachable rosette is thrust between his eyes as he charges, and the stream of blood that follows betrays the steel point behind the beautiful rosette. Then men with red flags will tantalize him. They stand behind the flag, and as the bull charges the men step aside, holding the flag at arm’s length in the same place, and the bull passes under the flag into empty air, where the man was. Quick as a cat he detects the fraud and turns upon the man, who makes a two-forty sprint to one of the escapes, where the bull tries to batter down the planks to get to him. The bull is now mad enough to fight a circular saw, and again the bugle blows. The ring is cleared and now enters the matador. The judge hands him a red flag and a sword. He must now challenge the bull to single combat, and to the victor belong the congratulations, and the man knows full well that if he gets killed the crowd will cheer the bull just as heartily as they would if it were the other way.

All the preliminaries of the fight were to aggravate the bull to his highest fighting power, then turn him over to the matador, the “star of the evening.” Rules as rigid as the Marquis of Queenbury prevail, and woe to the man who should violate a rule or take advantage of the bull! The judge would instantly order him from the ring and fine him. The ethics of the fight require that the man shall stand in the middle of the ring, wave the red flag as a challenge, and as the bull starts toward him put the flag behind him. As the bull charges, he must reach over his horns, thrust the sword through his shoulder, pierce the heart, and the point of the sword must appear between the bull’s fore legs, and it must all be done in a single stroke.

The hand and the eye must be as quick as lightning to do that when the bull is on the run. If the stroke is successful, the sword flashes a moment in the air and the next its hilt is resting against the shoulder blades, and the bull falls as if struck by lightning. Then the air is rent with shouts and dollars and fans and handkerchiefs, and with one foot upon the dead animal, the matador bows his appreciation. The bugle blows, the two lazadores gallop in, throw their lariats over the two hind legs of the bull, and without checking their gallop, drag him out and prepare for another. A bull is killed every fifteen minutes as regular as the clock.

Sometimes the sword misses the heart, and the bull walks off with a stream of blood and an ugly sword wound, and then the hisses and remarks that fall upon the matador sometimes drive him to suicide. I saw a matador driven to desperation by the hisses, and seizing another sword he made the stroke just behind the ear, severing the medulla oblongata, a more difficult stroke than the other, thereby redeeming himself. Sometimes a bull with wide stretch of horns will disconcert a matador and he will attempt to retreat at the last moment, but then it is as often death as escape.

One Sunday a company had unusually bad luck. Three horses and two men had already been killed, and only two bulls, and the troupe had no more matadors. One man was apologizing to the audience that the sport could not proceed as he had already lost two men, when the bull suddenly made a charge upon him and caught him between the shoulders. The “sport” closed for the day, and the people pronounced it a great success.

The next Sunday there was hardly standing room from the crowd that came back hoping for a similar show. I met the crowd returning, and asked how was the fight? Several shook their heads and looked dejected. “No bueno, nobody was killed and the whole thing was a fiasco.” If a bull refuses to fight after the lance has been thrust into him, the bugler at a sign from the judge blows him out. It must be a bloody, thoroughbred fight or none at all. It requires a long education to harden people to suffering and blood as these people practice daily. I saw two soldiers walk out of the barrack to fight a duel with pocket-knives, and a hundred people stood by and saw them kill each other and not a hand was raised to stay them. The modo duello among the cow-boys is very effective. When two cow-boys have a difficulty that cannot be settled, their friends take them off and tie their left hands together and stick two bowie knives in the ground for their right hands, and leave them. The one that is left alive can cut himself loose and come back to camp. If neither comes back by the next day, the friends go over and bury them. There is also a woman bull-fighter in Mexico; her name is La Charita. Arizona Charley, an American cowboy has also endeared himself to the Mexican heart by proving himself a first-class matador. Bull-fighting is as much a national sport as our base-ball. At one time it was interdicted in the federal district, and the people would go to Puebla every Sunday, seventy-five miles away, to see the “sport.” To the lovers of the sport it matters little whether the bull or horse or the man gets killed, or all three. What they want is their money’s worth.

The meat is sold to the butchers after the fight, and Monday morning when the waiter asks the Americano how is his steak, the answer generally comes, “It’s bully.”

CHAPTER XI.
LA VIGA CANAL.

ON the side-walk adjacent to the western entrance to the cathedral is an iron and glass Kiosk. This is Mexico’s flower market. Every morning in the year from daybreak until eight o’clock, the sidewalk and the adjoining street is one mass of fragrance and color. Every flower you know and as many as you do not know are spread in the greatest profusion possible, which fact suggests an inexhaustible supply-house somewhere. Here are roses, jassamines, pansies, violets, heliotropes, sweetpeas, gardenias, camelias, lilies, honeysuckles, forget-me-nots, verbenas, lark-spurs, poppies, morning-glories, tulips, geraniums, and orchids of untold variety and color. And there were purchasers. Priests from all the churches, milliners and café proprietors, dry-goods’ merchants, hotel keepers, the señora in her private carriage, señoritas with holy shrines and patron saints to honor, devotees whose special saint day is to be celebrated by a fiesta—everybody buys flowers, and they come by the ton as fast as other tons are sold. And they are arranged by master hands into cornucopias, crosses for the church altar, wreaths for the funeral car, decorations for the cemetery, and into any design the purchaser may indicate.

GROUP EL ABRA.

I ask where such a world of flowers can come from in such an unbroken stream. “From Las Chinampas,” the floating gardens. Floating Gardens! that sounded like the tales I had read, and here are people just from them! I anxiously ask where are they: “En Canal La Viga;” and so the search began. A street-car takes us to La Embarcadero where a hundred eager boatmen leave the wharf and come running to see us. I always thought I was popular, but here was an ovation I had not looked for. Then I learned something new. Each of my hundred friends had the best boat on La Viga, and each of my hundred friends was the best pilot from the canal to the lakes. Here was absolute perfection in ship building and nautical knowledge that would make Diogenes put up his lamp and say: “Eureka!” After each had extolled the virtues of his particular scow, or flatboat, or raft, whichever it approached nearest in appearance, we chose one.

If Canal La Viga was ever dug by man, history is silent about it. It was here when the conquerors came. It serves the same purpose as Niagara River, and brings the water of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco down to Lake Texcoco. It has a uniform width and depth, and its banks are lined with stately avenues of trees the entire length. To the great middle-class and Indians, this is the great highway of commerce and resort for pleasure. Sundays and feast days it is a mass of moving color. In the dim past this city was the Venice of the New World, so boating is an inheritance. The boats are from ten to fifteen feet long; from four to eight wide and are generally poled along. There is an awning and comfortable seats where the passenger may enjoy the scenery protected from the sun. You make any arrangement you can as to price, and your boatman spits on his hands and pushes off, and if it is early in the morning you meet hundreds of crafts coming to market loaded down with fruits, grain and vegetables, pigs, lambs and chickens, and charcoal and baskets and everything else that the Lake country produces. The vegetables, by irrigation, surpass anything you have over met in that line; heads of lettuce larger than cabbage, and radishes as large as an ear of corn. A diminutive steam tug is met, trailing twelve or fifteen barges loaded with grain and cordwood from the upper lakes. Under a shade tree by the water, is a laundry after the fashion of the country, and a man and woman are washing clothes. The man’s part consists in sitting down and looking tired while the woman scrubs.

If it is Sunday the boats are laden with garlanded merry-makers with tinkling guitars and singing and dancing and having a “large time.” On the right is the once famous Paseo de La Viga, whose glory has long since departed to the Paseo de La Reforma. In spite of its neglect, La Viga is one of the most delightful drives in the city, especially in early morn, when canal traffic is at its best, and during Holy Week when the great middle-class take their holiday. Almost immediately after starting, we reach the old puebla of Jamaica, which, like the Paseo, has the look of having seen better times. On the opposite bank and by the Paseo, stands a melancholy bust of Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec chieftains, whom the Mexicans delight to honor—another testimonial of ancient aristocratic grandeur. The next point of interest is the old Garita de la Viga, the custom-house building, dating back to Spanish times.

Until a month prior to this writing, all boats paid custom duties on whatever merchandise they brought to the city. When the duties were paid the smaller boats were admitted through a small gate-way, which necessitated the lowering of the awnings, while the large ones had to discharge their cargoes.

On the up-stream side of the romantic old bridge is always a blockade of boats of every description, from mud scows to steamboats, waiting for a transfer. The first town beyond the Garita is the quaint little town of Santa Anita, the Coney Island of the Canal. It is essentially a Mexican town of thatched reed houses, nearly every one a restaurant for the sale of those unnamable dishes one meets with so often, which have a far-off smell, but fill a long-felt want. After hearing their names called, you are no wiser, but feel better. There are also liquid and semi-liquid refreshments to suit the taste, provided your sense of taste has been destroyed before coming here. The insidious and seductive pulque mixed with the firey tequila and mescal are all loaded with malice præpens, and are better left to the lava-scarred throats that have met them before. All the fruit drinks are excellent, but the drink par excellence is the pina. It is made from grated pine-apple, sweetened with sugar and cooled with the snow just brought from Popocatapetl that morning.

When Horace sang of the wine of Brundusium cooled with the snows of Hymettus, he had not heard of the pina of Santa Anita backed up by Popocatapetl. Here are games, and all manner of games peculiar to the people, and flower-booths where the people buy flowers and garland each other, where even the humblest may wear a crown woven of fragrant flowers woven by the hand of Romeo or Juliet, only they call each other Ramon and Inez. Here is a fine old church with a beautiful tower and a diminutive plaza with restful seats and entrancing music.

Be sure to stop at the hacienda of Don Juan Corona. He was a retired bull-fighter, and in his old age became antiquarian, and his house is a vast museum of costly and rare antiquities. When he died he left a legacy to found a school for the poor, and if you have any pennies to bestow upon the señora who shows you around, they will be well spent.

We leave the merry-makers and proceed on our search for las chinampas, after our boatman has mulcted us for coppers enough to tank up at a pulque joint. The thick ropy liquid has loosened his tongue in a marvelous manner, and the flood gates of his information bureau are raised, and for an hour he gives us chapters of unwritten history and legends of the country. That which I knew, he gave in Spanish, and that which neither of us knew he gave in Aztec, and he justified his claim of being the best informed guide on La Viga. Henceforth I call him Ananias. The two snow-clad volcanoes were close by on our left and I asked him which was Ixtaccihuatl and which Popocatepetl. “This is Esclaéwa and that is Popocaltepay,” he promptly answered. I said: “Man, your pronounciation is bent a little bit to starboard; everybody else says Popocatepetl.” “Of course they do,” he said, “which only proves that everybody else is wrong. I say it is Popocaltepay.” That scored one more for that designing pulque, and added to the title of Ananias, that of Geographer with a pedigree only three removes by blood from some people Baron Munchausen once knew.

The next town reached was Ixtacalco, where the people seem to have sobered down, and the burg showed less bent for pleasure and more for business. Here a fine old stone bridge crosses La Viga, and a discouraged old chapel with its portals wandering down to the water’s edge, where, in the good old days gone by, the boatman muttered an ave and deposited his offering to the saint in whose honor it was consecrated, in the hope that good luck might attend his market voyage. In front of the church, dedicated to Saint Matias, and which is a Franciscan foundation of more than three hundred years ago, is a little plaza with a fountain of running water. Along the lane from this plaza and marked by a palm-tree, is the ruin of what was once the chapel of Santiago, which is used as a dwelling.

In the midst of these inhabitants is the remnant of what was once a most gallant image of Santiago himself, now galloping to defend the faith on a headless horse, another relic of the romantic past, the work possibly of some cavalier of Spain, under the leadership of that prince of brave men, Hernan Cortez—for cruel as he was, we cannot withhold from him the meed he justly earned in bearding the lion in his den, though The New World Venice was buried in his blood-reeking canals. Who knows whose work it was, least of all the inhabitants of Ixtacalco, or the mutilated image itself, or if it knows, it discloses not its secret. We told Ananias to drive on, but that worthy assumed an electrocuted countenance that was wonderful to behold. The long distance had already paralyzed one side, and “He barely had strength enough to take him back to the city, and the Lake is fifteen kilometers. You will have to hire another boatman from here, and señor, by all the saints I could not pass that bridge, it is beyond my territory, and besides, señor, how much more will you give me to carry you to the next town?”

There! at last we see him in his true light, a pirate! Three well-earned titles in one day and it was not a very good day for titles either, and he had no appearance of aristocracy either. Certainly he did not belong to the Order of the Bath. “Here,” said I, “I will give you three cents to get drunk and drown yourself.” Off came his sombrero and down came a salaam almost to the prow of his boat. “Señor, I think I heard you say you wanted to see the chinampas.” “Chinampas! why of course, that is what I left the city to see, where are they?” “Well señor, we passed the floating garden a mile back at Santa Anita.” Caramba! Here was the title of knave to add to his already long list. With the hope of “holding me up” at the bridge for a raise in wages, he had silently passed the chinampas for fear I would stop.

My admiration began to grow for this Captain Kidd, and I was anxious to know how many cards he yet held up his sleeve, but it was expensive, so telling him to soak his head, I crossed the bridge and struck out upon the causeway, and for miles and miles there was nothing but chinampas! They could have been seen from Ananias’ boat had it not been for the bank of the canal. This then was the mint where the flowers and vegetables were coined for the great city. Floating garden is now a misnomer. In years gone by they really floated on rafts, but as the French say “Nous avons change tout cela.” Since the lake was drained they are all stationary and are likely to remain so unless “Popocaltepay” resumes business again.

The Chinampas are a net-work of islands—Venice moved from the city to the lakes. The land-owner simply taps the canal with a ditch, leads it around three sides of a square and brings it into the canal again, making a rectangular island of any dimension he chooses. His neighbor beyond taps to his canal, and the system is extended for miles and miles just like the streets of a city, the business blocks answering for the islands. Through these canal streets dart thousands of boats that harvest the crops that grow here forever. Surrounded and saturated with water the chinampas are always moist and fertile and as there is no winter it is one perpetual seed time and harvest. The accumulated humus and vegetable matter make it unnecessary to even fertilize.

Broad streets cross these areas at intervals and among these islands and along the causeways the Indians live. No mosquito is ever billed for an evening’s entertainment, and the voice of the mud-turtle is not heard in the land. Malaria? perhaps, but what of that? A few dollars to the priest, a few masses for the soul in Purgatory, and the general average in the end is about the same. Your average Indian, like the Hindoo, is a fatalist, and “Kismet!” what is to be will be. There is something of beauty in these humble homes, and where flower-growing is a profession, it would be strange if their beauty had left no impression upon the lives and homes, and so all the people of La Viga decorate with flowers. The thatched house of reeds will be hidden under its wealth of vine and flower of the copra del oro with its immense golden cups approaching in size a squash blossom. Within these huts are specimens of dark beauty and features and wealth of hair that many a fairer maiden might envy. Seated under her own vine and pomegranate tree, wrapped in thought and a scant petticoat, she weaves a mat of rushes or knits a hammock that will find its way to the home of some who read these lines.

Are they happy? “Where ignorance is bliss,” etc. They were born here, their parents before them were born here, this beautiful valley has all the charms to them that your home has for you. And is not Antonio here? and is he not the best gardener on La Viga, and are they not going to the little chapel next fiesta to be joined by the priest? Surely happiness in this world is measured by the contentment of our lot.

Not all the people of the Chinampas have boats. The great highway along the bank carries more passengers than the placid waters. An Indian woman with a hundred and thirty pounds on her head will trot her thirty miles to market and return next day. I say trot because no other word will do. All people of the burden-bearing class have a swing trot that they keep up all day. And the income! what glowing picture of opulence does the Indian not feel when he spends two days in the mountains burning charcoal, then loads himself and burro with his wealth, and trots his twenty miles to market? A dollar and a half for both loads would drive him speechless, but let us confine ourselves to actual facts, and grant him a whole dollar. He counts himself well paid, and the five days labor and forty mile journey count for nothing. He is not selling his time, but his carbon which he patiently peddles till sold, only keeping enough to feed his burro with. I suppose he feeds him with it, for I am sure I have never seen him carry along anything else that looked like feed. For dessert a few banana peels around the market place and broken pottery is about his only chance unless good luck blows some old straw hat his way; then he feasts. Time! What is time to the Indian? Has he not a whole year?

The next town on La Viga is Mexicalcingo, seven miles from the city. Before the Conquest it was of some importance, but now only a straggling village with dirty streets, which shelter possibly three hundred people. The ruins of the monastery and church of San Marco, built by the Franciscans, are here. The old causeway and military road, seven miles long, that once crossed the lake from Mexico to Ixtapalapan, crosses La Viga at this point. This was a dependency of the Aztec City. A very picturesque view of the high old bridge of Aztec time is had, and the bright green maize on one hand, and the old ecclesiastical building on the other, bowered in masses of dark green foliage, are very pleasing. Past the ancient old bridge the scene changes but little except there are less signs of habitation, and finally the last town of La Viga is reached, Culhuacan. This is a picturesque old town, half of it built on the hill, and here are the ruins of a fine old church and monastery. Here La Viga begins to broaden out into a lake, and everywhere, both parallel with it and at right angles to it, are many branches of the canal, which in wet weather are small lakes themselves.

The journey might be continued out into Lake Xochimilco “The Field of Flowers,” and the quaint and beautiful town of the same name would be well worth the time; but we started out to see where all those beautiful flowers came from, and veni, vide, I returned.

CHAPTER XII.
THE SUBURBS.

THERE are twenty suburban towns around the capital that can be visited by horse-cars, or as the natives say, “tram-vias.” They are Atzcapotzalco, Tacuba, Tacubaya, Jamaica, Santa Anita, Chapultepec, Molino Del Rey, Churubusco, San Angel, Castaneda, Tlalpam, Cepoyacan, Popotla, San Joaquin, Contreras, Azteca, Nueva Tenochtitlan, Guadalupe, Tlaxpano, Tlalnepantla and Mixcoac. You will notice that most of them bear Aztec and not Spanish names, which means that they are older than the Conquest, and are worth seeing, even though you do not get out of the cars.

The farthest away is old Tlalpam, about 20 kilometers, and most of the journey is made by steam. Seven or eight cars leave the city, drawn by mules to the gate of the city where they are coupled together, and a locomotive pulls the train through the beautiful valley at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. It makes one feel a little bit creepy to know that he is thus hurried along in a train of street cars, but they are made by a reliable New York firm and that gives confidence. We pass through a valley overlain with volcanic tufa, and herein lies the secret of the wonderful productiveness of this farming land. It is easily pulverized and makes a fertilizer as potent as the commercial ones. Old Tlalpan is on the rim of the valley and the foot hills of the plateau, and is a residence suburb of the wealthy who do business in the city. The walls of the private residences are as forbidding as a penitentiary. Solid masonry from ten to twenty feet high, capped with broken glass fastened in cement.

A Mexican’s home is indeed his castle, to which he enters through stone walls and iron gates. You are not wanted there and are never invited. I knew an American professor who taught five years in Mexico, and had seen the inside of only three homes, and then he went on business, and saw none of the female members. Such is the custom and seclusiveness of the people.

Tlalpan reminds me of a citizen of New York who went into a fin du siecle saloon to get a drink, and when he paid his reckoning it was one dollar. He naturally protested against the exorbitance, and the clerk called his attention to his surroundings. “My dear sir, look about you; this is no dive, these paintings cost a hundred thousand dollars.” The victim paid the dollar, and thought long and deeply. The next day he returned by way of a harness shop, and got a pair of blind bridles that draymen use on their horses, and thus equipped he entered that aristocratic saloon and walked up to the counter. “Gimme a drink straight without any scenery today.” That is old Tlalpam. Every street has its blind bridles up and no scenery, but it is not peculiar to Tlalpam. I have never seen a Mexican’s home with a front yard. At the edge of the sidewalk up goes his stone house or his stone wall, pierced with an opening and closed by a heavy iron gate fastened always on the inside. Members of the family have to give the password or its equivalent before it is ever opened, and tramps are unknown. Life would have no pleasures for a tramp who could not open the back-gate and creep up to the kitchen and frighten a woman to death by a flash of his living picture.

In Tlalpam you walk a block between high walls to the cross street, and do the same to the next and the next, and you can imagine how delightful it is, “Straight without scenery.” You must not forget that none of the streets have shade trees. So after I had admired all the beautiful stone walls and stone pavements, a wicket was suddenly opened to pass someone in, and I got a flashing glance of languid señoras and señoritas taking their siesta in hammocks swung between lime trees redolent with fragrance and—some one shut the gate. If that sleepy old town thought that I had come all the way there to look at the stone walls, little did it know me. I pounded on that gate till the startled inhabitants thought I was trying to break into jail, but I got in, and found myself in one of the most beautiful and fascinating places I had yet seen. The spraying fountains and flowers and song birds, and the Moorish setting of the surroundings, took me back to the wonderful stories of the Alhambra. Meanwhile that astonished household was all agape at the unheard of intrusion, but great is the power of flattery. I frankly told them that I had been sent all the way from the United States by a committee of one, to hunt out the most beautiful places in Mexico and secure their photographs at all hazard to display and strike dead with envy the people who live in the stuffy cities of America. That on that very morning I had left the City of Mexico for the express purpose of getting a picture of the finest place and the most beautiful ladies in Tlalpam, and with that end in view I was here.——“Enough Señor, enough! Take us; we are all yours, the house, the fountains, the trees, the girls—they are all yours, take them.”

Here was eloquence and victory combined and I did not know what to do with all the victory. I had solemnly promised not to accept any more costly presents from these good people, but this bunch of girls seemed to be different from hotels and other real estate, so I resolved to make the old gentleman a present of his house and lot, and keep the girls: so I very gladly embraced—er—the opportunity of posing them for their pictures. Why these good people should hide so much loveliness and beauty behind impassable stone walls is beyond my ken.

How old is Tlalpam? I don’t know, but it began at a time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Upon the walls, the crop of glass planted in the cement did not seem to flourish very much. It was a very glassy looking glass and seemed to need irrigating, but time is long with these people, and if it does not pan out a crop in the next fifty years, they will wait patiently for manana, that scape-goat of all incompleted enterprises—to-morrow. I don’t know whatever gave these people an idea that they could grow glass anyway, unless it was the Spanish moss. This moss is a parasite that grows upon all kinds of trees, but in old Tlalpam it grows upon the wires stretched across the street to hold the street lamps, and it is aristocratic moss that grows with its head up instead of trailing, and I call that making headway against adverse conditions. The weeds and cacti upon the wall seemed to make their way better than the broken glass, and when I last saw them, they were green and were getting up in the world.

“But it is a long lane,” etc., as the proverb says, so at last the supply of aristocracy gave out at the rise of the hill, and we reached the realm of the great unwashed, who had neither walls nor rags to hide their nakedness. The happy children were clothed with innocence which needed no other protection than the blue sky and the Republic of Mexico.

Higher and higher we go up the hill. The avenue we started in led into the main street, this street finally led into a path, and the path terminated in a cow trail and this trail merged into a squirrel path which ran up a tree; so, like the King of France, “We marched up the hill, and then marched down again.” But before starting down we stopped to rest at the tree where the squirrel trail disappeared, and looked over the valley, and could realize the emotions of Cortez when he stood at the same place and viewed a similar scene. Across the silver lake lay the City of Mexico, twenty kilometers away, with its thousands of spires and pulse-throbs that supplied the veins and arteries and capillaries to the fortunes and hopes of its tens of thousands of dependencies. No wonder Cortez said it was the fairest city man ever looked upon. The one thing a stranger never quite masters here is the rarified atmosphere which destroys all ideas of distance and nullifies all laws of optics. You have traveled the road and know it is twenty kilometers, but the city is brought so like a mirage that you seem almost able to hear the clock strike. We leave our squirrel path and find ourselves in the city of the dead, a beautiful place shaded with eucalyptus trees and furnished with restful seats.

Soon there enters a figure heavily veiled and places a wreath of amaranth upon a new-made grave, marked with a wooden cross, and R. I. P. We leave her to her sorrow and follow a limpid stream from the mountain back to the city below. Beyond is the parched chaparral and the thorny cactus now laden with its harvest of purple tunas, surely the manna of the desert for these discouraged-looking peons. Beside the stream were green trees of limes and oranges and English walnuts and agua caties and an air of restfulness.

We follow the stream into the little plaza with its spraying fountain and fragrant Datura suaveolens, which grows into quite a bush. The pleasant seats invite us to sit and listen to the notes of the noisy purple grackle and the discordant tropical jay as they take their morning bath. Rip Van Winkle is still asleep and Mrs. Xantippe R. V. W. has not yet come from the market, and so for fear of disturbing the serenity of that Elysian Field, we tip-toe back to the station where the car is waiting, and that sleepy old town does not know to this day that a band of camera fiends invaded its sacred precincts, even unto its highest citadel and returned without the loss of a single man. Happy Old Tlalpam. R.I.P.

Back across the ancient bed of the lake we fly, and where once was Montezuma’s fleet are herds of sleek cattle, knee-deep in rich alfalfa, awaiting their turn to contribute to the material welfare of the mammoth city. We reach a junction, Churubusco! Immediately we think of that history class of twenty years ago, when we had to “stay in” after school because those battles would not fight themselves in the right places; when Chancellorsville and Crown Point and Saratoga and Churubusco could not agree as to time, place and manner. Here was a chance to settle one point, even if the teacher had long since died of worry, and we anxiously get out and look.

“Where is Churubusco?” “This is Churubusco.” “But,” I said, “I don’t see anything but a street-car stable with come mules in it.” “All the same this is Churubusco.” “Well,” I enquired, “where does this mule car go from this junction?” “It goes to San Angel, a summer residence town.” I determined to go out there and come back when my mind was settled to take a look at Churubusco, but when I got back, there it was, just an adobe mule stable. I sat on a bench opposite and tried to think what did General Scott want with the stable, and why they put it in the history. I suppose it was put there to punish unoffending little boys who liked to play base-ball. I took out my camera and prepared to shoot the harmless stable, and changed my mind. I was not on a warlike expedition, but was in pursuit of knowledge, and I did not want to add another blot on the sanguinary page of America’s Dr. Ledger. No, not for a brevet. I put up my magazine.

A general vegetable merchant, who had three cabbages and four turnips on a board, seeing my troubled countenance, very kindly came over and said: “Que pense, Señor?” I said: “I am thinking about General Scott bringing his army up here after that car stable and then did not take it away after you gave it to him. Now don’t you think he was off his base?” He shrugged both shoulders, took his cigarette from his mouth and thought a minute, and then he uttered these words of wisdom: “Quien sabe?”

I said, “Well if you live here and do not know, how am I expected to know, and what are the histories to do about it? And my good fellow, just between you and me and the gatepost, don’t you think if General Scott had come here and taken a good look at that stable first, he would have gone on to town and had a good night’s rest, and saved me all this unrest and pang of conscience about that history lesson, and that poor dead teacher?”

With his eyes full of pity he said: “Señor, are you hungry?” “Yes I am, and I am disgusted with your old street-car stable.” “Señor, here’s your car if you are going to town.” I turned my face to the city and my back on Churubusco.

We soon reached the city gate, where the locomotive was unhitched and the mules were re-hitched, and we were soon on the street, where we met a funeral car with its black canopy flying behind, as the mules, under whip and lash, hurried to the city of the dead, and I went to drown my thoughts in a glass of pina. Others may have this drowning mania sometimes, so I give this recipe free gratis for nothing, as I got it from the señora on the Zocalo. The pine-apple is first pared and sliced as we do apples. Then on her knees the señora takes her stone rolling pin and stone vessel like a wash board and reduces the slices to pulp, which is strained and sweetened and iced, and is sent to you by the señorita, who guarantees to drown all your troubles for just six cents, and she innocently prattles away until the glass is empty, and “of course the caballero will have another.” Under ordinary circumstances you would not, but many a man has taken his second glass there just because he did not know how to say no. The next car is bound for Atzcapotzalco, so we jump aboard and pass out upon that terrible causeway where the Spanish army were almost annihilated on that memorable night of Noche Triste, July 1, 1520.

At the bridge you pass through the Riverra de San Cosme and are shown El Salto de Alvarado. Alvarado was the most trusted lieutenant of Cortez, and on the retreat that night the Aztecs cut the causeway and the waters rushed in, separating the army of Cortez into two parts. Alvarado was fighting in the rear, and when he attempted to join Cortez he found the dike cut. His men were all killed or taken prisoners, and he gathered all his strength and made the leap from the end of his lance that made him famous. Authorities do not give the distance, but say it was impossible for any other man. Aztecs and Tlaxcalans alike looked on in amazement and cried: “Surely this is Tonatiuh, the child of the Sun!”

Here the Aztecs stopped to gather up the rich booty which Cortez had taken from their treasure-house and was forced to leave behind in the breach, and the circumstance alone enabled the invaders to reach the village of Popotla, a mile further, where Cortez sat down to weep over the destruction of his army. The tree under which he sat is by the side of the street and is known as the tree of Noche Triste—Melancholy Night. It is a cypress and is called by the Aztecs, Ahuehuete. Some years ago a religious fanatic set fire to it and disfigured it, but it still shows a trunk forty feet high and the same in circumference. The American tourists were about to take it all away as relics, so the city was compelled to enclose it in a lofty iron fence, which is fully able to enforce the ordinance, “Keep off the grass.” The natives very naturally expected me to attempt to scale the fence and get a branch, and to let them know that all Americans could live up to their reputation. I vigorously shook one or two of the iron posts which stubbornly refused to leave the enclosure. All the same I felt proud; I had proved to them that I was an Americano, who would rob the dead, if the dead had any keep-sakes about him that would do to exhibit at home.

Having thus patriotically saved our national reputation, I boarded the car for Atzcapotzalco, which was once an independent kingdom and the capital of the Tepanecs. Atzcapotzalco, only seven miles from Tenochtitlan, held the Aztecs in subjection. Once when the Aztec King sent a present, Maxatla, the tyrant, in derision returned to the king a woman’s dress. Later he allured to his court the wife of the Aztec king and violated her. For this insult, the Aztec king Itzacoatl, “Serpent of stone,” made an alliance with the Acolhuans, and in a two days’ battle the city of Atzcapotzalco was taken, 1448, and reduced to a slave market and never again rose to power. I think they were still talking about that battle when I was there. Old age seemed to have settled down upon everything, and the task to arouse them was so great I refused the contract and left it just as Cortez found it in 1520. The valley surrounding it is very fertile and alfalfa and vegetables were as green as ivy.

Tacubaya is the Monte Carlo of Mexico and the most aristocratic suburb around the city, with fine residences and beautiful gardens and the most handsome villas in the country. From the gate of Chapultepec a causeway leads through a most beautifully shaded avenue to the city, and then I lost interest in it. I was riding a bicycle and when I reached those cobble-stone pavements I gave them my undivided attention. A tall fellow from Texas did the swearing for the crowd, and he was so fluent there was no need for reinforcement, so my whole mind was given to calculations as to whether I could mount that next stone or climb out of the next hole. I saw a policeman and I thought he was coming to read the law, which says no team shall go faster than a walk, so I stopped to give him my impression of the inquisition and the rack, but I was disappointed. He had simply used up all the shade on his corner and was hunting for more. A frog once lived in Kiota, so the Japanese story runs, and he started out to see the world. When he reached the top of a hill he reared on his hind feet to view the world. As everybody knows, a frog’s eyes are on the back of his head, and as he reared up, his eyes pointed right back to Kioto, so he returned and said: “All the world is like Kioto.” So all of Tacubaya is like the main street, just cobble-stones. I am sorry I missed all the beauties they say are there, but all I saw was the front wheel of that bicycle and the cobble-stones. Bicycling is best done in that town on foot.

With Penon it is different. Penon was once an island in Lake Texcoco, but since the draining of the lake it is high and dry and is noted for the hot baths and its beautiful bath house. The whole establishment is paved in glazed tiles laid in mosaics, and the pillars are all painted after the ancient Egyptian style. I never was an Egyptian, but if I was I think I would mistake this excellent imitation for one of the old establishments that Anthony and Cleopatra used to patronize so liberally. The ride to Penon on bicycle across the ancient bed of the lake cannot be excelled.

On the road we passed the new penitentiary and the boys wanted to stop and see it, but I was perfectly satisfied to “pass by on the other side.” Not that I was likely to meet any old acquaintance among its officials, but on general principles I argue that a penitentiary is a good place to stay away from. You might get lost in there and not get out, and besides, we had been interviewed by the greatest newspaper in the city, and as most fellows’ wood-cuts always look like somebody you never heard of, I thought those officials might have seen those pictures and would arrest us—I mean the other fellows—for some jail bird that escaped long ago; but they were bound to go so I told them somebody had to attend to those bicycles, and if they would not I felt it my bounden duty to stay there and guard them. So I went to the pen by proxy. They say it was grand and had cages and other attractive furniture all from the United States. I always mean to go to the penitentiary by proxy.

Across the lake is the city of Texcoco, that was once the Athens of the valley as Tenochtitlan was the Rome. Here are many ancient remains of buildings built when this was the most bitter rival the Aztec capital had. Were it not for the help of the Texcocoans, Cortez never would have conquered the Island City. Beyond here are the Arcos de Zempoala, an aqueduct 37 miles long, supported by arches nearly a hundred feet high. Two leagues from Texcoco is the Malino de Flores, “The Mill of the Flowers,” which is not a mill at all, but the entrancing home and estate of an old Spanish family, Cervantes by name, and one of the oldest and noblest of the Grandees from old Spain.

In this fairy land of a hermitage you marvel as you never did before at the possibilities of beautiful surroundings and Moorish architecture. I wish I might describe this beautiful place, but no one can unless he be artist, florist and architect, and as I am neither I will not mar its beauty by a parody of an attempt. For a description of the towns I did not visit, consult any good cyclopedia.

CHAPTER XIII.
WITHIN THE GATES.

THE city contains nearly six hundred miles of streets well-paved but not supplied with shade trees. In nomenclature they area puzzle. The principal street is San Francisco; the first block of it is called first San Francisco; the second block, second San Francisco, etc., and often a street changes its name every now and then, and the names include everything: La Nina Perdita, or Lost Child Street, Crown of Thorns Street, Holy Ghost Street, Mother of Sorrows Street, Blood of Christ Street, Jesus of Nazarus Street, The Immaculate Host of Jesus Street.

And the shop signs are a law unto themselves. No sign indicates the kind of business done in the shops. Thus, “El Congresso Americano” may be a blacksmith shop or a milliner’s establishment; “El Sueno de Amor” is the Dream of Love, but is likely over a shoe store; “La Perla Del Orient” was a lottery ticket office; “El Amor Cantivo,” Captive Love, was a dry goods’ store; and so on with “El Mar,” The Sea; “La Coquetta,” “El Triumfo de Diablo” and “The Port of New York.” Sometimes they hit a meaning which was not meant; “The Gate of Heaven” was all right, as it was placed over a drug store.

Other signs ending in “ria” indicate the goods sold. “Sombrereria” is a hat store, “sombrerero” is the hatter and “sombrero,” the hat. “Zapateria,” shoe store; “zapatero,” shoe dealer; “zapato,” a shoe. “Sasastaria,” a tailor shop; “plataria,” silversmith, etc., but these signs are used only where articles are made, all others being fanciful. The stores are nearly all kept by Frenchmen and styles are the same as in Paris. The ladies of the “400” do their shopping in their carriages, and have the goods brought to the carriage for inspection.

The metric system prevails. Railroad tickets are sold by the kilometer, land by the hectare, cloth by the meter and sugar by the kilogram. Silver money is coined in the same denomination as ours, and the coppers are as large as a silver quarter. The law for counting money by dollars and cents was passed in 1890, but the people still count by the old way, though they know both. The old way is a copper tlaco, a cent and a half, a cuartillo, three cents. For silver, medio, 6¼ cents; real, 12½ cents, which is equivalent to our “bit.” A quarter, or “two bits” is two reals, in Spanish dos reales but always pronounced “do reals.” The real is the unit of calculation, the people rarely using the term pesos, or dollars, in small amount, If you ask the hotel prietor what are his terms, instead of saying two dollars, he will say sixteen reals, and will use that term for any amount less than five dollars. An actual real of 6¼ cents is no longer coined, and its value leads to serious complications.

Your street car fare is twelve cents for two tickets. You offer the conductor a quarter and he will give you twelve cents, and will try to argue that he is right, but when you enter the number of his badge on your note-book he promptly gives up the other cent, but he never fails to try to claim it. I have known fruit vendors to lose a trade in trying to keep the odd cent in a quarter, arguing that a real is 6¼ cents in theory but only 6 in practice. Counterfeiting is the greatest industry in the republic outside of the lottery business. Paper money is rarely seen, and that makes the volume of silver enormous, and requires everybody to carry bags of it. If you paid a man a hundred dollars in quarters, he would test each one separately hunting for counterfeits, before he would accept payment, and the “ring” of money testing in the market is a regular Babel. No man or woman trusts another in making change, and if there is no hard surface near to throw it upon, into the mouth it goes, and if the teeth make the least indenture, back to you it is flung.

The street car system is excellent. All the street cars are horse cars drawn by mules. They are hitched tandem and go always at a gallop. The cars go from one to fifteen miles and have regular schedule time. They all meet and start from the Zocalo on the Plaza Mayor by the Cathedral, where there is a general conductor with a time-card who starts them off. They always go in trains of from three to six or nine cars in first, second and third class, and with short distances the fare is three, six and nine cents. When there are only two classes, the fare of the first is double the second. The first class car is painted yellow, and bears the legend, “For 20 passengers,” and must never carry more. The theory is that if a passenger is willing to pay for comfort he shall have it. Second class cars are painted green, with the legend, “For 35 passengers.” For long distances the fare may reach as high as thirty cents. The conductor sells you a numbered ticket, and the collector takes it up, and in your presence must tear off one corner to prevent the possibility of using it a second time. Gentlemen always offer seats to ladies, and salute the passengers on entering and leaving the car. As the car is reaching a crossing or turning a corner the driver blows a tin horn, the same that makes life a burden for us on Christmas day. If the car is going to a bath-house or other public place where charges are made, the conductor will sell you a coupon ticket with admittance to the place, the price being always printed on it, thus saving you much trouble in a rush.

Courtesy is the price of position here, and no better officials can be found than the street car conductors, and, the least infraction or discourtesy reported to headquarters receives prompt attention. The railroads also run three separate classes of cars with prices accordingly, but not quite in the proportion as street cars. Thus, from Celaya to Guadalajara, the distance is 161 miles, and a return ticket, first class, is $9.86, second $6.56, and third $4.90.

Of carriages there are four classes. Carriages painted yellow and flying a yellow flag are third class and cannot charge more than twenty-five cents for a half hour or less, nor more than fifty cents for a whole hour. Those painted red and carrying a red flag cannot charge more than thirty-seven cents, and for an hour seventy-five cents. Blue, fifty cents for half hour, $1 for one hour. Green, special rates at option of driver and passenger. When a passenger enters a carriage, the flag must be taken down immediately so that everybody may know it is engaged and will not hail the driver, and he cannot make other engagements until the carriage is empty. All carriages and horses are inspected by a commission who pass upon the respectability of carriage and team and order the proper color painted across the doors, and the printed rates pasted inside so that no intelligent traveler need be imposed upon. And every hotel must post in its rooms the rates “con comida,” or “sin comida”—with or without board. No one need pay in advance; no matter how dilapidated you look or how scant your baggage, you may hire the most costly apartment in the hotel and no questions asked about security.

This is because the law protects the people, and if you defrauded a poor market woman out of a copper the law would follow you to the confines of the republic and imprison you for debt. That settles the bum question. The hotel proprietor assigns you to your room and cares not a straw about you until you are ready to leave. If you pay, very well, come again. If not, by clapping the hands at the door brings a policeman immediately. The policeman hears the landlord’s story, and gives you your option—either pay or go with him, and the prisoner becomes the property of the creditor until he is paid.

The police system is excellent, from the reason I am told that they are not appointed by political favor, but are soldiers from the barracks and can be always found. Every street-crossing has a policeman all day and another all night, so during the twenty-four hours there is not a moment when he cannot be found. When the night squad comes on at 6 p. m. each man brings a lighted lantern and sets it in the middle of the crossing, and it is possible to stand at a crossing and count forty lanterns down the four intersecting streets. As soon as the houses are closed the policeman tries the doors and windows of each house to see if they are fastened, and returns to his lantern. Every half hour during the night each man must blow his whistle to show that he is awake and on duty. If you are a stranger and ask for direction, the politico will take you to the next crossing and deliver you to another and you may thus be passed to a dozen politicos, and they will take every precaution to deliver you safely. If you are a prisoner, the process is the same, and no man knows what you are arrested for but the first. The man who delivers the prisoner simply tells from whom he got him, and so to the next until the first is reached who makes the charge. This makes bribery and escape impossible, for when a prisoner is delivered to the next man, the deliverer must report. It is exactly after the manner of the registry department of our post office. Should the person making the arrest receive a bribe and permit an escape, no one would know, but when once started down the line no politico would take the chances.

Every gambling house or assignation house or cock-pit or any other institution that the government licenses, is also furnished with policemen. All day long he stands guard at your door, and all night long his lantern sits at your steps, and, like the old man of the sea, he is always there to prevent disturbance. In the gambling house, he sits like a statue till the business is closed and sees all that passes. You give a ball in your private house, the politico takes a chair by the door and sits quietly till your guests have departed. You get up a little picnic or an excursion a few miles from the city, a special coach is fastened to the train carrying a company of infantry to keep you company all day. A foreign consul gives a reception to other consuls, a squad of mounted police sit their horses like statues in front of the consulate until it is all over. The American colony gives a 4th of July celebration, all day long they follow the procession or look at the dancing but never a word say they. They are neither meddlesome nor prying, they are just omnipresent.

Your society gives a parade. Your line of march must be made known to the prefect of police and every rod of that distance will be guarded by cavalry. You enter a theater and every tier of seats has a silent man in uniform. You enter a hotel and any complaint from guest or proprietor is made to the politico. You sit at a public table or other place, and the proprietor refuses to serve you on account of color, the politico locks the door and takes the proprietor before the tribunal. He is absolutely everywhere, but he is neither garrulous nor loquacious, and he answers all questions with a courtesy that is refreshing. Beyond the city limits he is no longer a politico but a rurale, a horseman dressed in buckskin and “booted and spurred and ready to ride.” He patrols the outlying country as a policeman, judge or soldier. On the western division of the railroad, whenever the train stops, two rurales armed with rifles and sabres inspect the train. When the train leaves the station, a rurale stands on each platform and looks through the glass door at the passengers till the train gets to the next station, where he gets off and another takes his place, and so on to the end of the road. The next train going the next way, each squad is carried back to their homes, only to repeat the program to-morrow. When the train stops for dinner you leave your wraps and luggage in the seat and pass into the dining room, while a rurale locks the car door and stands guard till your return.

Never a word do these silent men say. For hours they stand looking through the car door to see that no harm comes to anything or anybody. No one ever hears of train robbers in Mexico, but there is a reason for all this. A country that has been accustomed to its annual revolution and whose whole list of presidents and emperors nearly have died a violent death, must needs be ruled by an iron hand.

And it has not been more than fifteen years since bandits ruled the country and dictated terms to the government. As late as February 15, 1885, a commission of officers was sent from Zacatecas by the government to make a treaty with the bandit chief, Eraclio Bernal, and they returned unsuccessful. The bandit said he would disband his men under these conditions: “Pardon for himself and band, a bonus of thirty thousand dollars for himself, and to keep an armed escort of twenty-five men, or to be put in command of the army in the district of Sinaloa.” That is the answer the chief sent to the government; and I have seen an express wagon leave the train with the mail and express, with enough armed men to fill the wagon, to escort it through the streets of a city of seventy-five thousand inhabitants. This condition remained until President Porfirio Diaz hit upon a plan that it took a thief to catch a thief, so he sent word to the bandits that if they would quit robbing and come in, he would make them all officers with a salary, and they could still patrol their old haunts and keep the other fellows down, and they accepted. Now these men are guarding the very trains they used to rob. They are born horsemen and can ride a horse ninety miles a day on the trail. They are the best horsemen in the world, and can throw the lasso and shoot as well as ride. On a wager you can put a rurale in chase after a steer and he will throw the riato over either foot you name, and never check the speed of his horse.

They are a law unto themselves, and independent of municipal authority. The rurales may find a man breaking open a freight car, and they take him behind the depot, try him, dig his grave and shoot him into it, and the case is settled. No court or civil law will ever go behind their acts, and that stroke of President Diaz has given the country its prosperity. The wrong-doers know that the rurales are everywhere, and that their vengeance or justice is swift and sure. There is a tacit understanding that jails and criminals are expensive, and dead prisoners are inexpensive; therefore, if a man’s crime is worthy of death, he is shot immediately, and all convicts are turned into the army to do the dirty work of the camp. Should he try to escape, a hundred men know that they will be commended who shoot him first, so there is no wasted sentimentality with crime, it is simply an option, be good or be dead.

Ten years ago a man dared not travel without an armed escort, and now the same men he feared are his armed escort. When a great celebration is on hand and the military is wanted to parade, nine-tenths of the admiration is bestowed upon the rurales. Centaurs they are, with their caparisoned horses with every piece of metal about saddle and bridle of solid silver. His own dress is characteristic. With his yellow buckskin clothes with silver buttons, silver spur and tall sombrero with silver spangles and monogram, he is an object to win your admiration. Go where you will, in mountain and valley, hillside and plain, you will meet the rurales (they always go in pairs) with their ever ready rifle and lariat, looking for evil doers. Neither money nor time nor patience is wasted on criminals, and you never hear of mistrials, or appeals, or “deferred till next session.” Their court dockets are never crowded. The official shooter with his Winchester goes from court to court and shoots the prisoners as fast as they are condemned.

The republic supports an army of forty-five thousand men, and every town and city is a garrison, and has its military bands. Since the people support the army, they think the army is theirs, and they make claims upon what they claim as theirs. Every town has its military band, and many of them have three or four, and three evenings of each week and all of Sunday afternoon and evening the bands must play for the people. This is a rule without exception, and they are good bands and play fine music. The bands number from forty to eighty performers each, and in large cities there is no evening without music, alternating with different parks, but on Sunday they are all on duty, and with the band comes the social feature of the people. Around the band stand is a circular asphalt walk, possibly an acre in circumference. While the band is playing, the parents and duennas and chaperones are seated.

The young men four or five deep are promenading on the outer circumference of the circle and the young ladies on the inner, but going in the opposite direction. Here are possibly a thousand young people thus enjoying themselves, the young men talking to each other and the young ladies to each other, but never opposite sexes to each other. Their social customs are as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and for a young man to speak to a young lady in public would be a breach of etiquette never forgiven, and a young lady would not dare walk two squares on a public street unattended by a duenna, unless she was going to prayers. She would run the risk of her social standing. There is no doubt that they do throw “sheep-eyes” at each other in the promenades, but speak, never. At 10 P.M. the band plays its last number, and the duennas gather up the young ladies and the young men gather up themselves and they all go home and talk about the glorious time they had.

The young and unmarried never mingle. Should a young man have seen his fate among these promenaders he may not say so to her. He finds out where she lives and “plays the bear”—that is he passes along the street on the opposite side and gazes longingly at her balcony. This he does many times and many days. Of course she pretends that she does not see him, but at the same time she is earnestly looking for him every day. If she goes to the window he may stop. Further encouragement is given by her disappearing from the window and returning with a smile a la Juliet, and the young man goes home and pats himself on the back and throws bouquets at himself for his great success. Perhaps he will keep up this bear business for a year, perhaps two, and has never spoken to the little angel. Sometimes he will get under her window with his guitar with twelve strings and burden the night-wind with his made-to-order songs, and if she does not pour a pitcher of water on his head he has made so much headway that he would be justified in thrashing any other fellow who should hang around the premises playing bear, “haciendo del orso.”

He is supposed now to have made enough headway to be allowed to call and get an introduction and he must find a mutual friend who can do it for him. He arranges the matter, and at last is admitted and introduced to the señorita in the presence of the mother and father and duenna, and he never, no never sees her alone. He invites her to the theater, and when the carriage calls the whole family is dressed and ready to go, and he never sees her except in their presence. If there is no objection on the part of the parents, and if Barkis is willing—and she generally is—the marriage takes place, and “they live together happy ever afterwards” as the story books say. Their courtship seems to be in accumulating all the imaginable difficulties possible, and always presumes that the parents will be unwilling and must be outwitted, and this invents plots and counter plots ad infinitum. Of course the parents know, and the young folks know they know, but it is the custom to invent difficulties and they can not depart from custom. A married woman’s sphere is but little different from the unmarried; she can accompany her husband on the street is one advantage. She is pretty as paint can make her and as ignorant as hermits usually are. A woman’s world here has two hemispheres—the home and the church, and she lives and dies knowing no more.

A woman who makes claims to aristocracy must not under any circumstances earn a penny or she loses caste immediately. If she teaches or embroiders for the church or for charity she is excused, but for herself, never. Sometimes poverty clips the wings of these high-flyers, and it becomes a serious struggle between starving and losing caste. In such cases they will sometimes ostensibly give music lessons for charity, but collect for it on the sly and still preserve their social standing.

With the great middle class, all this is different—they live in another world. They make no pretense to tinsel aristocracy, and have their living to make and they make it with no limitations whatever beyond their capacity, and for intelligence and business, a wife from this class of Mexican women is worth seventy-nine of the bluest blood aristocracy I have seen in Mexico. They have a fair education in Spanish, and both French and English are taught in the schools now, and I have found them able to converse in all three, and could buy and sell with as good a margin for profit as men.

Of course there are three classes here, and the third class will be treated of in a separate chapter. The only bearing they have here is that they are servants to the other two, but their social standing does not count for much, Very few girls in this class are unmarried at thirteen or fourteen years of age, and twelve year old girls as mothers is as common a sight as pig-tracks, Maturity comes early in the tropics, and a woman is a wrinkled back-number at thirty.

The marriage ceremony does not trouble these people much. They have not the money to buy the license, and so they omit the legal ceremony. On a hacienda near San Luis Potosi, a peon lost his wife. He came to the boss and asked for a mule to take the body to the cemetery, and also asked for two dollars. He explained that he might bring back another wife with him, so he wanted to be prepared for emergencies. After three hours he brought back another wife, and his household machinery never missed a cog.

Feast days without number give this happy people the opportunity of enjoying themselves and resting. Not resting because they are weary or overworked, but resting on general principles. The Ethics of Rest is a science they have appropriated unto themselves. They do say that men who love music and flowers will never make cowards or traitors. “La Fiesta de las Flores”—the feast of flowers, is held on Friday before Holy Week; “Viernes de Dolores” or Sad Friday. This fiesta was once held on La Viga when every boat on the lakes took part in the decoration of everything and everybody, but Fashion has now decreed that it be held in the Alameda. The Alameda is the Charing Cross of Mexico. It is a park of forty acres that was once the site of the Inquisition, where Indians were barbecued because they did not accept the Catholic religion. The Inquisition held its last auto-da-fe and burned its last conspicuous victim, Gen. José Morelos, in the Plaza as late as November, 1815!

The Alameda has been the birthplace of gunpowder plots, and St. Bartholomew’s days and revolutions all and sundry for many, many years, but now it is a peaceful pleasure park, beautiful with fountains, and aviaries of rare birds and redolent with orange blossoms and whatever the ingenuity of man can add in the list of charming flowers and shaded walks and shrubs that never know the sere and yellow leaf, and here on Viernes de Dolores, before daybreak the throngs pour in a steady stream of Indians from across the mountains and the dwellers from the plains and the lake dwellers are there and everybody has flowers. The patient burros have come laden with flowers till only their ears are seen. From away down on the coast, Jalapa has sent two carloads of flores, and everybody buys flowers and decorates and makes himself pleasant. No one must fail to do homage to Flora, the goddess of flores, and so garlands and wreaths and merry-makers make possible for the first time the extravagant displays I have so often seen on the drop-curtains of the opera house and thought were so impossible. The fountains were festooned and draped with the rarest of fragrant flowers, and rarer orchids, and every available place on person or thing was adorned, and two bands played alternately, and from early morn till late at night was one vast holiday.

Then there is another Fiesta de los Flores, a fiesta, but not a feast. This is the “Combate de Flores.” This is designed especially for the aristocracy and is held on Paseo de La Reforma. It is a custom borrowed from Cannes or Nice, and is exactly what the name implies, a combat of flowers. The line of battle extends from the statue of Charles IV to the gates of the castle of Chapultepec, over two miles. The carriages are all decorated with flowers, and as they pass and repass each other the occupants pelt each other with flowers. The ladies in the balconies along the Paseo also take part. The hour for assembly is 4 p. m. A double line of cavalry extends clear to Chapultepec. At each glorieta is a military band. The sidewalks are jammed by an admiring multitude who watch the carriages pass with their occupants resting literally on a bed of roses with which to pelt each other, to finally stop at the statue of Cuauhtemoc, where the prizes are to be given to the best decorated carriages. The prizes were escritoires in ebony, bronze vases, statuettes and diplomas of honorable mention. The carriages were transformed into crystallized dreams.

One lady, whose name was Concha, had a carriage body of an immense white shell of eglantines and white and cream roses. Another was a cornucopia of sea-weed and palms interlocked with flowers of every hue. President Diaz and his wife appeared in an undecorated carriage, possibly to save the embarrassment of the jury in distributing prizes. And what more esthetic and harmless recreations could we have than the utter abandon with which these people enjoy the blessings of life and nature? Our lives have little enough of sunshine sifted into them, and we might learn some valuable lessons from these tropic people how to get our quota of real joy out of three hundred and sixty-five days. The fountain of youth which Ponce de Leon sought in vain is here discovered, happiness.

The drainage of the city is not good, and were it not for the altitude, the death rate here would be terrible. Imagine yourself in New Orleans, and find yourself suddenly lifted a mile and a half in mid air, and you are in the City of Mexico. The air is rare and pure. A corpse could be left out of ground any length of time and would not decompose, but would only dry up. Fresh meat never spoils, and vegetables simply grow old and refrigerators are unknown. There is no winter, no summer, but the rainy season from May till September is followed by the dry season. During the rainy season you may expect a shower once a day, lasting perhaps an hour, perhaps ten minutes, and then the sun shines again. The nights are glorious with southern constellations, and Polaris and the Southern Cross are both seen, but the handle of the great dipper is broken off below the horizon.

You wear the same clothes the year round, as the climate is the same. After four o’clock you must put on wraps, for the nights are always cool enough to require blankets every night in the year. The Mexican made shoe is an instrument of torture which nobody would endure but a Mexican, because he has never seen a better. High heel and tooth-pick toe, throws all the weight in a pointed toe which must hold twice its normal capacity. The unsightly gait the women make with this uncomfortable shoe is distressing, and to add to the torture they do not wear stockings—so I am told. My own shoes wore out and I tried in four cities, without success, to buy a pair of low-cut shoes. We wear them for the comfort they bring in hot weather, but they have none, so they do not make low-quarter shoes. You never see perspiration on a person’s face here, no matter how violent the exercise.

The Mexican chews tobacco—never. He smokes tobacco, always, men, women and children, on the street, in the theater, at the table—everywhere is the deadly cigarette, and they inhale the smoke and emit it from the nostrils. The Pullman car is the only place where it is necessary to display the sign “No se permitir fumar.” The matches are wax tapers and double enders. When a person asks for a match, he lights one end and puts it out, and always returns you the unused end. Such a match will hold a blaze a minute. High caste ladies do not smoke in public. The floors of the cars and other public places are pitted as though they have had the small-pox where smokers have thrown their half-burned matches which burn long enough to scorch the floor.

The theaters are built after our style except that every tier of seats is divided into boxes holding six chairs. Everything goes well until the last act, when a porter calls upon you politely for six cents for the use of the chair, and then you learn that the price of the ticket does not include a seat, and that a seat concession goes with every theater. You may stand if you prefer, but a Spanish play is no shorter than an English one. In the front center of the stage is the prompters stand. Through a trap-door in the stage near the foot-lights his head projects above the floor and is concealed from the audience by a tin cornucopia opening toward the stage, so he can be seen as well as heard by the actors, but he can also be heard by the audience as he prompts their half-learned lines.

Kerosene at fifty cents a gallon is the universal public illuminator, and the empty five-gallon cans with the U. S. brand are met with everywhere.

Sept. 16 is Independence Day in Mexico, and its observance is worthy of note. Its birth was similar to our own, and the child of oppression from the mother country. Spain prohibited the Mexicans any trade whatever with any other country but Spain under penalty of death. No schools whatever were allowed except in charge of the priests, who suppressed every branch of useful knowledge. No manufactures of any kind were allowed if Spain could produce and sell the article, and nothing was allowed to be planted in the rich soil that Spanish farmers in Spain could sell in Mexico. In 1810, a patriotic Catholic priest, Maguel Hidalgo y Castella (Hidalgo his father’s name, Castella his mother’s) with a desire to benefit his starving countrymen, introduced the silkworm and planted vineyards. These industries were promptly destroyed by the Spanish officials, and thus were the seeds of rebellion and liberty planted.

Hidalgo had been among his countrymen and organized a rebellion. On the night of Sept. 15, 1810, it was whispered to Hidalgo that his plans were discovered and the government forces were marching on him. With swift decision he had the church bells of Dolores to sound the danger signal, and when the alarmed population reached the plaza, they found their priest with torch and musket. With burning words he told them of their wrongs and discovered plans, and at that strange hour and in the darkness where one could not distinguish friend or foe he gave the famous grito, Mexico’s Declaration of Independence: “Long live our Mother, most holy Guadalupe! Long Live America! Death to bad Government!”

Thus, in that modest hamlet, now known as Dolores Hidalgo, was set on foot the revolution which eleven years later gave Mexico her independence, after three hundred years of oppression and cruelty never equalled before in any other country. And now, on the night of Sept. 15, you may witness the most remarkable celebration among liberty-loving people. Before night the tri-color is displayed from every building, and across the streets are hung innumerable Chinese lanterns ready for lighting.

As night advances, the ten acres of the Plaza Mayor becomes a seething mass, just as it was that memorable night of Noche Triste three hundred and seventy-six years ago when the Aztecs drove the Conquistadors from this very plaza beyond the city gates. As the hands of the great clock in the cathedral slowly move, those ten acres of faces are turned upon its illuminated dial and all voices are hushed. As the hands come together, a magic wand is touched somewhere, and ten thousand lights flash on the scene from a thousand beacons. The string of Chinese lanterns sway across the streets. Immediately that sea of faces is turned to the opposite end of the Plaza facing the national palace. Like a scene from “Dore’s Last Judgment,” those silent faces, in the lights and shadows of the illumination, point southward, waiting Hidalgo’s hour. Exactly at eleven o’clock, appears the soldier-president, Porfirio Diaz, bearing above his head the banner of red, white and green, and from under its folds launches forth again the grito that for eighty-seven years has been their war-cry: “Mexicanos! Viva Independencia! Viva La Republica!” Instanter the trumpets blare, the cannons boom, martial music is set free, the bells from the towers give tone and the heavens are lit with the glare of fireworks that rival the halcyon days of Popocatapetl. Ten thousand resound the glorious call. “Viva Mexico! Viva Independencia!” until the very soul of every freeman instinctively cries in its own language, “Viva Independencia!”

The next day the grand review of the army takes place, and promptly at ten o’clock the regulars of the infantry and cavalry pass by in new uniform, but their glory is eclipsed when two thousand rurales, the finest horsemen in the world, flash by in their buckskin uniforms, the silver sheen of their trappings glinting in the sunlight on horses that know every water hole and aroya from the Rio Grande to Tehuantepec. For a whole week these light-hearted people celebrate with balls and banquets and fireworks and fiestas and the poor are remembered with gifts from the president’s wife.

Hidalgo was a martyr to his cause, and within eight months his head hung from the castle walls of Chihauhua, but now rests in the Cathedral under The Altar of Kings. Iturbide took up his fallen sword and in 1821 entered the capital at the head of his victorious troops and was hailed as “El Libertador,” and was crowned as the first Emperor of Mexico. Santa Anna headed the revolution that banished him, and on his return in 1824 was shot as is the custom with Mexico’s rulers.

But there is another day as dear to Mexico as September 16, and that is July 18, the day when Juarez died. Benito Pablo Juarez (Whareth) was a full blood Indian, born in Ixtlan in the state of Oajaca, in 1806. From 1847 to 1852 he was governor of Oajaca and was banished by Santa Anna. He returned in 1855 and joined the revolution of Alvarez which deposed Santa Anna, and after continual fighting, was declared president in 1861. Immediately he issued a decree suspending for two years all payments on the public debt. Forthwith England, Spain and France sent a combined army to seek redress. England and Spain soon withdrew, but Louis Napoleon, taking advantage of the civil war in the United States, and presuming that the disrupted union could never enforce the Monroe Doctrine, declared war against Mexico and offered the throne to Archduke Maximilian, of Austria, as Emperor. For seven years were the contending armies in the field, but in 1867 Maximilian was taken prisoner and shot at Quétaro, and Juarez ruled supreme. And then that Aztec Indian by one fell stroke lifted the pall from his much warred people and did an act which astonished the world. For three hundred and fifty years had the Catholic Church misruled and despoiled Mexico. The people were taxed to the starving point to enrich the priests. It was the Catholic Church of France that had placed Maximilian on the throne, and the Catholic Church of Mexico that kept him there and fought his battles against the liberty-loving Indians.

Three-fourths of all the lands and property of Mexico were deeded to the church free of taxation, and when the “Procession of the Host” passed along the streets, every foreigner or skeptic who did not at once kneel was in danger of the Inquisition. This was the state of affairs in 1867, but Juarez faltered not. All the vindictiveness of his race was kindled when he thought of the tale of bricks that had been required of them under Spanish rule and in that supreme moment he divorced church and state, and confiscated all the church property to the state. No thunderbolt could have been more swift or more obedient than his decree. Every convent, monastic or religious institution was closed and devoted to secular purposes. Every religious society of Jesuits and Sisters of Charity was banished from the country. So thorough was his work, that now no convent or monastery can openly exist in Mexico, and no priest or nun or Sister of Charity can now walk the streets of Mexico in any distinctive article of dress to distinguish them from any other citizens.

Catholic worship is still permitted in the cathedral, but the Mexican flag floats from the tower to show that it is a state institution and can at any time be closed or sold or converted into any use the government sees fit, and that the clergy and priests are “tenants at will.” All those rites which once supported the claims of the Catholic Church to omnipotence are now performed by the state. The civil authority performs the marriage ceremony, registers births and provides for the burial of the dead. Marriage ceremony by the priests is not prohibited, and they are legally superfluous, but those who cling to the old, first secure the state rite and afterwards seek the church service. The church controlled all educational institutions, all public opinion and the keys of heaven and hell.

When the soldiers of Juarez pulled down the fetishes of the Indians, the Indians stood speechless expecting fire from heaven to consume them for sacrilege, for thus they were taught by the priests. The exiled monks cursed them for anathema maranatha and prophesied that the earth would open and destroy the despoiled, but the soldiers laid paved streets across the yards of convents that had witnessed crimes and debauchery in the guise of holiness in the “Retreats” that would smell to heaven, and not a soldier was engulfed. For the first time the ignorant people learned that the priesthood was not infallible, that the fear of the church had no terrors to this Indian president, and the old Aztec spirit returned, and for the first time the veneer christianity of the Catholic faith showed its shallow depths, and the disappointed adherents lifted not a finger against this dark-skinned iconoclast. The church at that time owned eight hundred and sixty-one large country estates valued at $71,000,000. Twenty-two thousand lots of city property valued at $113,000,000 and other property not listed, making a total of $300,000,000, and the revenue of the clergy from the people direct was $22,000,000 annually, which was more than the income of the government from all its customs and internal taxes. By the irony of fate, Protestants who before this were not allowed in the country, now bought from the state this very property.

Thus, the former spacious headquarters of the Franciscans with one of the most beautiful chapels in the world, fronting Calle de San Francisco, the most fashionable street in Mexico, was sold to Bishop Riley, acting for the American Episcopal mission, at the price of $35,000, and is now valued at over $200,000. Likewise in Puebla the American Baptists have bought the old palace of the Inquisition, and a similar palace in the City of Mexico is now a medical college. The national library occupies an old convent, and a large share of its treasures were confiscated from the Roman churches. Since 1867 Protestant churches are springing up everywhere, where it was worth a man’s life to propose such a thing before. Previous to this so persistent was the church that the national seal bore the legend: “Religion, Union and Liberty,” placing the church first, and even after Mexico secured independence the seal remained the same.

Juarez was both a Washington and a Lincoln to Mexico, and so when July 18th comes around to mark the day of his death, from Dan to Beersheba is one vast blast of bunting and fireworks. I was in the capital on that memorable day when the city put on its holiday dress to do honor to the name of Juarez and to strew flowers on his grave.

All lovers of liberty were given an opportunity to hear the eagle scream. President Diaz was the chief figure in the procession and was the first to lay his offering on the tomb, followed by the members of congress, the diplomatic corps and the military bodies. The stars and stripes were there of course, end the Spaniards were there in numbers. Two hundred and fifty Cubans had a place in the procession, each with a miniature flag of Cuba on his coat and “Cuba Libre” on his badge. They objected to the Spaniards on the ground that the celebration was in honor of liberty and a patriot, to neither of which virtues could Spain lay claim while Cuba was breathing her life out in a death struggle, and the police had to intervene to prevent blood-shed over the patriot’s grave.

By the decree of Juarez, there came to Mexico freedom from a worse slavery than that which darkened our shores; the slavery of the Romish Church. The Catholic religion still prevails, but it is a Juggernaut with pneumatic tires, and it runs a course lined with bayonets. There are millions of benighted adherents yet under the spell of the priesthood, but Protestant churches are springing up everywhere with the free bible. After the wonderful achievements of the Juarez administration, it seems remarkable how conspicuous by its absence is the Indian face from public affairs in Mexico. She has a standing army of over 45,000 men, but all its officers are white, and the same is true of the police force, and the military bands whose rank and file are of Indian blood have the leaders white. The students of the military academy are white, so are all members of congress, the superintendent of public works and all places of trust, although legally, every man of age is privileged to vote and hold office.

But behind the law are the leges non scriptæ, the spirit of social caste, as broad as the leagues of territory, and as powerful as a Corliss engine. The Indian’s face is no debar from good society nor a residence in any part of the city where he may buy, but the old regime of Spaniard and Indian, master and servant, has taken deep root and is still as powerfully in evidence as in the slave states of America. Of the twelve million inhabitants, one-third are pure Indians, speaking a hundred and twenty different languages. Onehalf are Mestizos or mixed races, and the remaining one-sixth are foreigners, the Spaniards predominating, and the remnant is the governing power.

Public opinion in Mexico has been defined as “the opinion entertained by the president;” and this is almost absolutely true, if you may also add a few thousand land owners, professional men, professors and students. The rest do not count. No such thing as a public mass meeting to discuss public questions has ever taken place in Mexico. A presidential canvass simply means that the candidate who first gets control of the army gets elected, but a campaign, never.

While every adult male citizen has a right to vote, less than thirty thousand votes are cast in a presidential election, and the great mass of the people never know there is a change unless there is a revolution.

One day before the election I saw a two-line announcement in an American paper published in the city which said: “Tomorrow the citizens of Mexico will elect a president.” Early the next morning I was on the street expecting a great excitement or patriotic demonstration, but not a cog of that great wheel of industry missed a revolution. About ten o’clock I began to ask people about the election, but no one could give me a word of information. I went to the National Palace and everything was going on as usual. I asked a number of people where could I find the voting places, but got no information whatever, and I began to think the announcement was a canard. Two days afterwards I was in the state of Vera Cruz and saw in another paper the following election news: “Porfirio Diaz was unanimously elected president of Mexico for the fifth time.” That was all. I had been on the streets the whole of election day and could not find a single person who could tell me of the election.

To differ in speech or newspaper from the policy of the party in power is to prepare your own grave for treason, or for banishment, so those who have a grievance against the government have no recourse by electing a better governing power, so they simply wait till they feel strong enough and find a man to issue a “Pronunciamento,” and a revolution is born, and sad but true, there is no other way. Free speech and mass-meetings and opposition candidates are unknown except at the point of a bayonet. Excepting Juarez, the Indian, Porfirio Diaz—who is part Indian of the same tribe as Juarez—is the most progressive president the country has ever had, and the constitution was changed so he might succeed himself and thus complete the good work he inaugurated, but Diaz’s first term was gained at the head of a revolution. He was a candidate in 1871, and in the election only 12,661 votes were cast, of which Juarez received 5,837, Diaz 3,555, and Lerdo 2,874. Diaz refused to abide by the decision and issued a manifesto and entered the capital at the head of an army, assumed the presidency, had the people ratify his proceedings, and then proceded to build railroads and encourage foreign capital to come in and rehabilitate the wasted country, and, regardless of fear or favor, has created the modern Mexico. So successful was he that the people decided it was better to keep him than have the annual revolution, so the constitution which Juarez had framed was changed to permit him to succeed himself, which he has done so well that he is serving his fifth term, but not all consecutively.

Cardinal Newman once said: “To be perfect, one must have changed often.” If that be true, the government of Mexico ought to be pluperfect by now. Since her Independence in 1821, she has had fifty-seven presidents, two emperors and one regency, and with possibly four exceptions, each change of administration was attended by violence.

In 1848 occurred the first change without violence, but Arista was banished in the next two years, and in the next three months there were four presidents, which brings the average up to normal. What a bonanza for the Salt River candidates of the United States!

When you visit the picture gallery of the National Palace, the guide will say: “This is president so-and-so, elected at such a date, and who was shot at such a time. And this is president so-and-so, who was shot at such a date.”

All the leaders of the war of Independence were shot, so were both the emperors, and nearly all the presidents were shot or banished. These presidential shooting matches have made the country a land of experts in teaching the young idea how to shoot. Whenever the winning man has secured the army and re-entered the capital, the other fellows, in the language of General Crook, “rise like a flock of quail and light running.”

CHAPTER XIV.
THE TRAIL OF THE TANGLE-FOOT.

ON the plains of Tlaxcala, Apam and Puebla, in the rich lava beds, and on the desert which is so poor one can hardly raise a disturbance on it, are millions of acres of land devoted to the culture of the maguey and the preparation of one of the vilest drinks known to man.

The century plant, the agave, the aloe and the maguey are one and the same. It is called century plant, because outside of the tropics it might live a hundred years and never bloom, like our Louisiana sugar-cane; but here in Mexico from six to fourteen years are sufficient for its maturity, as it requires that much time to accumulate enough vitality for its crowning effort in life—the propagation of seed. When it has reached this stage it shoots up a central stalk a foot in diameter and twenty feet high, crowned by a panicle of beautiful greenish-yellow flowers, and then the plant dies down as completely as any annual.

But the pulque farmer does not permit the plant to blossom. When it shows indication of shooting up its central bud as large as a cabbage, the same is cut out, leaving a cavity capable of holding four or five quarts. Into this cavity the sap collects and is sold as agua miel or honey water. After twenty-four hours fermentation it becomes pulque, the national drink of Mexico, for, of the 350,000 inhabitants of the capital, 250,000 are pulque drinkers. A single plant can be milked five months and in that time will produce one hundred and sixty gallons of pulque. Each morning a small army of pulque gatherers will enter the field with long calabashes or gourds, through which they suck up the pulque on the siphon principle, and inject it into the pig-skin bottle held on the back by a band around the forehead. This skin-bottle is the same that is mentioned in the New Testament and is secured entire from the animal, and with the ends at the hoof tied and loaded with pulque, has the exact semblance of a hog on a man’s shoulder. The pulque must reach market the same day it is gathered, as it becomes vinegar within twenty-four hours, so special pulque trains run on all roads entering the city.

Seventy five thousand gallons is the daily consumption in the City of Mexico, and the railroads make a thousand dollars a day for carriage, and the custom houses collect on each gallon as it enters the garitas or city gates. When the sap first appears it is greenish in color and sweet, hence its name of agua miel, or honey water. Carbonic acid soon collects as fermentation advances, and then it is called pulque. Pulque has the color of soapsuds, almost the consistency of molasses and a compound taste not found in the dictionary nor listed in Materia Medica. As to smell, it is a cross between a slaughter house and a compost heap of decaying vegetables. Fermentation is so rapid it would explode a cask in a few minutes, so the gatherers empty it from the pigskins into tinnacals or ox hides strapped to a wooden frame. To retard fermentation, it is poured into vats and a little milk and rennet are added, which do not quite coagulate it, but give it the aromatic odor of Limburger cheese. From these vats it is loaded on the trains and hurried to the city where it is again transferred in pigskin to wagons loaded with hogsheads with the bung open. In front of the retail pulqueria, the wagon stops and the final unloading begins. A hogshead is turned on its side at the rear of the wagon and the spigot is pulled, and the ropy liquid is passed through a large funnel into a pigskin on the ground, by passing through a leg. This pigskin holds as much as a beer keg, and when full, the huge porter replaces the spigot, wraps a string around the leg and shoulders the pig which looks natural enough to squeal. The porter empties this into five or six huge casks which are setting on the counter, where the dealers dole it out at a cent a glass to the hundreds who push and fight for standing room until the last cask is empty, and a similar scene will take place every day in the year.

Just opposite my window I watched a crowd for hours that had overflowed the sidewalk struggling to get inside and they did not thin out till ten barrels had been emptied, which means five hundred gallons. And the same is true for every pulqueria in the city from the time the first train load arrives till every cask is empty. Pulquerias have no written sign, but over each door is a plaited awning of green maguey leaves which has all the power that an electric lamp has to swarms of night insects. At one cent a drink, even the paupers can get gloriously inflated, and it takes half the police force to drag off those who find the streets too narrow for their new style of perambulating.

The ordinary simon pure pulque is just liquid filth, no more, no less. Private families remove the Limburger essence by means of a harmless chemical and add sugar and orange juice, but the dealer at the pulque joint knows better; he adds a quantity of marihuana to the cask, and presto! he has the regulation Kentucky tangle-foot, warranted to kill at forty rods. With one or two drinks of this, the Mexican’s eyes look two ways at once, and he just spoils for a fight, and at once hunts some one to disagree with him. He will walk up to a stranger and look him over in a zigzag way and say: “Viva Mejico.” The other fellow was just out hunting ducks himself, so he replies: “Viva Espania,” or “Viva Cuba Libre,” and then their heads and feet change places, and when they come to their senses they are lying on the soft side of a stone floor in the “husga” and wondering “Who struck Billy Patterson.” After witnessing the surging, seething mass of frenzied men and women with their savage Indian nature all ablaze with pulque, no one longer wonders at the large number of police he meets. The government is absolutely powerless to stop the sale of drugged pulque, and the number of deaths annually from pulque fights is incredible. In one year, the number of fights with knives alone was over six thousand in the capital. I know of no more dangerous animal than a Mexican loaded with pulque and marihuana, face distorted and blood-shot eyes aflame, and a knife in his belt. Blood is his glory and he loves a long knife which he can throw thirty feet with the accuracy of a pistol bullet.

Outside the cities the duello is the code of honor and the long knife the peacemaker. Among the cow boys and miners the friends of each tie their left hands together and stick a bowie-knife in the ground by each and walk off. The one that lives longest may cut the cords and come back to camp. If neither returns the boys know that they crossed the Styx together. Pulque is not the only drink made from the maguey, it is only the swill of the great unwashed. For the more epicurean tastes the root of the plant is roasted and distilled and from the product is a fiery liquid, which for courtesy is called mescal, but in reality is molten lava, and its nearest kin is another distillation called tequila, which is almost pure alcohol. They are sold in saloons at three cents a drink, and the American who attempts to wrestle with the monster takes a glass of mescal and a glass of water and tries to swallow them both at the same moment in order to keep the lining of his throat from scalding off as the lava goes down. The native, to show his contempt for the method, will look you in the eye and drink the fiery liquid without water. It brings water to his eyes, and the clotted blood-shot spots appear almost as rapidly as the shades of a chameleon on a rose bush. I saw a maniac suffering with delirium tremens from mescal, and a more pitiable object I have never seen. How he pleaded and begged for three cents, offering his soul in exchange just for one more drink before he died. I went to a restaurant and got him some soup and it had the effect of water upon a hydrophobia victim and I can only liken him to a caged hyena.

The maguey must not be called a profligate because it gives birth to five different intoxicating drinks; it serves other purposes as well. From the leaves the natives thatch their houses, and the spines make needles and pins. The fibre of the leaf is used in making rope, wrapping-twine, hammocks, sisal, mats, carpets, hairbrushes, brooms, baskets, paper and thread, firewood, and from the roots a very palatable food is made, and upon its bountiful leaves there feeds an army of green caterpillars about the size of your middle finger, and epicures do say that when they are properly stewed and set before you that you forget all about clam-bakes and gumbo soup and shrimp-pies and edible birds’ nests and just concentrate your mind upon the gusanos de la maguey, to all of which I say amen. I had to concentrate all of my attention and other things, too, to prevent a violent volcanic eruption just looking at the tempting morsel. I do not doubt the epicures in the least; on the contrary, I had so much faith in their judgment that I was willing to take their word without the caterpillars. But I did eat one dozen—by proxy, that is paying for them and enjoying that consumptive Mexican’s appetite as the whole dozen followed each other down the chute, but I might add, I had to put a weight on my stomach to avoid—well a catastrophe.

The maguey is absolutely independent of rain or moisture. It grows on the mesa that does not get a rain in six years. It is a bulbous plant and multiplies by suckers set in holes. The usual method is to take a crow-bar and dig a hole among the rocks and give it just enough earth to hold the roots and it will do the rest. There is nothing more beautiful than a maguey farm on the plains of Tlaxcala, with the plants set ten feet each way and spread over the plain for forty or fifty miles. The plants are so green they seem to have a blue tint, and the rows are so symmetrical, no matter which way you look, your vision will focus to a point in the distance where all rows converge to the vanishing point like the rails of a railroad on level ground. For a hundred miles south of the capital, every available rod of ground is planted in maguey which grows without any cultivation whatever, and will yield to the farmer ten dollars to the stalk during the single five months of its productive period. No field gets ripe at once. An acre with several hundred stalks may not have two dozen to come to maturity this year, and as soon as they are exhausted new bulbs are set in their stead, which makes a perpetual orchard. A plant that is to mature this year is easily known by the bleaching of the leaves as it yields its last vitality to the central bud.

Whenever the train stops, hordes of women gather around to sell to the passengers from earthen-ware vessels at a cent a drink. As the passenger lifts the putrid liquid, the dripping vessel leaves a trail of viscid streamers, like the gossamers of the bridging spider, or the saliva from an ox under the yoke, and especially if the wind is blowing, the network of sticky pulque streamers from car windows is just about as pleasant as the opening chorus of a candy-pulling, or the closing scene at a turpentine still.

In the families of the Spanish and French, pulque is never taken, but wines, champagne and sherry, are the household drinks, and the great national drink of America, lager beer, is slowly adding the dignified William goat and the overflowing schooner to the pictorial decorations of the Mexican house-fronts. The amount of liquid refreshments these people, especially the women, can embrace within their anatomy is astonishing. The dinner hour is prolonged from one to two hours in conversation and guzzling, and when a gentleman sees a lady’s glass empty at any part of the table, it is customary for him to walk around to her chair and fill the glass from his bottle; and these opportunities are eagerly sought by the watchful men, as it indicates a lack of attention to permit a lady’s glass to become empty. But I have never seen this class of people drunk or tipsy. The liquor must be very weak to permit so many bottles being emptied without a knockout.

A young Mexican at Guadalupe attempted to make his national drink aristocratic by giving it a lofty name. He asked me if I would not seal our good friendship by joining him in a glass of vino blanco. I told him I did not know what white wine was, as red was the only fast color the Americans patronized, but I would seal the friendship all right and let him drink for both of us. To this he raised not a particle of objection. I doubt if any such magnanimous windfall had ever come his way before when he could drink for two. He landed me in a pulque joint and this was my awakening to the vino blanco.

I had come in search of knowledge, and found it by means of my nose, which I had to hold while I grandiloquently told him to “tank up.” The proprietor brought him a half gallon rancid soapsuds, which he first offered me. I backed off and told him I had not done a thing to him to deserve such punishment, and besides, soapsuds more than a week old always went against my constitution and by-laws, and that I was subject to heart-failure anyway, and had to guard against undue exertion, such as vomiting, etc. He said it was not soapsuds, but “vino blanco,” (pulque nueva), and if I did not believe it was new pulque, just smell. I told him that was exactly what ailed me now, I had smelled and was leaning against the counter on account of it, and if he would just let me off I would burn a candle to his choice saint. After my friend had “tanked up” and swallowed most of the fragrance, I was able to stand up once more, and then I very kindly asked that proprietor if he did not think that stuff was ripe enough to bury. I said, “Sir, in my country when a corpse is kept till the flies swarm in the house, it is a sure sign that it is time for the funeral. Now sir, just look at the flies.” “O yes,” said he, “los muscos love vino blanco also, and they come because they know a good thing when they se—smell it.” Now what was the use of wasting logic on this logician? So my friend and I entered the street. It was a warm day, and while we had argued, I think the heat had contracted the street. At any rate it was much too narrow for my friend and his vino blanco, and he and a lamp-post had quite an argument about who had the right of way.

I think the post must have hit him below the belt from the way he fell out, and with the guilt of the act resting so heavy on my conscience I fled from the scene and vowed I would never buy soapsuds any more for my poor, martyred Guadalupe guide.

CHAPTER XV.
THE CITY OF THE ANGELS.

LA PUEBLA DE LOS ANGELOS is the authorized version of the sacred city, but “Puebla” serves for all ordinary uses. This city is seventy-five miles southeast of the capital. It is not on account of its transcendent beauty or rare virtue that it is called the City of the Angels, but from its wonderful history, woven into mystic legends by the zealous priests. And for the story:

“Once upon a time,” as all good stories should begin, the Indians saw angels hovering over the place when it was an Indian village, before the Conquest, and hence its name. Another version is that one of the good bishops was looking for a site on which to build a town, and in his dream saw a vision of two angels measuring town lots on the border hills of a beautiful plain, and went right out and found the place where Puebla now stands to agree with his dream, and forthwith founded the city. Still a more recent explanation is given, that when they were building the church, angels built as much wall by night as the workmen built by day; and if you are disposed to doubt the statement, why, they show you the church itself, which ought to convince the most skeptical.

The cathedral is built of massive basalt, and is thought by many to be much finer than the cathedral of the capital. It fronts the Plaza Mayor, and is built upon a platform of porphyry with Doric and Ionic superstructure. The inside is bedizened with glitter and tawdry jimcracks as usual, entirely out of keeping with the beauty and magnificence of the building. The main altar is gilded with gold to the value of a hundred thousand dollars, and before Maximilian’s time there hung from the ceiling a famous chandelier of pure gold, also valued at a hundred thousand dollars. The church party was backing Maximilian, so the lamp was melted into coin to pay the army. In the towers are eighteen bells, the largest weighing ten tons. Why these churches have so many bells that are not rung, and have no chimes is another of the unanswered questions, and must remain so until the last call. The pulpit is of pure onyx, and the floor of glistening marble, and over the door-way is the insignia of the Golden Fleece. The two grand organs are encased and decorated with as fine work of sculpture as can be found anywhere, and the walls are lined with costly paintings. Of course here is shown a piece of the original crown of thorns.

In the church of San Francisco is a doll brought over by Cortez and carried by him through all his campaigns. It is an image of the Virgin, and the benighted natives venerate it as though it were a god, and this is but an index to the christianity of the country. The name of Christ is rarely heard, and the name of Jesus is so secular that you may go into a hotel corridor and say$1‘Jesus!’ and a half dozen men will answer and come to you. Go into any crowd and say the same word, and there will always be some one named Jesus, and possibly several. It is rather painful to your piety to have some bandit try to pass a pewter quarter on you or to keep the odd cents in a trade, and then to know the rascal is named Jesus Maria Magdalene. There is not a Christ Church to be found in all this land of churches, and as a means of saving grace, Christ is not counted. In the Mexican Catholic Church, the people pray to the powers in the order of their importance; first to the Mother of God, “Most Holy Mother,” second, to the saints, and lastly they mention the name of the Infant Jesus as being the son of Mary. In the prayers and in the sermons and in the paintings he is always figured as an infant in the arms of the Virgin, or the Man of Sorrows with his heart on the outside of his anatomy. After looking at a thousand such pictures one is tempted to believe that the X-ray is not such a modern innovation after all. In the case of the twelve stations on the march to Calvary, with the aid of red paint all the horrors and mental anguish that the human frame can endure are displayed in life-size as a scourge to the laggard believer.

I do not fancy the poetry of Burns, but these grewsome images of wax and papier mache with the real thorns on his head and the red paint gore dripping everywhere, always recall the lines:

“The fear o’ hell’s the hangman’s whip,
To haud the wretch in order.”

The impression it always makes on me is that the threat is always implied: “If you do not repent, you will be treated in the same manner,” and I honestly believe the Indians so interpret it. In the nave of these churches are hung the twelve apostles, in all stages of ancient martyrdom and modern dilapidation. Statues with broken or missing legs and streams of red paint gore pouring in congealed rivulets from Roman scourges and spear-points savor more of the bull-ring than of a sanctuary. On the altar is a copy of the Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised; but out of its lids of solid silver bedecked with ribbons and symbols, they hear not a word of christian living, nor of the beautiful life of Christ, nor of their duty to their fellow man, but prostrate before these gory statues the worshipers go round and round, counting their beads and crossing themselves and gazing upon the ghastly anatomies before them, and this is their worship. If they are oppressed with the weight of earthly sins they are told to pray to the Holy Mother of God to intercede with St. Peter in behalf of the afflicted one, and in addition to burn candles upon the altar of Saint Francis or Saint Xavier, who have the contract to use their good offices in behalf of the sinner, said sinner guaranteeing to burn so many candles in acknowledgement, which candles can be had from the church commissary two doors to the rear on the right. And this is the substitute the Aztecs got by renouncing their idolatry. They asked bread and received a stone.

Puebla is called the City of the Angels, but it ought to be called the City of Churches. This was always the bulwark of the Church of Rome in the New World and was the last to succumb to the new order of things under Juarez. This is the city that backed Maximilian in his fight against the patriots and quartered the French army for seven years, and where the auto-de-fe of the Inquisition was pushed with all the zeal of Torquemada. When Juarez destroyed the church party, Pueblo had a dozen nunneries and as many monasteries, with all their concomitant cess-pools of vice, as Maria Monk so vividly describes in her Montreal experience. Under the liberal educational crusade of President Diaz, the people are becoming too enlightened to ever revert to the old regime.

Puebla is a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants and ranks as the fourth city in importance. It is the market for the beautiful onyx which is mined near the city. It is in a fertile valley, and for miles and miles to the rim of the mesa lies one of the most beautiful scenes within the Republic. Three volcanoes and three other snow-capped peaks overlook the city. From Mount Malinche the city I think gets its pure water brought by aqueducts. Puebla is the key to the country in time of war as it commands the approach to the sea. It was captured by Iturbide, Aug. 2, 1821; by Scott, May 25, 1847; occupied by the French, May 5, 1862; captured by the French, May 17, 1863; Recaptured by the Mexicans, Apr. 3, 1867. The old fort on the Hill of Guadalupe must be visited. Here the Mexicans under Porfirio Diaz defeated a veteran French army May 5, 1862, and earned their right to the national holiday of “Cinco de Mayo.”

Though the city is over seven thousand feet above the sea, the valley produces everything, wheat, rye, cochincal, maize, cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, coal and iron, stone quarries, and lime and kaolin for porcelain, dye woods, and all kinds of tropical fruit in luxuriance, and the valleys of alfala feed the finest beef steers it has ever been my good fortune to see. The city was built in 1532 and is a model of neatness, and as no animal matter decomposes at this altitude the presence of disagreeable odors is unknown. Six railroads enter the town and the tramvias lead to many interesting suburbs. Twenty-five miles away is Popocatapetl, but with no forest or hill between the city and the volcanoes to proportionate the distance, it hardly appears five miles. If you wish to ascend the volcanoes, the Inter-Oceanic train stops at the small station of Amecameca at the foot, where guides and a two days’ supply of provisions are furnished.

Here upon the second highest mountain in America, and the third highest in the world, you may sit in the snow and cool yourself off after the exertion of the climb. I cooled off at the bottom and climbed it by proxy. My proxy said the view from the crater was magnificent and I felt satisfied. The street-car line that leads to Cholula passes over the Atoyac near the city across a very quaint, old arched bridge, built when the city was born. About five hundred yards to the right of the track is the natural wonder of Coxcomate. From the car window it looks like a pile of white stones or a well bleached haystack, but on a nearer approach it proves to be a tumulus of white calcareous stone, evidently of water formation, about fifty feet in height and a hundred in diameter at the base, and the form is that of a truncated cone. At the apex is an elliptical opening, twenty-five feet along its minor and fifty along its major axis. It is a bell-shaped cavity and lined with ferns of various descriptions. The depth is about a hundred feet, and its width along the bottom about sixty. On one side of the bottom is a mass of gorgeous ferns, and on the other a pool of water.

Of course Coxcomate has it legends. One is that the Aztecs were wont to worship the genius of this spot, and occasionally to throw in human victims to appease his subterranean majesty. It is also said that the Spanish Inquisition used to cast in heretics and leave them where they could calmly meditate upon the controverted points of doctrine. Whatever its former use, it is a curious freak of nature, situated in the midst of a level plain. It seems to have been a volcanic bubble, of which there are many in this country.

From Puebla a branch road takes us to Santa Ana, and a tram-way from there to ancient Tlaxcala, the capital of Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala was a republic in ancient times, as were also Cholula and Huexotzinco, and these were life-long enemies of the Aztecs; and it was by fanning this blaze that Cortez united them to conquer the Aztecs, and to the Tlaxcalans is due the credit of the Conquest. They were faithful to the uttermost to the Spaniards, and in the first defeat gave Cortez a home and haven until he could collect another army, and again followed him, this time to victory. Cortez always appreciated this kindness, and it is here in squalid little Tlaxcala, degenerated into a village of five thousand diminutive people, that more relics of Cortez are found than at any other place.

The municipal palace contains four oil paintings bearing the date of the Conquest, and the banner of Spain which Cortez carried throughout his conquering career. The material is of heavy brocaded silk which sadly shows its age. It is nine by six feet, cut swallow-tail and is nearly perfect, though approaching four hundred years old. The iron spear-head bears the monogram of the rulers of Spain, and the original staff, now broken, is kept with it. Immense sums have been offered for it from Spain, but the Tlaxcalans refuse all offers. Here are also the arms of Tlaxcala, illuminated on parchment, and bearing the signature of Charles V., and the standards presented to the chiefs by Cortez, as well as the robes in which the chiefs were baptized. Here also are a collection of Tlaxcalan idols and the treasure-chest of Cortez, which was locked by four different keys and could be opened only when all four guardians were present together. Here is to be seen the oldest church in Mexico, San Francisco, built three hundred and eighty years ago, under plans furnished by Cortez himself. The roof is supported by carved cedar beams brought from Spain, and in a little chapel is the original pulpit from which the Christian religion was first preached in the new world.

Here of course you see the crude figures of bleeding saints and sublimated martyrs and harrowing crucifixions, painted in all their mangled horrors to hold in awe the superstitious native. As the Greek boasts forever of Marathon and Thermopylæ, so with the Tlaxcalans in their departed glory. A more squalid lot cannot be found than upon the sun baked mesa of Tlaxcala. Living in adobe huts and filth and rags, it requires the light of history to convince you that these were once warriors second to none in the valley, who boldly met the Spaniards in open battle when first they saw each other.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA.

“Nations melt
From Power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunlight for a while and downward go.”

Eight miles from Puebla in the midst of the vale of Atoyac stands the sphinx of Cholula, a pyramid covering forty-four acres of ground, whose base is one thousand four hundred and twenty-three feet and whose altitude is one hundred and seventy-seven feet, with a truncated apex two hundred feet square. This was once crowned by a temple, but now by a church called Nuestro Señora de los Remedios. The City of Cholula was the sacred city of the Aztecs, but the pyramid antedates their tradition. When it was built, by whom and for what purpose will not be known till the sea yields up its dead, but there it stands built of brick, twice larger than Cheops, and so overgrown with trees that it looks like a natural hill. A winding road with steps leads to the top, whence a view of the whole valley is to be had.

With his usual exaggeration, Cortez said that from its summit four hundred heathen temples could be seen. At present the town of Cholula contains about six thousand inhabitants, and I counted only fifty-four church steeples seen from its summit, of course omitting those visible in Puebla. Naturally Cholula has its legends, and what ancient edifice has not? The Aztecs knew nothing of the history of the pyramid. According to Toltecan tradition, it was built by the followers of Quetzacoatl. Among all nations of Anahuac, the god of air was Quetzacoatl, “Feather-decked-serpent,” the great, good and fair god. He had been a high priest in old Tollan, and according to all the statues representing him, was bearded and had a white skin. He was a god of peace and discouraged war and animal sacrifice, and introduced the culture of maize and cotton and the smelting of metals and the working of stone. When he wished to promulgate a law, he sent a hero whose word could be heard a hundred leagues away to proclaim it from the summit of Tzatzitepetl, “The mountain of clamors.” Under his tutelary care, maize grew to such a size that a single ear was all a man could carry, and cotton grew with all the colors already in it. In a word, the Aztecs believed that the reign of Quetzacoatl was the golden age of the country.

Tezcatlipoca (shining mirror) was the principal god next to Teotl, having descended to earth by means of a spider’s web. He fought with the high-priest Quetzacoatl, and then told him it was the will of the gods that he journey to the ancient kingdom of Tlapallan. Quetzacoatl was escorted out by a number of people singing hymns, and finally reached Tolula. His gentle manners and integrity won the hearts of the Cholulans, so he dwelt with them and taught them the arts of civilization, the smelting of metals, the weaving of cloth and the making of delicate pottery. After a sojourn of twenty years at Cholula, Quetzacoatl decided to continue his journey to Tlapallan and departed toward the sea, saying he would return. Gradually the report spread that he was dead; he was then proclaimed a god by the Toltecs of Cholula, and was afterwards proclaimed protector of the city, in the center of which they reared the pyramid to his honor and crowned the top with a temple. In this temple was an image of the “god of the air,” wearing a mitre on his head waving with plumes of fire, and around his neck a resplendent collar of gold, in his ears pendants of mosaic turquoise, in one hand a jeweled sceptre, and in the other a shield, curiously painted, the emblem of his rule over the winds. The sanctity of the place and the magnificence of the temple spread, until the worship of Quetzacoatl was shared by all the nations of Anahuac, and Cholula became a Mecca, the Holy City of the Valley.

Quetzacoatl created a new religion based on fasting, penitence and virtue, and he belonged to another race than the one he civilized, but what was his country? In all the Aztec writings and on all his statues he is called “the fair god,” and when Cortez landed in Mexico, Montezuma refused to make war upon him, saying, “It is the return of Quetzacoatl.” The Cholulans forgot the art of war in the pursuit of the arts of peace as taught by Quetzacoatl, and Cholula became the great emporium of the plateau. Cholula became a dependency of the Aztecs, and this gave offence to the Tlaxcalans, the bold Swiss mountaineers of Anahuac, who were the enemies of the Aztecs. So when Cortez arrived and conquered the Tlaxcalans, they were only too willing to join him against the Cholulans. It was in 1519 that Cortez selected six thousand Tlaxcalans and a large number of Cempoallans and marched against the city of Cholula. Cortez had been invited by the ruler to visit the city and was the guest of the nobility, but here is shown one of the blackest spots in his entirely perfidious character. Cortez left the main part of his army outside the city with instructions to rush in when the signal gun should be fired, and to weave sedges around their heads so as to be distinguished from the Cholulans in the slaughter. The next morning he had his men to conceal their arms and assemble around the great square. He then sent word to the princes and all persons of distinction in the city that he desired a conference with them in the square, and they came to do honor to their invited guest, followed by the thousands, curious to look upon the strange horses and fair-skinned strangers. Then Cortez, to make a pretext for his deed, accused the chiefs of plotting treachery against him, and at the signal, his army closed in the three sides of the square and began the slaughter of the unarmed inhabitants. All the accumulated hatred of the Indian allies was let loose in this hour of vengeance. All within the square were slaughtered, including all the persons of distinction of the republic, and then the butchers with fire and sword spread through the streets of the city, and to the summit of the pyramid.

The statue of Quetzacoatl was thrown down and robbed of its treasures. The temple was fired, and in the blaze of its destruction the savages, both Spanish and Indians loaded themselves with booty from the thrifty Cholulans, and with his sword in one hand and the crucifix in the other, the missionary bandit, Cortez, offered the remaining inhabitants a respite if they would accept baptism and acknowledge the King of Spain as their sovereign! Under the guise of friendship, and while accepting the hospitality of his host, this Christian savage stooped to a perfidy which the natives scorned.

This sacred city whose court magnificence rivaled the pomp of Montezuma’s capital became a Golgotha. Upon the top of the pyramid where was the temple, stands a catholic church, and in front an ancient cross which the priest told me was almost as old as the Conquest. At the northeast of the plaza where the massacre occurred stands the Church of Seven Naves, which was built by the special order of Cortez from models of the Cathedral Mosque of Cordova in Spain. The chapel has sixty-four supporting columns, and the small mullioned windows and Moorish frescoes give it a repose of perfect harmony with its peaceful environments. I sat in the plaza that had once flowed in blood. It was July 18, and the populace was celebrating the anniversary of the death of the patriot Juarez, and as the glare of fire-works cast unnatural shadows among the stately trees, I was reminded that Cholula once furnished the toys and fire-works for the whole valley. This industrious people was called in derision “the race of traders;” and even as I sat, the keen-eyed boys detected the presence of strangers and scented a trade in “antiquias.” After throwing a few stones at a tree, they leisurely drifted by me, and finally returned, and mysteriously drew from their pockets curious toys and fragments of pottery in a pattern different from any now made, and declared them to be “antiquias viejas de Cholula.” These people are up to date and can make you a relic to order if they only know what you want, and will date it back as far as you wish; but these were the simon-pure article of Cholula as she was in her halcyon days.

Near Cholula are smaller pyramids very similar to those of the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley. Stretching across the fertile valley the shadows point to Popocatapetl, only six leagues away, but the diaphanous atmosphere would make you believe it only one. The ancient capital is now a compact village of six thousand people, as silent and bereft of enterprise as though it dwelt under the spell of the Enchanted City in the Arabian Nights. The young men were discussing the independence of “Cuba Libre;” the women were at church, and the Indian women from the hills with their babies strapped to their backs and their bare feet upon the pavement, glided more like phantoms of a vanished race than realities of the present. Though 380 years have passed since that awful remembrance, its every aspect seems to accent its Bartholomew’s day. The silence is oppressive, so we climb the pyramid to view the valley, and such a view! To the north six leagues is Tlaxcala; to the south and reaching the horizon an endless valley; to the east, Puebla and the gateway to the gulf; and to the west the two snow-capped volcanoes, and within these boundaries a garden spot that equals the valley of Mexico.

Throughout this broad expanse are hamlets and orchards and pastures and fields of evergreen maguey and cochineal, cactus and tropical fruits. The scene is like a picture or the mirage of some unseen habitation. The animals and men in the distance creep like insects in a pantomime. Not a column of smoke to denote the presence of a factory nor the revolution of a single wheel of commerce. A blast of a tin horn from the horse-car tells us this is the last car to Puebla tonight, and we leave the beautiful sunset glistening from the snow-clad peak of Popocatapetl, and leave the unsolved riddle of the pyramid to the ages.

CHAPTER XVII.
LAS TIERRAS CALIENTAS.

TO the “Hot Lands,” we leave Puebla by the Inter-Oceanic railroad and make the wild ride to the city of Vera Cruz. The first part of the journey is across the mesa of burning sand and bare rocks. Soon after leaving the city we pass the mount of Malinche, which supplies the city with water. Malinche is the name given to Cortez soon after he reached Mexico, For miles and miles not a tree graces the landscape. Now and then a brilliant cluster of morning glories appear, but they are shrubs and not vines. The geranium also appears, and no longer a shrub, but almost a tree twenty feet high. Flocks of discouraged sheep and very earnest cattle seem to be devoting all their attention to eating sand and rocks. Of course it is contrary to custom for these animals to make a steady diet off this kind of fodder, but with my most earnest investigation it was all I saw for them to eat. A sparrow could be seen anywhere on any given acre of ground.

A few shepherds wrapped in serapes were constantly on the watch to keep the gaunt and restless wanderers within their imaginary boundaries, for it was contrary to custom to allow one flock to eat the sand that belongs to another. The miserable huts of the natives are measured by the length of the discarded cross-ties of the railroad. A quadrangle of these stuck a foot in the ground and thatched with maguey leaves and the citizen is “at home.” So is the donkey or whatever other animal he possesses. Sometimes he has several razorback pigs tethered by a foot to the end of a rope and they root in the ground and hone their backs against the cross-tie that answers for a door-post and are happy. As the train approaches a station, scores of women and girls press around the car windows beseeching the passengers to buy fruits at the first class cars, and cooked provisions at the second and third. The most of the first class passengers are Americans, and as a rule they do not invest heavily in Mexican provisions. They say it requires too much faith to eat them.

And pulque. How could we get along without the fragrant pulque? With a large earthen jar in her left hand, and a small one without handle in her right, she anxiously seeks purchasers. When a purchaser is found, down goes that right hand, fingers and all to the bottom of the jar, and as it comes up full, the white, ropy fluid frescoes with its sticky streamers everything in reach. In their anxiety to out-sell each other, the anxious eyes are scanning every window for engagements while the right hand mechanically is immersed to the wrist in the larger vessel. At one cent a drink, and often as many vendors as purchasers, two or three cents is the average revenue these people make from a train that passes only twice a day. It is sad to see the hungry pleading eyes of these half-naked women as they in vain offer their scanty wares to people who do not buy. I have bought food from one of these beggars and given it to another just to see them eat, and no starved beast could have shown greater hunger and zeal with which they picked up every crumb from the ground.

In the cities beggars are kept scarce by the police, but on these plateaux they swarm, and grown men and women will crowd around the train, and their clothing would not average two yards to the person. Only twice did I see beggars attempting to offer an equivalent for the alms they begged—at La Barca on the Mexican Central Road where two blind beggars with cracked voices and rheumatic guitars inflicted the painful combination upon the unoffending passengers. I think the grimaces were given without charge, and only the music was expected to be paid for, but I am sure my coppers were given for the heroic efforts of that face to reach the sublimity of the music. The face was always about three and a half flat keys below the instrument, and the much abused instrument made no attempt to catch up with that wonderful voice, but plodded along with her “reglar steady” for all pieces. Those three organizations covered the whole baseball diamond in their progress, but they all got together at the home base, and while the worthy Mrs. Beggar collected the pennies, the crowd cheered the first warbler and called for the second. Each one had the pitch that belonged to the other fellow’s songs, but the crowd got it all anyway so what was the difference? Anyway they were the only beggars that offered a quid pro quo and the crowd forgave them much, even as they had sinned much against the musical profession in traveling on the high C’s without any chart.

Out of pure charity I took one of the Mrs. Beggar aside and very softly asked her if she did not think an ordinary three-cornered file would help her husband’s voice and also his throat. The word “throat” was my Waterloo. Lifting her coal black eyes to mine she looked the thanks she uttered as she said: “Lord, señor, a thousand thanks, that is the very thing, he has not had a square meal today.” When will people learn that everything intended for the throat is not to be eaten? Such gross ignorance discourages my good Samaritan impulse and seriously interferes with my work as a reformer. The same thing happened at a restaurant where the same dish of butter had kept guard on the table so long that it was being consumed by its own inactivity, and was making itself felt further and further from its base of operations. Out of pure charity for my fellow boarders, I heroically made a martyr of myself and relieved the old guard which “died but never surrendered,” so the other fellows might have a fresh dish, and what was the result? Bismillah! that eagle-eyed waiter reported that I just actually made my living off that brand of butter, and next meal the old guard had been replaced by a whole pound of the same vintage but more vigorous and loud. Such ignorance leads people to misinterpret my noble motives. Now, here I was trying to make good music for coming generations, by offering that old lady a file to rasp down the nightingale’s fog horn, and she thinks I am so entranced with the unearthly music that I want to show my appreciation by giving them a cubic meal. Alas this thankless world! It was ever thus.

I said they were the only beggars that paid for their alms, but I make one exception. Between Guadalajara and San Pedro a beggar has a gold mine. Not what you would call a gold mine, but it is one for him. He has a fortune in his knees, which got on the wrong side of his legs, and as the street-car stops to change mules he painfully hobbles on crutches to the car, makes his exhibit, collects the coppers and hobbles back to his seat to wait for the next car, and he never utters a word. He has what ordinary people call “a sure thing.” He always made me think of the tramp and the dog. The dog found the tramp in the hay-mow and growled. The tramp said: “Good doggie, good doggie,” and the dog wagged his tail but kept growling. The tramp said: “It may be all right, but I don’t know which end to believe.” So every time my beggar friend turned his face away from the car, his knees and feet seemed to try to come back, and I did not know which end to believe. This beggar question is too large and has made me wander away from my subject. I was talking about the women sousing their dirty hands into the pulque, but small matters like that do not count. The old saw is still in vogue, that we must all eat our peck of dirt before we die, and so we in Mexico just eat our peck and get the dreaded duty from our minds.

There are many more miles of desert and pastures where the cattle still feed upon sand, and then we come to the fortress of San Juan de Los Llanos. In the midst of the desert where it never rains, and where there is no green thing in sight, lies this huge fortress of St. John of the Plains. For four hundred years this has been the King’s highway from the gulf to the capital, and all the treasures of gold and silver to Europe, and of merchandise from Europe have had to pass along here in caravans of pack-animals and armed escorts. This road was a veritable Captain Kidd’s treasure-house to the hundreds of bandits that have swarmed through this country, so it is no more of a policy than necessity that the soldiers are here.

We are now nearing the rim of the plateau and pass through miles of rich mining country until we leave the state of Puebla and enter the state of Vera Cruz. We are a hundred miles from the sea and eight thousand feet above it on the backbone of the Cordilleras. Around us is white frost, and in four hours we shall be in perpetual summer. We are above the clouds and everything is invisible. The clouds envelop the train like a pall, and we are conscious of only one thing; we are plunging down the mountain with breaks down, and with the descent of one hundred and thirty-three feet to the mile. A rift in the clouds discloses a semi-tropical forest, and upon every tree are myriads of beautiful orchids of blue, red, scarlet, orange—every color and in the greatest profusion. A thousand feet below is a little town we are trying to reach. The train approaches it first on this side and then on that, and winds down the mountain in a kind of spiral, and at last stops at the station. Above us is the track we have just left, and if a rock was loosed from it, it would fall upon the roof of the train at the station. There is one place on the road where a stone dropped from a car window would hit the track at two separate levels. It is a journey one never wants to take twice by daylight. If you pass the dangers at night you save the nervous speculation as to what would happen if a wheel should break on the brink of a chasm a thousand feet deep, and a floating cloud conceals the nature of the rocks you would land upon in the awful depths below.

Every few hundred yards by the track are wooden crosses and stone cairns. I ask my neighbor: “Porque las cruces?” He devotedly crosses himself and mentions them as unfortunate meeting places of travelers and bandits, and after the meeting the traveler still remained. Every one who passes considers it his duty to add a stone to the cairn.

At the stations the half-clad natives, shivering in the chill mountain air, offer food and beautiful flowers for sale. Orange blossoms from the valley and a dozen other rare blossoms the foreigner has never seen, and the beautiful orchids with the roots done up in leaves are offered for a real, (12½ cents) which would cost five or six dollars at an American florist’s.

Down, down we go, through dark canons and over spider bridges and below the clouds. Now our wraps are uncomfortably warm and we lay them aside and open the windows. From every where comes the odors of rare tropical flowers and the iridescent rays of beautiful butterflies, and we are half down the mountain at Jalapa (Halapa). Jalapa is a city of fifteen thousand population, and was once the capital of Vera Cruz and has much to endear it to the tourist. As the train stops you enter a street-car drawn by six mules which will carry you to town on the hillside of Meniltepec. When you wish to come back to the train, the brakes are set and the car will bring you back itself, and the mules will be down after a while to draw it back. It is a regular toboggan affair, and you feel as if you were shooting the chutes, were it not for the heavy bumpers that would stop you were the brakes to give way. I think the Mexican style of carrying the babies slung over the back must have originated in Jalapa. If a nurse should undertake to roll a baby carriage, and while talking to a policeman should let the buggy get a start down any street, it would shoot the chute for Vera Cruz on an incline of thirty degrees.

Before the Inter-Oceanic Rail Road was completed the street-cars ran to Vera Cruz, seventy miles away, and all the company had to do was to mass their mules in Vera Cruz and their cars in Jalapa and start the cars on schedule time with enough brakemen to prevent a hot box. The streets are not quite as crooked as a corkscrew, and not quite as straight as a cow-trail when she is grazing, and starting from the top, each first floor window looks out upon its neighbor’s house-top. It rains here about eight days in the week. The town is four thousand feet above sea level, and just behind it is the Copre de Perote peak, thirteen thousand four hundred and three feet high, and plenty high to catch the rain clouds from the gulf. When they strike the jagged edge of this toboggan slide which holds Jalapa, they simply disgorge and go back for another load. They seem to be a very faithful, conscientious set of clouds that put in a good day’s work and never grumble about working over-time or the agitation of an eight hour system. I got tired carrying my umbrella. It would rain half an hour and sunshine half an hour till the next cloud got snagged on that mountain, and so between them there was no rest for my umbrella. I am always full of good motives and advice, and the same work a lawyer wants ten dollars for, I distribute with a lavish ha—mouth. Armed with my good intentions and my dripping umbrella, I called upon a member of the city council and suggested the idea of filing off the rough edges of the mountain so it would not snag the clouds and drench the people so often, but my words and good intentions were all wasted. Those citizens have been sliding down hill so long and been drawn up again by mules, they have no energy whatever, and would never climb that mountain till they got street-cars up there. And besides, if the cloud system was altered they would have to establish a different sewer-system, and that means work, and of course they would not.

These clouds have done one thing though, they have banished the thatch roof, and every house is built of stone and roofed with half-cylindrical brick tiles which project a full yard over the eaves. This constant drizzle has killed the usefulness of the old and tried friend—the almanac. You don’t have to ask when it will rain for you know it will rain in half an hour. Then it is no pleasure looking in the almanac to see when the first frost will fall so we can gather chestnuts or pecans, because frost never comes, and fall never comes, and winter never comes, but it just stays one eternal spring. The trees are always green and if a leaf falls another grows in its place, and if you pluck an orange another blossom springs out immediately, and if you cut a bunch of bananas, a new shoot starts up for another stem, and as fast as you pick the coffee berry, a perfect shower of snow white blossoms appear.

There is absolutely no season. Four crops of corn can be grown, allowing ninety days to each crop. Sugar and coffee and tobacco are the main crops. The state of Vera Cruz borders the gulf for five hundred miles with an average width of seventy-five, and in all that territory, the soil does nothing but push things out. The Indian takes a sharp stick and makes a hole in the ground and drops a grain of corn, covering it with his foot, and ninety days afterwards he gathers his crop, and that is absolutely all he does in the way of labor. A banana stem will spring up eight or ten inches in diameter with several bunches of bananas and eighty to the bunch. He gathers them and knocks the stalk down and presto! another springs from the roots, and this he does perpetually.

The coffee plant is the most beautiful plant in this region, and bears till the slender branches touch the ground. The fruit is like our cherries or plums, and the natives eat it as we do cherries, and only the seed is sold for drinking. All around Jalapa in the forest grows the vanilla vine so dear to the cake and ice-cream fraternity. The vine grows all over the forest like grape vines, and is not cultivated. The flowers are greenish yellow with spots of white, and the pods grow in pairs like snap-beans, six inches long and as large as your finger. They are first green and then yellow, and when fully ripe are brown. The pods are dried in the sun and then touched up with palm oil to make them shine. The Indians make a good living by gathering the pods and selling them in Jalapa, which is the chief market for vanilla. They also gather from these woods sarsaparilla, which has its home here. All druggists keep on their shelves a drug called Jalap, which grows here and gets its name from the old town of Jalapa. With pine-apples and plantains and limes and apricots and pomegranates and bread fruit and sugar and coffee and tobacco all growing at their doors, what wonder is it that the people all say, “Jalapa is a bit of heaven dropped down to earth.” All they need is a tree to grow hammocks ready-made and swinging, and the millennium has come. It is situated near the foot of the volcano of Orizaba, the second highest mountain in America outside of Alaska, and the rich hills and valleys are covered with vast heaps of volcanic tufa and ashes which are natural fertilizers.

The American army on its march from Vera Cruz stopped here to shoot the chutes—and the natives—and exchange hospitality with them. The natives have a very vivid recollection of that visit, and on the principal street stands a tall granite monument with this inscription:

“SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE NATION’S HEROES
WHO DIED IN DEFENSE OF THEIR COUNTRY
AGAINST THE AMERICAN INVASION IN 1847.”

The thing is so absolutely true and incisive that most Americans who read it like to quietly slip off to another street where there is no grim accuser. Every time he looks dispassionately back at that war he feels like the big bully who slugged the little boy in the street just because the boy had spunk enough to fight back, and then took all his apples. California, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona must always feel like blood money to the American people, as they were taken from Mexico to extend slave territory.

Santa Anna was born in this town, and the reckless traveling up and down these toboggan streets must have given him his dare-devil spirit which marked every stage of his eventful life.

Jalapa is the summer resort of the moneyed people of Vera Cruz. Every May when the Yellow Fever awakes from his sleep in Vera Cruz, the brave citizens in a body back up the hill to Jalapa and shake their fists at him and dare him to cross the line, and the fever does not dare. They would simply pull a plug out of one of their special clouds and flood him back to the sea. There must have always been a city here: behind the present city are stone pyramids fifty feet high, and countless foundations of stone walls laid in cement. There are oak trees four feet in diameter growing through pavements laid in hewn stone and cement. The architecture is different from that of the Aztec, and there is neither language nor tradition as to who built these ancient ruins. They lie towards the coast between Jalapa and Orizaba.

Tell it not in Gath, but they do say that the most beautiful women in Mexico live in Jalapa. “Bewitching, alluring are the women of Jalapa,” is what the natives mean when they say: “Las Jalapenas son halaguenas.” Perhaps this accounts for the saying that Jalapa is a part of paradise let down to earth. The prevailing type of beauty here is the blonde with blue eyes and brown hair, while elsewhere it is the brunette with black eyes and hair. After one has seen las Jalapenas halaguenas, the old churches and the musty paintings lose their interest. The old town shows its age probably more than any other in Mexico, and if these old stones could speak they might tell us of the building of Cholula. Whatever is old in Mexico is still older in Jalapa. Excursions to Coatepec and Jelotepec, about six miles away, may be made on horse-cars through tropical forests and coffee groves, and then we continue our tobogganing to Vera Cruz. On the down slide we pass Cerro Gordo, where General Scott defeated Santa Anna, April 18, 1847. He must have defeated the town too, for it is not there. A few mud huts are patriotic enough to remain and continue the name, for which they deserve much credit. Perhaps they are guarding the place to preserve Santa Anna’s wooden leg which was lost here in battle. They have not yet learned that it is in Washington City.

We finally stow away our thermometer to prevent its melting and running away. They say that straight down in the ground underneath Vera Cruz to an indefinite depth it is really hotter than Vera Cruz. Perhaps. Vera Cruz is a good place to stay away from. From May to October it is the summer residence of his majesty El Vomito Negro, a black vomit, familiarly known as Yellow Fever. This is not only his summer residence, but his permanent home, but during the winter months he is “not at home;” but May 1st., on house-cleaning day, his residence is open to all comers, be they light-weight, middle-class or sluggers. He gives all odds and guarantees a knockout in the first round or forfeit the championship.

During 1868-4 the French army planted four thousand soldiers in a little cemetery which they facetiously called “Le Jardin d’Acclimation.” The Mexicans call it “La Ciudad de los Muertos,” the City of the Dead. The population of Vera Cruz in 1869 was 13,492 and the number of deaths for the ten years ending in 1879 was 12,219. The average duration of life by these figures was eleven years! The annual deathrate is ninety per thousand population, while in the United States it is 22.28 per thousand. The safest way to see the city in the summer is to go in on the train, go out to the old castle of San Juan d’Ulloa about a mile out in the harbor, climb to the light house and take a good look, then get on the same train and get up and out, or rather out and up. The town covers about sixty acres and has no suburbs but sand and water. An avenue of palms on the main street is the principal feature. If you stay till night you will see the raven hair of the Mexican ladies sparkling with gems, but they are only fireflies or “lighting bugs.” Three or four of these tropical fireflies placed under a tumbler will give light enough to read by. They have a natural hook on their bodies, so they are fastened in the hair by this hook without pain to themselves. Our American cities are troubled about their street-cleaning department; but Vera Cruz has a street-cleaning commission that is a commission. Here they work without salary and only ask bed and board. The only other bonus they ask is that the city fine any person five dollars for killing any member of the commission; which seemed only reasonable, so the city gladly consented, and now the agreement is entirely satisfactory to employer and employee.

The city council, on the city records, calls these commissioners Zopilotes, but ordinary people just call them turkey-buzzards.$1‘Their contract calls for bed and board—or tree. They find their board in the garbage piles and refuse heaps of the streets, and their bed on the church steeples and on the city hall and on your gate post or any other soft place where it is comfortable to rest after a hard day’s work. The city has not yet appointed a commission to clean up behind the commissioners, and if I should suggest the thing to them they would misunderstand my ideas of reform, so I will leave them to their fate and the heavy death roll which they will still charge to El Vomito and exonerate the Zopilotes. Owing to an oversight in drawing up the contract, no mention was made of nesting-places for the commissioners, and so they had to make other arrangements elsewhere, but where it is the deponent sayeth not.

Their day’s work was done and we saw that all the resorters had resorted to their resorts, so we resorted to the train, unpacked our thermometer and hied us away. Vera Cruz has had a monopoly of the shipping business, but has a rival now in Tampico. When you go to Tampico, you must tar and grease your hands, face and neck, then wear a pair of leather gloves and muzzle your face with wire netting. You may keep the insects off but you will smell like a barrel of train oil. The entomologists must have got tired classifying insects and dumped all the remnants at Tampico. One sociable little fellow has a habit of crawling under your toe-nail while you sleep and digging a hole till he is out of sight and then going to sleep. He has no special reason for this except to make you cut off your toe to get him out or to make you sleep in your boots. The monkeys and parrots are very sociable too, but familiarity breeds contempt. If I must associate with monkeys I prefer those with two legs so when I abuse them they can understand my wrath.

For description of Tampico see Encyclopædia Britannica. Besides the Inter-Oceanic, there is another railroad entering Vera Cruz, the British road that was thirty-five years in building and cost forty million dollars. This road leaves the plateau at Boca del Monte (mouth of the mountain) eight thousand feet above the sea, and falls four thousand feet in passing over the first twenty-five miles of circuitous track, and it falls twenty-five hundred perpendicular feet in the first twelve miles, or two hundred and eighty feet to the mile. That tired, sinking feeling is very, very present when you start down. A double engine called the “Farlie,” having two sets of driving machinery and the boiler in the center, pulls this train, and when it starts up hill it has to stop every ten miles to rest. The Britishers who built that road had faith and plenty of it. Below Orizaba, the road crosses a gorge a thousand feet deep, and was blasted from the solid rock. To do so, workmen were suspended by ropes over the cliff, and worked for hours with hammer and chisel. One piece of track clinging to the wall is not over ten rods long and required seven years to build. So costly was this road that when it was first opened in 1873 first class freight rates from Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, two hundred and sixty-three miles away, were $76 a ton on freight trains and $97.77 on passenger trains.

Since Tampico is now a rival port freight is only $45 a ton and still the road hardly pays for its outlay. We soon enter the beautiful valley of La Joya (the Gem) and down, down below the clouds we pass through evergreen foliage of ferns and flowers that surpass anything in beauty ever attempted by brush and canvas; mammoth ferns and tangled vanilla vines and other parasitic vines that coil around the giant trees and strangle them to death, and then feed upon the remains. Tropical birds of all colors and migratory birds from other lands are here without number. It is here the Indian hunter pursues his vocation of killing to make the wonderful featherwork, so salable in the capital, and just here we enter the beautiful city of Orizaba, the capital of Vera Cruz.

Behind the city is the snow-capped volcano of Orizaba, eighteen thousand three hundred and fourteen feet above the sea, three miles and a half high. Violent eruptions took place here in 1545-6 but it has been on a strike ever since. Being the second highest mountain in North America, perhaps it is putting on airs. At any rate it is chilly enough now and the melting snows form innumerable cascades and waterfalls; and so the Chicmec Indians called the volcano “Ahauializapan” or “Joy in the waters,” but the Spaniards had neglected their pronunciation in their early youth and this was their Shibboleth, so they called it Orizaba and let it go at that. Earthquakes have always been a specialty with Orizaba, and the largest church has had its steeples thrown down three times, and many others have a rakish, corkscrew perpendicular, which gives the impression that they have been on a jag or are trying to imitate the leaning tower of Pisa. A river runs through the town, and runs cotton and sugar and flour mills. Orizaba is exactly of the same altitude as Jalapa and what was said of the richness and fertility of that burg is true of Orizaba. Volcanic ash is the fertilizer which needs only moisture, which is abundant. The streets are paved with lava, and there are three schools for girls and two for boys. If you like mountain climbing, plenty of blankets, two days’ provisions—and some silver—will take you to the crater of Orizaba, if your lungs can stand the rarified air.

I also ascended Orizaba, and my proxy said he could almost see into the land of the almighty dollar, the vision was so grand. I felt happy. Delightful excursions through the pretty gardens to Yngenio, the lakes and mills of Nogales, to the innumerable cascades of Rincon Grande, Tuxpango, El Bario Nuevo and Santa Ana. On the way to these, the orchids and other floral beauties just beg of you to pluck them and thus make room for their companions. Down the mountain we glide with brakes set and enter the steel laces of the spider bridge across the Metlac and hold our breath to lighten our weight to the other side. We feel much better after we are over, and just beyond in the tropical vale of Seco is Cordova, on the border of the tierra caliente and tierra templada. We are in the same belt as Jalapa and Orizaba, therefore in the heart of the coffee plantations. The principal food of the lower-class is bananas. The banana is an annual that grows about ten feet high and about a foot in diameter before the bud appears, and then from the top springs a purple bud eight or nine inches long, shaped like a large acorn. This cone hangs from a long stem upon which a leaf unfolds, displaying a large cluster of young fruit. As soon as these have set, the leaf drops off and another unfolds, exposing another young brood of buds. When these set, the process is repeated until there are nine or ten circles of young bananas, and when complete the bunch has nearly a hundred bananas, and the stalk never has to be replanted. It requires less attention and produces more than any plant known.

If the coffee plant was allowed to grow with its own sweet will, it would become a tree thirty feet high, but then the berry would be hard to gather, so it is topped and pruned so as to spread laterally. The leaf is a shining evergreen, the flower is a snowy white star with the odor of jassamines, and the fruit is a bright red, turning to purple when ripe. The fruit looks much like a cherry and tastes as well, but this is not for what it is cultivated. Within the berry are two kernels or seeds with their flat sides adjoining, and enclosed in a thin pericarp. The fruit is spread in the sun to dry, and the outer surface is shriveled to a pulp, when it is removed by the hand. The pericarp or thin husk still remains, and this is removed by being broken between rollers and winnowed, and the coffee berry is ready for market. It must be shipped alone as it will absorb any and all odors with which it comes in contact, and a cup of coffee with a Limburger aroma is not a desired innovation. The Mexican prides himself on the superiority of his coffee bean, and all travelers praise the article as drunk a la Mexicana.

A president of France once visited a village hostelry, and asked the woman in charge to bring him all the chicory she had in the house. After she had proudly delivered all her chicory to him he said: “And now madam, I will thank you for a cup of good coffee.” The Mexican is not above deception, however. Parrots grow here by the million and paroquets by the billion, and in nearly all colors of the rainbow, but only the ones with the yellow head will ever learn to talk, and no color of paroquets will do more than chatter. But what is that small thing to a Mexican? He simply gets a number of parrots and a pot of yellow ochre, and in three shakes of a sheep’s tail he has a cage full of yellow-head parrots worth five dollars each before they learn to talk. They next spot the American “greenies” with money to burn, and the rest, is it not written in the book of a retributive Nemesis who recorded those blue streaks of profanity when that parrot got its first bath? Yea, verily.

“In ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.”

Bret Harte may come down here with his mandolin and pick that same tune in Spanish and he will receive an encore.

The Mexican will sell you “antiquias” from a pyramid that he made last month, and he will sell you a coffee-wood walking stick that was made from an old railroad crosstie and loaded with lead, and he will sell you a blanket he stole from you last night, but when you call for coffee you get the real article, and it is not prepared in either iron or tinned vessels, but unglazed pottery. They fill your cup half full of coffee and half full of milk and pass you the sugar, and when you have done, like Oliver Twist, you call for more.

CATHEDRAL GUADALAJARA.

CHAPTER XVIII.
GUADALAJARA IN THE VALE OF LERMA.

GUADALAJARA, which is reached by the Mexican Central R. R. from Irapuata, was built in 1541 and in importance ranks next to the city of Mexico. It is the capital of Jalisco, situated near the River Lerma, which here changes its name to Santiago, in the midst of a plain hemmed in on three sides by mountains, and on the fourth side is the Canon of Santiago and the jumping-off place to the Pacific Ocean.

Being the only city of importance near the Pacific and never having had a railroad till 1888, it is strictly a Mexican city without foreign tendency. The city is exceedingly beautiful, with streets crossing at right angles and lined with orange trees for shade, the rarest of innovations in this country. There are a score of public parks with music stands, fourteen portales or arcades covering the sidewalks for many squares, and fourteen bridges spanning the San Juan River.

The Degollado Theatre is the largest on the continent, with the possible exception of the Metropolitan in New York. The only academy of fine arts in the country outside the capital is here. It is a great manufacturing city, but not a column of smoke or the noise of a wheel breaks the Sunday quiet. It is entirely what the word means—manufactures, hand-made. Pass across the little river among the humble adobe dwellings and every house is a work-shop for cotton and silk and wool and leather and musical instruments. Seated upon the dirt floor with a distaff in her hand, I saw Penelope weaving rebosas after the manner of the ancient Greeks. Two doors further I saw young girls with foot-power looms weaving cotton goods, and hard by were a score of young women weaving hosiery with small hand-worked machines. Leather and straw hats and baskets were all done by hand, and what a busy city! For squares and squares, every doorway revealed a hive of busy workers, for Guadalajara must supply the country a hundred miles around, and forever, and forever, the pack-trains from the Pacific country and the mountains come and go with the exchange of commerce. It is the busiest city I have yet found here and the people are happy. Saddles and hats and hammocks and baskets and pottery and shoes are made by the thousand tons and all by hand or the crudest of foot-power machinery. It is wonderful to see the skill of mere boys, who seem to inherit the trades of their ancestors, like the watch-makers of Switzerland or the wood-carvers of Germany.

Of necessity, hand-made articles come high in price, and that forces other thousands into the trade to make rather than to buy. A manilla hat will sell for four dollars right in the shop where it is made, and woolen sombreros without ornament are from four to ten dollars, and a pair of French suspenders costs a dollar and a half. A curious custom is the grouping together of all similar industries. In seeking a pair of shoes I was sent to a quarter of the town where for an hour every open door gave forth its leather odor, and the wall outside was lined with leather articles. There is no mooted question about shop-made shoes. Every workman sits in front of his door with his kit of tools on the sidewalk and works and waits for custom, and if he does shoddy work it is done under your gaze. All the rope and hemp dealers and workers in sisal are grouped in like manner, and the far-famed Guadalajara pottery can be found all in one square. Guadalajara is the home of the chocolate industry. The botanical name of the chocolate tree is Theobroma cacao, and on account of the theobromine the seeds contain, it is one of the most nourishing foods in the country. The cacao tree grows about 20 feet high. The leaves are large and the flowers small, and the fruit is a long purple pod similar to the yellow locust pods of our forests. The pod contains from twenty to forty beans, each very similar in size and color to the shelled almond. Butter made from these beans has an agreeable taste and odor, and rarely becomes rancid. The principal constituents are stearin and olein, and is much used in surgery, and in France is used in pomade. The chocolate of commerce is prepared by roasting the seeds, which establishes the aroma and changes the starch into dextrin. The seeds are then crushed, winnowed and molded, and are ready for export. For instructions in the art of preparing the steaming beverage, consult your cook. I do not know.

The most noted point in the city is the Hospicio de Guadalajara. This building covers eight acres of ground, and within its walls are twenty-three patios or open courts where fountains play and flowers bloom in the open air, and mangoes, oranges and bananas grow in the very doors. This is a public institution for foundlings and orphans and the deaf, dumb and blind. Girls and boys occupy opposite sides of the building, and are grouped according to age. A matron in white cap led me through the entire establishment, beginning with the nursery with its long rows of cribs with infants of all ages and in all stages of humor. Some are orphans by necessity and some by desertion, but they have a better home than thousands with healthy parents. Life here is not a sinecure and the children are all taught valuable trades. Crippled and deformed little girls were embroidering and embossing laces and silks upon patterns so intricate it looked impossible to follow without machinery. I shall never again believe that the Irish and Venetian lace-workers have a monopoly of this wonderful and painfully intricate knowledge. There is a bazaar in the front where these finished articles are offered for sale, and that is the main channel through which they receive gratuities. A direct gratuity would be respectfully declined as it is a state institution and well supported, but you would be told that to purchase these articles would be directly helpful to the poor unfortunates who were weaving their lives into those wonderful patterns.

I asked the matron as to their final disposition. She said that the afflicted ones would of course stay still death. The healthy girls would be helped to places of self-support, and the boys would all go to the army, if they had not mastered some trade. The children have a beautiful chapel in an open court and decorated in the most pleasing manner. I learned more of the nobler side of the Mexican people by a day spent here than in all my wanderings elsewhere. Sorrow and affliction are like to bring us in a more sympathetic union, and the hundreds of patient and afflicted children trying to solve the problems of life under difficulties, force home the truth that all human nature is the same. Except for the Spanish language, these neatly dressed attendants and wards could not be told from any similar institution in our own land, and they will compare as favorably in any line of conduct or results achieved, and the moral tone and timbre of the institution is a paragon of excellence. The Hospicio San Miguel de Belen is a similar institution for afflicted adults with hospital, lunatic asylum and school attached.

I suppose penitentiary life is never pleasant, but prison life here is the most pleasant I have seen. The outer walls look grim enough, but within there must be two acres of flower plots all under care of the prisoners. The guards are all upon the walls and can see all that goes on below. The penitentiary is arranged like a turbine wheel, or rather like a wagon wheel, with avenues from all parts of the ground converging to a central arena without roof, and where the prisoners may be all assembled under inspection if need be. There is here also a reformatory for boys with dungeons for refractory ones and books and lessons for the ignorant ones. While it is called a penitentiary, there are no long term men there; they are all in the army, where they do all the drudgery work of the barracks. They wear a distinctive uniform and would be instantly shot if they attempted to escape. It is very easy to gain admission here, because the visitor is on the wall forty feet above ground and every part of the wall is traversed by narrow bridges across the amphitheatre over which the guards constantly travel. The prisoners are allowed to come to the office and sell anything they manufacture, and their friends may bring them the raw material, so a man may be a prisoner and yet support his family. The building contains a court of justice and prisoners from the patrol wagon are brought directly here and tried and turned into their wards.

Monopolies have no chance here; the government controls everything. The slaughter house is a model of cleanliness and water is freely used. A hundred or more animals are slaughtered daily and the butchers buy as the animals are quartered. Prices go according to the grade of meat and as it is a state affair there is no swindling and no bidding on prices. The animals are slaughtered without cruelty. One is drawn up a gangway by a windlass and fastened so it cannot struggle, and a knife is driven behind the horns, severing the medulla oblongata, and another into the heart, and the blood drawn off by a conduit while the carcass falls into a car and is drawn to the skinning room and in six minutes is quartered and sold. The city market is a wonder all by itself. It covers an entire square and the roof is supported by 196 arched portales on the outside, and the number within the mazy interior are too many to count. Underneath is sold everything that is common to the country.

Across the San Juan River, five kilometers away, is the suburban town of San Pedro. The tramcar passes through the city gate under a huge arch and enters a beautiful avenue of giant elms and camphor trees, and finally stops at a shaded plazuela in the midst of the little town. The town for the most part consists of mud-colored adobe huts with no comfort or convenience, but you soon discover that this is a residence town of the merchants of Guadalajara. You discover this by the lofty stone walls shutting out the eyes of the vulgar. One of the first indications of wealth is a desire to be seclusive, and to wall the great world out from one’s own little selfish world. Even the church is walled in and the cemented coping stuck with jagged glass, and the entrance guarded by heavy iron gates.

But San Pedro is known by one thing alone worth notice—pottery. Guadalajara pottery is known all over the world. Here is found a peculiar clay that gives it a priori advantage, and for generations the making of pottery has been the business of the town, and the knack of the thing is inherited. The delicate and artistic painting is done by people who never had a lesson in art or pigments. Everything in the shape of a vessel is made in San Pedro, from the huge urns that hold your largest lawn plants to the minute toy that may be covered with a button. Not only vessels, but every thing the Mexican has ever seen he can reproduce in clay, be it horse or man or procession or bull-fight or building, and he will make it as true to life and color and purpose as a photograph. But in San Pedro they do more than that. You can sit for a statue or a bust, six feet or six inches, and the workman will take his clay and produce a likeness your own mother would know. They are absolutely true to life in every respect, and will be colored as to eyes and clothes to the fractional part of a division of a tint, and I refuse to abate one jot or tittle of the statement.

But everybody in San Pedro can do that, so we have not yet reached the celebrity. To find the artist of Mexico, of Guadalajara, of San Pedro, you must walk two squares east on the street that leads from the southeast corner of the plaza, turn down to the right half a square till you come to a little tumble-down adobe house on the left. The latchstring is on the outside and you are always welcome. Within is Juan Pandero, the Indian sculptor, a genius if there is one. To be exact there are two, father and son. If you want a statuette of your beautiful self it is made while you wait, or will be built and sent to your hotel, or he will go to your room and do it. But more than that, send him your photograph and he will do the same, and herein lies his genius. Only these two can produce statues from photographs, and they will be as true to life as though he made them from models. And the tools. Such tools! Seated on the floor with a lump of clay and an old case knife, and the outfit is complete.

From the hill of San Pedro, the City of Guadalajara and the Vale of the Lerma lie before you, and you notice what you have noticed a hundred times before, how like the hills of Palestine are the landscape. Take any series of pictures of the Holy Land and of Mexico, and no person who had not traveled in one or the other could tell the difference. The houses low, flat-roofed and painted white, the absence of trees and the naked plain force the resemblance every time a vista is opened.

Back to the city among those magnificent elms and to the Paseo. The Paseo! what would any Mexican city be without its Paseo, where fashionable people take their outing with such system and abandon? This Paseo extends for a mile along both sides of the Rio San Juan de Dios. There are also the Botanical gardens, and the Alameda, and the mint and state buildings with the finest of architecture, so unlooked for in this far-away place. Churches! ah yes, same old thing, even to the earthquake brand, and they are costly and beautiful. The cathedral was begun in 1561 and completed in 1618. Both towers were thrown down by an earthquake in 1818. Paintings without number adorn the wall. The Assumption, by Murillo, is a genuine master-piece. All the saints in this part of the vineyard have been remembered in the christening. There are El Sagraria, San Francisco, San Augustin, San Felipe, La Campania, Guadalupe, Mexicalt-zingo, Jesus Maria, Capuchinas, Santa Monica, El Carmen, San José de Analco, San Sebastian de Analco, La Parroqua de Jesus, San Juan de Dios, Aranzazu, La Soledad, San Diego, Belen, La Concepcion, La Trinidad y la Parroqua del Pilar, and I am tired of naming them; but if you will get an almanac and call off all the saints in the calendar, I will agree to find their churches christened and waiting for them in Guadalajara.

Nothing but a conscientious duty makes me go around among these old paintings, and what do I know about them? I stood in an art gallery once before a picture called “The Transfiguration;” my companion asked me how much was it worth. I sized up the gilt frame and measured the space it covered and said it must have cost ten dollars. He pointed to the name in one corner and said in disgust: “Don’t you see Raphael’s name on there? that picture is worth forty thousand dollars!” I dropped my catalogue to hold my palpitating heart in place and told him I knew better. Why, there were not ten yards of canvas in the whole thing, and the molding was not much over eight inches wide and there was not fifty feet of it, and I knew the price of molding and canvas too. Forty thousand dollars! who ever heard the like? “But it is not the frame, goosie, look at the picture!” I looked at it, and then I told him to look at the picture on the other side, at that Stag Fight, or at that fellow on the beech-log fishing, and “there’s a picture to look at.”

He cast a withering glance at me and said some words which sounded like this: “——!—--!!—--!!! natural born fool.” I stayed an hour trying to get educated enough to see the forty thousand dollars. Hundreds of people came, looked in the catalogue at the price and then showed their superior education. “Now, that’s what I call art.” “Just look at the expression.” “What an ensemble!” “Note the radiance of that halo!” I merely asked them what was it anyway. Some said it was the price, some said it was an original old master, and some said it was both. I saw hundreds of pictures I liked better, but I was out of style. I saw a beech forest with silver bark and purple and brown leaves that I thought was a gem, and some one turned up his nose in disgust and pointed to the price; only $25! bah! And then I wept because my art education had been so sadly neglected, and so I never miss an opportunity now to improve it. Now, when the guide strikes an attitude and proudly points to a painting and says: “Murillo!” I throw up both hands and step back a pace or two and say: “Murillo! Murillo! Ah, Murillo! Just look at that expression! What an ensemble!” Then I look at the guide’s face to see how I am getting along, and he looks happy, and then we pass on. Then he stops. “The Entombment, by Titian, $50,000.” Then I go into ecstacies and strike another attitude: “The Entombment! $50,000! Titian! $50,000! Ah, Titian! $50,000! That’s art!” When we stopped again I was just about to raise my hands again, and looked to him for my cue, but he said: “By a Mexican, $25.” “Oh!” I said in contempt. “Just a daub! Why in the name of Saint Peter doesn’t that man learn to paint!” That guide said I ought to make art my calling, and I do not know till this day what he meant.

Of course excursions outside of the city are in order. The cars lead to Tlacotalpan, about five kilometers away, a quaint old town that looks like Rip Van Winkle’s summer residence. The Falls of Juanacatlan are farther. You go by rail twelve miles to Castillo, and go by horse-car one league farther to the River Lerma. The river is over a hundred yards wide and the cascade is seventy-one feet high. In high water the falls are beautiful, but a huge flour-mill has been erected which draws most of the water through a flume when the river is low, at which time it is possible to walk across the rocks the entire distance above the falls. The mill was not completed when I was there, but judging by the name it bears, it will be a very correct and moral mill. The part of the name as completed reads: “The Mill of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary Magdalene;” and when the annex is added to the mill, I was assured that the rest of the name would be added, as at present there was not enough room. Between Castillo and the falls is a rich valley covered with fine beef cattle for the city market, and here can be witnessed some of the finest work of roping cattle to be found among cowboys. While in full gallop they can rope any foot of the animal that may be desired.

Above here the river Lerma passes through Lake Chapala, and as it emerges from the other side it bears the name of Rio Grande de Santiago. Surely baptism is a wonderful alembic that can make a saint of a muddy little river by one emersion only. But its good works follow it, and where it empties into the Pacific, behold the Bay of San Blas! It was from Lake Chapala that the Aztec migration began, 648 A. D., for the valley of Mexico, and on this march their name was changed from Aztecs to Mexicatls, in honor of their war-god, Mexitli. Soon after the river leaves the lake, and just beyond Guadalajara, it forms a wonderful canon, which for grandeur is not surpassed on this continent. The chasm is a narrow barranca two thousand feet down its perpendicular walls.

You stand on the brink in the tierra templada and behold the tiny, silver stream a full half mile below you in the tierra caliente, the hot lands of the Pacific. You will never see elsewhere such a work of nature as the canon de Rio Santiago. No, not even in the Colorado Canon. It seems as though the great Titans in play had spaded this great block of the continent from those perpendicular walls, and hurled it at the Cyclops in the sea.

CHAPTER XIX.
THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN.

ENTERING Mexico from El Paso on the Mexican Central R. R., we traverse the plateau that is continuous from Santa Fe to the City of Mexico; and dreary enough, too, is the journey, with a perpetual landscape of mesquite brush, cactus and chaparral. The first place of interest is Chihuahua, two hundred and twenty-four miles from the Rio Grande, with its famous silver mines of Santa Eulalia. The city laid a tax of twenty-five cents on every pound of silver taken from the mine, and with its share of the revenue, built the famous church of San Francisco at a cost of eight hundred thousand dollars.

This is the home of the Chihuahua dog, a beautiful nervous little creature that is smaller than a squirrel and can easily be carried in the pocket. It somewhat resembles a marmoset, and is bought by people who are inclined toward pets. I have heard it darkly hinted that the Mexican hot tamale was largely made up of Chihuahua dogs, but after seeing the animal I do not believe it, as it would not pay dividends. Judging by the size, a person with an ordinary appetite could easily misplace two of them, and as tamales sell for a cent a piece or twelve cents for a square meal, the dearest principle of speculation would be sacrificed with a dollar dog cooked up with a plebeian mongrel. It is true I have never known what was in the scores of tamales with which I have made a personal acquaintance, but I will never believe that a Chihuahua dog was actually killed for that purpose. With the armadilla it is different. His market value is only rated by the number of steaks or tamales he will make up, and of him I can believe anything.

All of this country for almost a thousand miles is devoted to mining, which forms almost the only industry. At Lerdo, near the Nazas River is the choicest cotton-growing section of the country. This is the Laguna region and is very similar to the Nile. It rarely rains, but with irrigation, wheat and corn grow all the time, and cotton has to be planted only once in seven years, as it grows that long from one planting. Eight hundred miles from the Rio Grande and four hundred and forty miles from the city is Zacatecas, a city of eighty-five thousand and the capital of Zacatecas. Nothing grows here but rocks and silver, and I believe they do not grow any more, but they have a great deal of the old stock still on hand. In the heart of the Sierra Madres, this old town is built upon a silver mine which was discovered in 1546 and since then has disgorged a billion dollars.

The sight of the town from the north is startling. You have climbed to a height of 8,000 feet and see no indication of a city until the train crosses the crest. At night when the city is a blaze of light it surpasses anything seen outside of Fairyland, as the train winds in a spiral down into town, dropping 136 feet to the mile. At the station the mules have pulled up the street cars and gone back to town, and as you get aboard the driver loosens the brake and lets the car roll into town by gravity. Like the nests of swallows clinging to the cliffs are the houses of Zacatecas, perched far up where it seems only a goat could climb.

And Zacatecas also has its Guadalupe, upon whose summit is the church of Los Remedios, and up the road, as narrow as the one which leads to righteousness and as rocky as the one up from Jordan, lined with sharp stones and crull cactus, crawl devotees on bleeding knees to do penance for their souls’ salvation, at the behests of priests who grow rich from their savings. Of course all the saints have churches named for them, and here is probably the oldest Presbyterian Church in the world. It was once dedicated to San Augustin, but has now become the property of the Presbyterians. In the old church of Guadalupe is probably more to interest the stranger than in any other church in this land of churches. In the main altar are life-size figures of the crucifixion, and behind these is a painting of Calvary with the Jews and Roman soldiers, drawn to affiliate with the statues in front with startling effect. The church is filled with people kneeling at the altars and whispering in the confessionals. The old art gallery is filled with pictures of the saints in all gradations of trials and temptations which prepared them for immortality. The new chapel is the gift of a maiden lady of great wealth, and is the finest chapel in Mexico. The floor is inlaid with hard woods in different colors, and the altar is rich with silver and gold and gilding and wax figures, and silk and satin hangings. The altar rail is of onyx and solid silver. The walls are finely frescoed, and arched to a dome fifty feet above the floor. Everywhere are mines, mines, and from their yawning mouths the Mexican laborers climb ladders all day, bearing on their back canvas sacks holding two hundred pounds of ore, and receive the princely sum of thirty-five cents a day. The richest churches and the poorest people in Mexico are always found in the same town and are correlative. The very fact that the people are poor, is because they have made the church rich. A million dollar church whose portals are filled with a hundred ragged paupers begging alms is an every day occurrence.

As the train leaves Zacatecas going south, it climbs a grade one hundred and seventy-five feet to the mile, and ere long reaches Aguas Calientes, “Hot Waters,” and the town runs riot in smoking, steaming, hot waters that burst from the mountain side and offer free baths and prepared laundry facilities free gratis for nothing to all who wish them, and they are thoroughly appreciated. Men, women and children paddle in the water and bathe and dress and undress with no worry at all about the small conventionalities of privacy, etc. Now and then you will see a baby tied to a string, who paddles to the length of his tether while his mother is busy with her laundering. The town was built in 1520 and is worthy of a visit at any time, but to see it in its glory you must come to La fiesta de San Marcos. Saint Mark is the patron saint of the city, and from April 23 to May 10, all the turkeys in reach are slaughtered to grace the festal board and the business houses close for a holiday. There is a fine old bell in the great church by the plaza, and whenever it is heard the peons uncover their heads, cross their hands and engage in prayer. People from all over the country come here to bathe in the hot waters and take life easy. It is better than heating water at home. Fruit is abundant and cheap, oranges selling two for a cent in Mexican money, or four for a cent in Uncle Samuel’s coin. Flowers grow so luxuriously in this warm moist atmosphere, that geraniums and oleanders grow to the height of trees.

Below Aguas Calientes is the city of Leon, on the river Turbois, in the state of Guanajuata. It contains a hundred thousand population and is the third city in importance in Mexico. It has five hundred and seven streets, two hundred and thirty-six manzanas and ten plazas. Nearly everything in use by the citizen is made here, but the leather industry prevails. There is no machinery whatever, but everywhere are handlooms for weaving rebosas, shops for the making of bridles and the cruel spade-like bridle-bits, saddles, leather clothing and sombreros, so much prized by cow-boys and haciendados.

Guanajuata is the capital of the state and is pronounced “Wah-nah-water.” The original name of the town was Guanashuata, “The Hill of the Frogs” in the Tarascan tongue, on account of the fanciful shape of the overhanging mountain. For three hundred years mining has been the business of this city which contains sixty crushing mills to reduce the quartz. The richest silver mine in the country is here, the Veta Madre, which has already produced $800,000,000 by the crude methods in vogue here, which never secure over sixty percent of the real value. Owing to the scarcity of fuel and water, machinery is impractical, so the usual method of extraction is as follows: the rock is ground into a fine powder and made into a paste with water, and spread upon the floor of a large court a hundred feet square, after the manner of a brick-yard mortar-pit; then certain preparations of salt, sulphate of iron and quicksilver are added, and for three weeks a drove of broken-down donkeys and men tramp leg-deep in this huge mud-pie. When the amalgamation is complete and the quicksilver has collected all the silver, it is taken in wheel-barrows to washing tanks, where half-naked men and boys puddle it till the metal falls to the bottom and the refuse washes away. It is barbarous treatment for men and animals, and a slow method, but the only practical one where coal sells for $20 a ton and wood $11 a cord. Wading naked in quicksilver and vitriol is not calculated to lengthen life, and the life of mules in this business is generally four years and of the drivers eight, and yet they never lack for drivers. The mines average $33 to every ton of raw material handled, and the silver is so plentiful and the profits so satisfactory that the forty percent. loss does not trouble the owners. The 85,000 people all get a living and are happy and what more is needful.

Queretaro with its fifty thousand population is especially noted for opals. It is a remarkable fact that every industry in Mexico is distributed by towns. Irapuato for strawberries, Celaya for dulces, Lerdo for cotton goods, Leon for leather, Puebla for onyx, Orizaba for fruits, Saltillo for Zerapes, Guadalajara for pottery, Jalapa for beautiful women, and so on from Dan to Beersheba. And so Queretaro contains the mines which produce the fiery opal which brings so much ill luck to the owners, according to the reigning superstition. This was an Aztec town, captured by the Spaniards in 1531. It was here the treaty of peace with the United States was finally ratified in 1848, and where Mr. Seward was met with so much honor in 1869. The Hercules Cotton Mill is the greatest attraction of Queretaro and one of the greatest in the country. It has an over-shot waterwheel forty-six and a half feet in diameter, and also a Corliss steam engine which burns wood costing sixteen dollars a cord. One thousand eight hundred employees work here twelve hours a day with wages from thirty-seven and a half to fifty cents a day, and weavers get six or seven dollars a week. The premises are walled in by a fort, and in front is stationed a company of thirty-seven men with Winchester rifles. All large establishments have to do this, as the large amount of money changing hands on payday is but an invitation to desperate men of the Jesse James persuasion to make an informal call. This mill has twenty-one thousand spindles and seven hundred looms, and manufactures the unbleached cotton which the common people wear. In the midst of a profusion of flowers stands a statue of Hercules which cost fourteen thousand dollars before it left Italy. Protective tariff in favor of this mill against imports is nine and three quarter cents per square metre, which enables it to sell its cloth at thirteen cents per square yard wholesale. A better grade of goods is sold in the United States for five cents. Free Trade is yet a long ways off in Mexico.

Maximilian and his two generals were shot here, and the saddest thing connected with the history is the fate of poor Carlotta, his wife. She was very dear to the people of Mexico, and when Maximilian was taken prisoner many people pleaded for his life. The governments of Europe protested against his execution, and the United States asked a stay of his sentence. The princess Salm-Salm rode a hundred and sixty miles on horseback and on bended knee prayed Juarez to spare his life. The next day after his capture, Carlotta hurried to Vera Cruz and set sail for France and begged Napoleon III to keep his word and uphold the treaty of Miramar, and Napoleon insulted her for her trouble. She then went to Rome and prayed to Pope Pius IX., but fared no better and distracted by her failures she became a raving maniac, and for these thirty years no light of reason has ever returned, but in the Austrian capital she sits in gross darkness, babbling the name of Maximilian. As for the Indian president, Juarez, he listened to all petitions but gave but one answer; that war was war, and as for sickly sentimentalism, he had gone out of the posing business, and they who lived by the sword should die by the sword.

While Maximilian was in power, he issued a decree that every officer taken in arms against the government should be shot without trial, and he executed that decree with every Mexican officer he captured. Now Juarez was in power and the law had never been repealed, and he decided it would work as well with Juarez as with Maximilian. Aside from all this he decided that one dead Austrian Emperor on Mexican soil was worth a hundred live ones, and Juarez always lived up to his convictions.

P. S. Maximilian was shot.

Pachuca is the capital of Hidalgo, eight thousand feet above the sea, and overcoats are needed the whole year. There are three hundred mines here and the business has been carried on four hundred years, and the quantity of silver taken out will never be known. The Trinidad alone in ten years yielded fifty million dollars. The other principal mines are the Rosario, Caridado, Xacal, Santa Gertrudis, Caxyetana and Dolores. At Acambaro we change cars for the Lake Region, through the beautiful towns of Morelia, the capital of Michoacan and the residence of the Bishop. In olden times when the Tarascan Kings got tired acting King, they took their boats, and leaving Tzintzuntzan, their capital, paddled over to Patzcuaro, “Place of Pleasure.”

The town is very old and the streets are very crooked, with shrines and saints set in the walls at every corner, but the old settlers were right when they called it a place of pleasure. After a good night’s rest it is the proper thing to see the sunrise, that will leave its impression with you forever. Up the street to the Hill of Calvary you pass fourteen stations of the Cross where the faithful pray. You hurry on to Los Balcones, a stone parapet in front of the church of Calvary and what a sight meets your eye! From your elevation of a mile and a half above the sea, the world is spread before you like a panorama. Spread at your feet is Laguna Patzcuaro, “Lake Beautiful,” with its green islands and giant trees, and as the sun comes up out of the Sierras he discloses to your enchanted gaze a level plain with forty-three towns with a setting of mountains and valleys worth a journey to see. Lake Patzcuaro is the highest navigable water on the globe, being over seven thousand feet high. It is a thousand feet below you on Los Balcones, but its thirty miles of length and twelve of width are before you as a mirror. On its bosom is the quaintest little steamboat that ever paddled a wheel, the Mariano Jiminez, and it will take you among all the beautiful islands, and to the old town of Tzintzuntzan. This was once the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Tarasco that resisted to the last the sovereignty of Montezuma, and after the Conquest was the seat of the Bishopric of Tarasco. This Bishopric was held in such high esteem by Philip II of Spain that he presented the cathedral with the finest creation from the brush of Titian, “The Entombment.” The old church is crumbling down, but the Indians venerate the painting so much the Bishop has forbidden its removal. Art lovers have offered immense sums for it, but the church authorities refuse to entertain offers in any sum, and so it hangs where it was hung over three hundred years ago.

The lake is dotted with innumerable fisher boats and timber rafts and large flat-bottom boats hewn from giant trees. The fishermen simply dip their nets in the water at random and catch the fish, which here form one of the chief articles of food; but we started out to study art, and not fish, so we land on the opposite side to see the famous painting which is so zealously guarded. You are admitted through the outer wall into the patio where sit a number of Indian women braiding mats, and the padre said they were doing penance. With a lighted candle the padre leads you through a dark corridor to a grim door, barred, chained and padlocked. This door leads into a chamber dark as night. The padre opens a grated window and lets in a flood of light and the picture lies revealed with its life-size figures. You know you are in the presence of the great master, because everybody says so.

Artists from every part of the world have come to see this painting and they all say it is a genuine Titian, and I knew this was the proper place and time to expiate on art as I had heard those learned critics do before the Transfiguration. I had finished nearly all the phrases they said when the padre closed the window and the flood-gate of my eloquence. Ah, but it was grand! After the padre had blown out the light, barred, chained and pad-locked the door, a new idea came to me. The bishop of Mexico has offered these Indians fifty thousand dollars for the picture and they laughed at him, and ten times that figure cannot buy it. All the figures are life-size and it is large enough, but fifty thousand dollars will plaster both sides. My idea is to go down there to Tzintzuntzan and get a job of doing penance in that old church and finally get myself elected guardian of the keys to that room, and then I will write this letter to the bishop of Mexico: “Dear Bishop: I hear that you have money to burn; also that you have fifty thousand dollars to invest in old canvas, especially the brand that adorns the dark alcove in the old cathedral at Tzintzuntzan. If you mean b-i-z, meet me at the Rialto on Lake Beautiful this P. M., just as the moon is rising in China, and we will give that old canvas the first fresh air bath it has had in three hundred years.

“P. S.—Come prepared to move in light marching order, because the state of Michoacan will hardly be large enough for you and the picture after morning mass.

“N. B., P. S. No. 2.—Don’t forget the fifty thousand dollars, for

“Yours Truly.”

If ever I get to be doorkeeper down there I shall certainly vote to use that fresh air fund to the best advantage, and there will still be profit enough to give all those enthusiastic art lovers a square meal after I have started to Canada, and I certainly would do that much for them. In coming years when the Tzintzuntzan poets shall say, “What are the wild waves saying?” they will answer, that they saw the only hustling doorkeeper that old church ever had, cross that lake between two days once, and before Aurora, child of the morn, had awakened from her sleep, he had reached the other side of the mountains and lit running.

CHAPTER XX.
DIVES AND LAZARUS.

THERE is probably no other country where the gulf between the rich and poor is so wide. Six thousand people own all the land in Mexico, and eleven million people have to live upon terms made directly or indirectly by those six thousand. The same six thousand are also the governing class, and make all laws to favor their own interest. For instance, all the land of the rich is exempt from taxation, and this compels the poor laborer to pay the tax for the support of the government. It is hard for a man to acquire land here, as the holders will not sell, and the laws against foreigners are very strict. Mexico has never forgotten 1848, when California, Arizona and New Mexico were seized by the United States, and she now sees to it that Americans get no more. Thus, no American, without consent of the president, can acquire land within twenty leagues of the border. This precaution is based upon the experience of Texas. Mexicans allowed the Americans to settle in Texas, and so soon as they felt strong enough they struck out for independence and got it. If Americans were allowed to buy along the Rio Grande, it would be but a few years till the Rio Grande country would declare independence and join Texas, just as Texas joined the union.

The rich have also made a law that a man may become a slave for debt, and the property of the creditor. As a legal enactment the law has been repealed, but as a matter of fact, the law is as operative today as it ever was, and this class of slave labor is known as peons. The peon may owe the creditor a hundred dollars. He is paid such low wages he never cancels his debt, but continues till it is doubled. Should he become dissatisfied with his master, he can get some one else to buy him by paying the debt, and he thus becomes the slave of the second, but this is always done legally. The original owner must write out a statement of the amount of debt, and allow the peon three days for each hundred dollars to seek a new master. Once in debt, always in debt, so the poor peon is never free, and his wife is included in his contract, and the haciendas will have no other kind of labor. The Mexican by nature is averse to work, and where land is so fertile and fruit is so plenty, it is hard to get a free Mexican to work, and harder to hold him. The peon, on the other hand, has both a moral and legal compulsion to work, and the fear of the law compels him to work every day but Sundays and feast days. So this is the kind of labor the haciendados seek.

In opening a new plantation, instead of hiring men, the owner spends six or eight thousand dollars in buying peons from other farms, before his new place has earned him a dollar. When he becomes the property of his new master, a contract must be made as to time and wages. The peon agrees to work on all days except feast days, and to receive in wages two dollars and a half a month, plus a ration of corn, beans and salt, or four dollars a month without rations. The rations consist of six almuds (6½ quarts each) of corn, half an almud of frijoles (beans) and one pound of salt. If a peon refuses to pay his debts in money or work, the law places him in close confinement. Life on these haciendas is peculiar to itself. The buildings are in the form of a huge rectangle surrounded by high walls and entered by massive gates which are closed at night. The walls are mounted by towers and pierced by loop-holes for muskets, and generally surrounded by a moat. All these precautions have been necessary in a land infested by bandits and subject to the annual raids of the revolutionists who could get horses and supplies to furnish a regiment.

The hacienda of Jaral once controlled 20,000 peons and furnished a full regiment for the Spanish army in the war of independence. Within this enclosure on one side is the residence of the bosses, as the owners nearly all live in Europe. On the other sides, in adobe huts with dirt floors, live the peons with their families and dogs, while in the center or in a separate enclosure are the animals. It reminds one of the feudal days to hear the signal bell rung and see the hundreds of people hurrying to the hacienda and closing the ponderous gates and preparing for a siege. Revolutions and bandits are not as frequent now as formerly, but the haciendas have no faith in Utopia, so they still build in accordance with past experience. The universal work animal is the ox, and he is worked just as he was on the Nile four thousand years ago. The plow is a sharp stick with an iron point that does not turn the soil but only opens a furrow. The beam is fastened to the yoke, and the yoke is fastened to the animal’s horns by means of raw-hide thongs, the universal hammer and nails of the country. The people mend, repair and make everything by means of raw-hide. The plowman holds the single handle with his left hand, and in his right he carries a goad with a steel point on the end with which he persuades his team. The driver never speaks to his team, but if he wants the team to go to the left he silently prods the right hand ox, and vice versa. The cruel method of fastening the yoke to the horns compels the oxen to pull by their necks instead of by their shoulders, and with a heavy two-wheeled cart loaded with a ton of stone, their necks soon become so stiff they cannot bend them, and cannot graze nor drink water unless they stand in it leg deep.

Innovations? O no, the Mexican wants no innovation. An enterprising Yankee shipped some plows down, and the natives sawed off one handle of every one. He had always plowed with one handle and always will. In making excavations for building, no wheel-barrow is seen. A piece of raw-hide stretched between two poles and carried by two men is the only wheel-barrow they will ever use. The only ladder in the country is an upright pole with cross-pieces tied on by ropes. To saw lumber a pit is dug and the log laid across the top, then with one man in the pit and one on the log, it is sawed into lumber. For wagons they use only two-wheel carts, and in loading, sometimes three or four hundred pounds will overbalance on the forward side and crush the mule to the ground, but with whip and lash he is made to get up and move.

I have seen these two-wheel carts come from the mines loaded with over two tons of silver, and drawn by eight mules, and only one mule in the shafts, and his back would be bent into the segment of a circle and his legs spread like a cotton toy.

To thresh their grain, it is spread in the yard and the oxen and donkeys are driven over it two or three days to tramp it out, just as they did in Egypt in Pharaoh’s time. After ten yoke of oxen had tramped over the wheat for two days, I fear there are fastidious people who would refuse to eat it, but we can get accustomed to many things when we have to. Even the green scum on the stagnant water of the canal makes a fine dish when you cannot do any better.

There came a Yankee to this country once who saw a Mexican threshing machine, which consisted of about thirty sheep, goats and burros, that were wading knee-deep in grain and threshing it out; so when he got home, he sent that farmer a Yankee threshing machine almost as a present, and it was put to work. The grain was threshed clean and it performed the work of a dozen men and twice that number of animals, and seemed a great success, but it got bruited to the priests. They came and saw the machine and stood in amazement. From their standpoint it was too great an innovation, and what might it not lead to? They declared that the devil was in the machine, and positively forbade the peons to use it! The threats and warnings frightened the poor ignorant peons out of their wits, and that machine was sent back across the Rio Grande.

When railroads were first introduced, the priests had the tracks torn up, and for a long time the rubber hose of the air-brake was continually cut open, because it was said to be the work of the devil. Wise priests they are in Mexico. Well do they know that where intelligence and invention find their way among those Indians, the power of the priesthood is gone, so it is not a matter of ignorance with them. They are well-educated—too well to permit innovations that will lessen their influence and shekels. I have met these priests outside of their official capacity, and found that many of them were educated in Europe and America and were well posted in the affairs of today, all of which proves that their teaching what they know to be false is the most transparent humbug.

The tools and manner of working is shiftless to the last degree. I have seen plantations planted in corn, and it was done by men digging holes with short handled grubbing-hoes, in which to plant, and when it was large enough to cultivate, take a short paddle or a board, and on their knees rake the dirt to each stalk.

The corn has been inbred until it is of the most stunted growth, when a few bushels of Texas corn would give new life to it. It is a rare thing to see a stalk on the plateau over five feet high, while the conditions of the soil ought to produce a height of twelve feet. For irrigation they still use the old well-sweep, a long pole balanced in a fork, and as the weighted end goes down, the laden bucket rises at the other, and all day the laborer draws this water to slake his thirsty field. A suction pump would do the work of six men, but I have not seen such an innovation as a pump in all this land. In making a cart the native will take his ax and hew him out one complete, and there will be no particle of iron about it.

With the woman, life is a continual tread-mill until she dies. From girlhood to old age her business is grinding corn, and it takes her entire time. In the entire country I have seen no other corn mill. The usual method is to put the corn to soak in lime water to soften the grains, and then they are laid upon a stone a dozen at a time and crushed by another stone roller made exactly like our kitchen rolling pins; and when it comes to grinding corn for a large family, a dozen grains at a time, it means a day’s work. In large cities of over a hundred thousand population, the public mill is the same. I visited a number where meal was ground for sale, and on the floor were thirty or forty women down on their knees grinding corn; the metata, or nether stone is held against the stomach like a washboard, and the rolling-pin stone is worked up and down to crush the corn, but always she is on her knees. This constant labor gives the peon woman a stolid look of resignation that never departs from her features. For use, the grated meal is dampened and made into thin cakes the size and thickness of a saucer, and cooked by placing on a hot stone or piece of sheet-iron.

Neither knives, forks, dishes or spoons enter into their household equipment. The tortilla is about the color and toughness of leather, and is baked and stacked away for future use. The frijoles are cooked in a small burnt clay vessel, then poured into or upon a frijola, which is then rolled into a cylinder and eaten. If by good fortune they have anything else to eat, the tortilla is used as a plate for this dainty and then the plate is eaten. Their adobe houses have dirt floors and no windows or chimneys. They never use fire except for cooking and that is done on the outside. Within are neither bed, table nor chairs. Sometimes there is a straw mat for a bed, and they sleep in the clothes they have worn all day, the men rolling in their zerapes and the women in rebosas. Shame and modesty in the usual amenities of life are entirely absent, and no privacy whatever is sought or needed. The men dress in white cotton and wear sandals on their feet, and each man is his own shoemaker. The women wear, often, simply a coarse chemise or at most a short petticoat reaching to the bare knees. Sometimes they wear coarse shoes, but never stockings. Their faces have a perpetual look of sadness. They are slaves for debt, and have nothing else in life to hope for. Marriage laws are almost unknown. They have not the money to secure a legal marriage, so the formality is dispensed with. In some of the largest cities in the country you may take a seat in a public park, and when no policeman is near some cadaverous looking woman will approach leading a daughter, and will offer to sell her for two or three dollars—to such stress are they driven by their condition.

Do not think for a moment that all this suffering and depravity will awaken sympathy from the rich. The rich are Spaniards, and being such, have neither sympathy nor charity for Mexicans and Indians. In trading with these poor people I have purposely paid them more than the price asked, when some Spaniard, thinking I had been cheated, would rush up and abuse the seller and attempt to restore my money.

Caste distinctions are drawn as tight as steel wires, and a peon would no more resent an insult from a Spaniard than if he were a superior being. They are fatalists, and accept their lot as their portion. Before the law they are all equal, but if the aristocracy should appropriate a particular park or street or sidewalk, the rabble would cower and huddle near the edge but would no more trespass than if it were an enchanted spot. The laws are made by the aristocracy, and in a lawsuit for damages the poor would have no show at all, and in most cases the leges non scriptæ are more powerful than the written. By common consent (of the aristocracy) the people have divided themselves into classes and they never transgress their acknowledged boundaries. No peon would think of asking a well-dressed gentleman for a cigarette light, and said gentleman would not use said peon for a door-mat.

The most remarkable feature is the zeal with which the police enforce caste rules. The railroads and street-cars are all divided into classes and the police are always present to see that the pilagua or poor class always go third-class. Even should one have a first-class ticket, the policeman would promptly eject him. At the bull-ring or theater the police assort them by their clothes, and I have yet to hear of a protest by the ejected. In the alamedas and promenades, if the aristocracy appropriate the inner circle next the band stand, the people immediately fall back to the outer circle, and a string of police will see that they stay there. But to all Americans, however dressed, barriers fall away like cobwebs, and with a tip of the hat the official bids you “Passe señor.” Ordinary servants are chosen from the great middle class, and employers require such exact obedience and homage that no servant of the United States would remain a day. No matter how often a servant is called, she must always answer with some deprecating remark denoting her position, such as: “Yes, your humble servant,” or “At your service, Señora,” and this formula must never be omitted. In nine cases out of ten no beds are furnished servants, and I have seen men and women spread themselves over the bare floor night after night and sleep in the same clothing they wore all day. For this faithful service women get five dollars a month, in a country where the cheapest cotton cloth is thirteen cents a yard. But Mexican servants are the best in the world. They know nothing of the comforts of life as we know them, so they do not grumble at their lot. Obedience and hardship are their inheritance, and like the caged bird that has never known freedom, they never chafe. It is this submission that makes the priesthood anxious to keep American innovation out; but let intelligence be once awakened to superior conditions, and automatic obedience to church and master will suffer a compound fracture.

The life of the great middle class woman is the happiest of the lot. Not being ground by poverty nor bound by the laws of aristocratic society, she enjoys life. The blue blood deserves our greatest sympathy. She must never appear without duenna or escort. If she engage in any occupation whereby she earns money or is drawn from her seclusiveness, she immediately loses caste. An educated lady may do missionary work or perform in music for some funcion; very well, but if it be known that she received pay for so doing, it would mean her Waterloo. In consequence most such places in the country are filled by foreigners who have no such restrictions to face. Sometimes gentility frazzels out to a very name with no income, and then the poor lady is in the strait whether she shall go hungry or lose caste, so she works by stealth. To the public she gives music lessons or art lessons for the love of it but on the quiet she collects tuition, and thus is able to live and still hold her own with the four hundred.

A Mexican lady has her world in two hemispheres, the church and the home. When she is not in one she is in the other. They neither visit nor receive calls. A Mexican’s home is for himself and he does not invite his dearest friends to it. This is not indicative of selfishness but the custom. If you want to see anyone you never go to their home, but to the plaza at eight when the band begins to play, and see your friends. That is what the band is for, to play while you visit. And so her life is spent. In her home all day peeping through iron bars, and on Sunday going to the bull fight, and three evenings a week going to the plaza to chat. Her home is furnished with elegance, but she has a peculiar custom. If her best room will hold forty chairs, then forty will be there. In nearly every home I have seen the walls held as many chairs as would set around the four sides, but their use was never revealed to me. Great is custom.

CHAPTER XXI.
POLITICAL ECONOMY.

LIFE is extremely hard in Mexico. The absence of fuel and water places her industries at a great disadvantage, and to foster her crude industries she is compelled to put a prohibitory tariff on imports, which falls heavily upon the consumer. A reciprocity treaty with the United States would solve the problem, but who ever heard of the American Congress agreeing upon subjects of great importance. When I first went to Mexico each state collected its own custom duties independent of the national government, and custom officials met the train at every state line. I knew a lady who moved from Kansas to Nueva Leon, the second state across the border, and on a silver water-pitcher valued at $35, she paid an ad valorem duty of $17.15. The custom regulations have changed now, and duty is no longer collected by individual states, but it is bad enough as it is. American ham in Mexico costs fifty cents a pound, cheese seventy-five cents, canned salmon one dollar a can, and mackerel twenty-five cents each.

Through the kindness of D. Appleton & Co., I am permitted to use some figures below, taken from that very excellent work by David A. Welles, “A Study of Mexico.”

“In 1885, an American living in the City of Mexico induced the landlady to order an American cooking-stove. In due time the stove arrived, and this is a copy of the bill presented and paid upon delivery:

ORIGINAL INVOICE:

1 stove	weight	282	pounds
1 box pipe	“	69	“
1 box stove furniture	“	86	“
Total		437	pounds	or 199.3 kilos.

Cost in St. Louis, U.S. currency	$26 50
Exchange at 20 per cent	5 30
Total	$31 80

Freight from St. Louis to City of Mexico (rail) at $3 15 per 100 pounds	$15 75
Mexican consular fee at El Paso	4 85
Stamps at El Paso	45
		$52 85

Cartage and labor on boxes examined by customhouse at El Paso	$ 50
Forwarding commission, El Paso	2 00
Exchange 16⅔ per cent. on $7 64 freight advanced by Mexican Central Railroad	1 25
		$56 60

IMPORT DUTIES:

1 box, 128 kilos (stove) iron without brass or copper ornaments, at 19 cents per kilo	$24 42
1 box, 31.3 kilos. iron pipe, at 24 cents per kilo	7 51
1 box iron pots, with brass handles, at 24 cents per kilo	9 48
	$41 41
Add 4 per cent. as per tariff	1 65
	$43 06
Package duty, 50 cents per 100 kilos	1 00
	$44 06
Add 5 per cent. as per tariff	2 20
	$46 26
Add 2 per cent. municipal duty	93
	$47 19
Add 5 per cent. consumption duty	2 36
	$49 55
Dispatch of goods at Buena Vista station, City of Mexico	38
Stamps for permit	50	50 43
		$107 03
Cartage in City of Mexico		75
Total		$107 78

RESUME:

Original cost of stove with exchange	$31 80
Freight, consular fees and forwarding	24 80
Import duties	50 43
Cartage	75
Total		$107 78

[Note.—This stove was shipped from El Paso in a lot of goods for Messrs. —— & Co., the largest importing house in Mexico, thereby saving the expense of two-thirds the consular fees—$14-56—which, if paid on the invoice alone, would have added $9 71 to charges and raised the total to $117 49.]

In 1878 Hon. John W. Foster, then United States Minister to Mexico, in a communication to the Manufacturers’ Association of the Northwest, (Chicago) thus analyzed the items of cost, in the City of Mexico, of a tierce weighing gross 328 pounds, containing 300 pounds (net) of sugar cured hams:

New York cost, 300 pounds at 11 cents	$33 00
New York expense, such as cartage, consular invoice, ($4 gold), manifest, etc., average 5 per cent. on large shipments	1 65
Freight from New York to Vera Cruz at 1 cent per pound, payable in New York	3 25
		$37 90
Exchange on New York, $37 90 at 18 per cent.	$6 82
Import duties in Vera Cruz, 138 kilos at 24 cents per kilo	33 12
Municipal duties in Vera Cruz, $1 03 for every 400 pounds	84
Lighterage and handling from steamer to warehouse ($1 to $1 50 per every 200 pounds)	1 63
Maritime brokerage, 2 per cent. on freight ($3 25)	07
Opening and closing barrel	50
Additional charges in Vera Cruz for stamps and cartage to railroad station	1 50
Commission in Vera Cruz, 2 per cent. on $70 66	1 41
Exchange on Vera Cruz, 1 per cent. on $39 06	39
Railroad freight from Vera Cruz to City of Mexico, 140 kilos at $54 32 per ton	7 60
Local duties in City of Mexico, 2 per cent. on Federal duty, $33 12	66
Local expense in City of Mexico, cartage in depot, expense in custom house, etc.	75
Total		$93 19

Therefore, $1 in hams in New York was worth $2.82 in Mexico, or 31 cents per pound! A similar analysis showed that an invoice of ten kegs of cut nails, which cost in New York $22.50, when imported into the City of Mexico cost $141.64, or $1 value in nails in New York was equal to $6.29 in Mexico, and salt that cost $2 a barrel in New York, cost $20.40 in Mexico. These are simply specimens of tariff duty, but the internal revenue system is no less remarkable.

Every inhabitant of the republic who sells goods to the value of $20 must give the buyer an invoice of same, and affix and cancel a stamp of corresponding value. Retail sales are exempt from this law so long as they are less than $20. Retail sellers in the market, or others whose capital does not exceed $300, are exempt. Tickets of all descriptions, railroad, theatre, etc., must have a stamp, also each page of the report of meetings; each leaf of a merchant’s ledger, cash or day book, and every cigar sold separately must be delivered to the buyer in a stamped wrapper. Sales of spirits pay 3 per cent; gross receipts of railroads (city) 4 per cent; public amusements, 2 per cent of entrance fees; playing cards 50 per cent, and mercantile drafts pay a dollar on the hundred. Each beef animal on leaving a town pays 50 cents; each fat pig, 25 cents; each sheep, 12 cents; and everything else you can mention.

A miller in Mexico has to pay thirty-two separate taxes on his wheat, from the time it leaves his field till he can offer it to his customers as flour. The country swarms with officials who collect taxes from every conceivable source, fandangos, christenings, marriages, funerals, buryings, etc., while you live, and then collect taxes on your grave after you are dead. It is very much like a case I knew in Texas when a man was sentenced to prison for life, and the judge found that he had overlooked one indictment, so he promptly added ten years. I am puzzled to know if this taxation gave rise to the belief in the transmigration of souls, or whether the belief in transmigration gave the cue to the officials to collect from the shades. Perhaps this delinquent tax is charged to the estate of Purgatory et al. Every man between the ages of 18 and 66 is taxed for the privilege of living, and the only way to escape this tax is to live in Vera Cruz and die young. Poor old Mexico.

I might devote ten pages to this subject, but what is the use? A country with such a prohibitive tariff shuts out her only source of revenue on imports, and exports nothing of importance but money, so how can she survive except by robbing the people? The country is very poor, the State of South Carolina producing two and a half times as much as the entire northern half of Mexico, and if you compare them by proportionate areas, twenty-five times as much. The interminable system of taxation is the most despicable system on American soil.

I have at last discovered why so many beggars go naked in Mexico. They go naked and beg in order to escape the tax gatherer, since a man is taxed on clothes and material and upon all incomes greater than $150. History tells of a certain people that brought on a revolution and a republic, just on account of such harmless pastime as licking stamps. The time will come in Mexico when the people will lick just one stamp too many, then they will rise in their might and stamp the industry in the ground. (Joke not intended).

CHAPTER XXII.
PREHISTORIC RUINS.

“Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain—
And fetters strong and fast,
Hold all within thy unbreathing reign.

“Far in thy realm withdrawn,
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom;
And glorious ages gone,
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.

“Full many a mighty name
Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevealed;
With thee are silent fame,
Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.”

WHAT strange people first entered this land? Who built these stupendous monuments? Whence did they come and whither did they go? And what characters are these engraved on walls which no man can read? And what catastrophe removed from the continent every single inhabitant of a gifted race? And why do we strive so hard to lift the veil which for so long has guarded these strange portals?

Every man who has looked upon these speechless but eloquent landmarks of these vanished races feels a burning desire to know more of them. To the curious and inquisitive, Mexico offers an endless field, and a few of these most noted ruins will be mentioned here.

The pyramid of Cholula, covering forty-four acres of ground, has already been mentioned. On Lake Texcoco stood the ancient city of Texcoco, and here have been found the foundations of three great pyramids, built of adobe and burnt brick. Sculptured blocks with finely chiseled bas reliefs have also been found. Three miles from Texcoco is a group of ruins called the Hill of Tezcocingo. The hill is very regular in outline and rises to the height of six hundred feet. The most noted part of this hill is the aqueduct which supplied it with water. The embankment which leads the aqueduct from the mountain is from sixty to two hundred feet high. The canals which brought the water are cemented with mortar mixed with pounded brick. Thirty miles from the capital are the ruins of Teotihuacan, “The City of the Gods.” Here are two immense pyramids dedicated to the Sun and Moon. The one to the Sun is seven hundred and sixty feet square and two hundred and sixteen feet high, with three terraces, the one to the Moon is one hundred and fifty feet high. Between them is a paved road one hundred and thirty feet wide. There are a number of smaller pyramids dedicated to the stars and the whole valley for six miles is strewn with relics.

On the Mexican Central Railroad, sixty miles from the city, is the town of Tula, or Tollan as it was called by the Toltecs. This was their ancient capital and is covered with ruins. There are two pyramids, probably dedicated to the Sun and Moon. One is one hundred and ninety six feet square and forty-six feet high, and the other one hundred and thirty one feet square and thirty-one feet high, and both rest upon raised foundations. The hillside for a mile has evidences of buildings made from adobe, brick and cut stone. At Queretaro, it was found that all the projecting points were made strong by ditches, walls and embankments. Bancroft in his “Native Races” says that at Canoas there is a fortified hill with forty-five defensive works, including a wall forty feet high, and a rectangular platform with an area of five thousand square feet.

At Quemada in the state of Zacatecas is said to be a hill whose every approach is guarded by walls of stone, with paved roads for many miles surrounding it. On top of the hill was a citadel, guarded by a wall twenty feet high and nine feet thick. To the south of Cholula are the ruins of Xochicalco, the “Hill of Flowers,” said to be the finest ruins in Mexico. The hill is a natural one rising nearly four hundred feet and having a circumference of nearly three miles. The hill was surrounded by a wide ditch and terraced to the top. Five of these terraces wind around the hill, and are paved with stone laid in mortar, and supported by perpendicular walls of stone. The top of the hill was leveled to an area of two hundred and eighty-five by three hundred and twenty-eight feet, upon which was a pyramid five stories high. The neighboring farmers have been using it as a stone-quarry, but there yet remain some fine specimens of chiseled bas-relief. These huge masses of porphyry were cut by people unacquainted with the use of iron, and as one sculptured block is eight feet long and three feet broad, and was carried nearly four hundred feet up the mound, we can appreciate the labor involved. There is no stone in this neighborhood, and yet the whole of this hill, three miles in circumference, is cased in stone. What a warlike neighborhood this must have been to require such fortification!

At Monte Alban is another group of a similar kind. At the summit of the hill is a platform half a mile wide, literally covered with sculptured stone. Mr. Bandelier considers this the most precious remains of aboriginal work on the continent. In the state of Oaxaca are the celebrated ruins of Mitla, built by a different people from the others. Besides the two mounds, Mr. Bandelier found the remains of thirty-nine buildings, most of which were built of stone. Huge blocks of stone were used and covered with a facing in which were traced peculiar geometrical designs. The columns are huge stone pillars without chapter or base. Mitla is an isolated spot with the pall of the tomb around it, except for the Zapotec Indians who live near. At Guingola in the same state is a fortified hill and a ruined settlement. In the state of Vera Cruz on the Panuco river Mr. Norman found twenty mounds and the ruins of a great city now covered by a forest. Cortez found this place inhabited by Totonac Indians whose traditions knew nothing of the ruins. The largest mound covers two acres, and was faced with stone 18 inches square. From the sculptures and inscriptions it was probably the work of the Mayas.

The Smithsonian Report of 1873, page 373, says: “There is hardly a foot of ground in the state of Vera Cruz, in which, by excavation, either a broken obsidian knife or a piece of pottery is not found.” The Mayas here probably made their last stand against the invading Nahuas, who also had to retreat before the advancing Totonacs. The ruins around Orizaba and Jalapa belong to this class. At Papantla is a pyramid ninety feet square and seven stories high, built solid, with a stairway leading to the top. Also at Tuscapam is another pyramid and the remains of many other buildings. When the country is fully explored, there will probably be as many more found as are already known.

One of the latest discoveries happened while I was in Mexico in 1896, and was by a Cuban, Mr. G. M. Moliner, who lives in the city of Mexico. He spent four years in Egypt, and for ten years has studied archæology in America. He has a sword which he found in Mexico and which he claims is coeval with the time of the Phoenicians. It is of copper and weighed eight pounds when discovered, and the scabbard four. The characters on one side he describes as Persian, and on the other as Phoenician. The inscription “Tai Abracadabra” was pointed out to a representative of the Mexican Herald, and the symbols of the gnostic beasts, the man, the eagle and the dragon, and the blade represents the bull’s tongue. He has also discovered a curio of copper, representing episodes in the history of the mound-builders as he claims, showing the city of the sun, figures of warriors, the conquering race armed with swords and oval shields, and bearing the insignia of the wolf’s head, while the conquered race is armed with battle axes and fire poles, and have the insignia of a bird’s claw. When he discovered this piece of copper, he also discovered what he calls the missing link between the past and present. It is a piece of jet black marble about ten inches square and polished as smooth as glass.

Mr. Moliner claims that this stone contains an epitome of the prehistoric race and the link that connects them to Asia. This missing link is the imprint of the head of Hermes, found in one corner of the lustrous black marble. This design is about two inches square, and though the marble is half an inch thick, the impression is on both sides. He claims that the design was painted and imbedded by discoloring acids. He has had the stone photographed and the study of the photograph is most interesting. The room must be darkened and only a little light must reach it. He explained that the ancient priests did this painting in the dark, through green obsidian glasses, and it must be viewed under similar conditions. Looking at the photograph in full light, it presented an enlarged representation of the alleged head of Hermes as found on the marble. When the room was darkened and the full glare of the light shone on it through green glasses, the photograph had the appearance of burnished silver. By shifting the photograph, caves and rocks would appear, and by another shifting appeared the outlines of a building with towers and turrets on the crest of a rock, showing a building of archaic architecture such as is seen in ancient biblical illustrations. Mr. Moliner declares this to be the ancient Chapultepec. By another shifting of the light, the head of Hermes appeared with five component parts, to wit: the sacred Maya stone, the sacrificial knife, the imperial diadem, and the mask and artificial snout found in Mexico by the conquerors, the last three being in use by the Aztecs from time immemorial. From the upper part of this head of Hermes rose a trinity of faces, more or less distinct, one looking straight ahead, and the other two right and left.

One of the oldest of religious trinities is that of Hermes, and Mr. Moliner claims that his discovery is similar to the symbol in the Louvre in Paris. The head of Hermes as found in the Louvre is on white marble, a slab eight feet high, and underneath it the inscription “Hermes from the Pelagic Times.”

The foregoing descriptions have been of ruins of the Nahuatl tribes; we will now turn to those of the Mayas where

“Antiquity appears to have begun
Long after their primeval race was run.”

The city of Copan, in Honduras near the Guatemala line, claims to be the oldest city in America. What must be the feelings of the traveler as he gropes through a tropical forest and comes face to face with this huge structure? First there is a terrace eight hundred and nine feet one way and six hundred and twenty-four feet the other way, seventy-six feet high and containing twenty-six million cubic feet of stone, brought from a quarry two miles away. On the terrace were four pyramids, the largest rising one hundred and seventy-two feet, and surmounted by two huge trees rooted in its mold. Within these ruins were found fourteen statues, the largest thirteen feet four inches tall, and all covered with bas reliefs and hieroglyphics whose workmanship was equal to that on the Egyptian pyramids. In front of the statues stand huge altars six feet square, divided into thirty-six tablets of hieroglyphics which tell to the world their history, but they speak in an unknown tongue, and we do not know whether these are the emblems of a Mayan pantheon or the relics from the palace of pre-Adamic man. Everywhere is a dark mystery which has baffled the scholars of the world for these three hundred years. The curtain falls, the traveler returns, and the æons begin again their cycles around mysterious Copan.

North of Copan is the hamlet of Quiriga, with ruins similar to those of Copan, made of cut sandstone. Mr. Catherton found eight standing statues, one fallen, and the fragments of thirteen more. The hieroglyphics are similar to those of Copan, but the statues are two or three times as tall. No people have ever been found with any tradition whatever concerning these mysterious ruins. Throughout Yucatan and Guatemala are ruins and inscriptions, but the people and their traditions have been swallowed up by oblivion. Northward out of Guatemala in the state of Chiapas in Mexico is Palenque, the sphinx and Mecca of Central America. This is a fertile, productive country, which was deserted and covered with ruins when Cortez landed. This old deserted city covers more than a mile. The pyramid, according to Mr. Stephens’ measurement at the base was 310 by 260 feet, and was cased in stone, now thrown down by the growth of trees. In one room of the temple was found a stone tablet four feet long and three feet broad, and sculptured in bas relief. It is set in the wall and around it is a stucco border, but its significance is unknown. The principal figure is carved with a necklace of pearls around the neck, and suspended from the pearls is a medallion containing a face. Rising from the center of the ruins is a tower thirty feet square with a staircase. Southwest of the palace is the pyramid called the “Temple of Inscriptions,” whose slope was 110 feet of solid masonry. Each of the corner pieces contained on its surface hieroglyphics, each of which contained 96 squares.

In Uxmal are ruins that rival Palenque and are the most interesting of any in Yucatan. There are so many, we will mention only one, and give the dimensions on the authority of Bancroft. The pyramid is 350 feet square at the base and surmounts a quadrangle of buildings. The building on the south is 279 feet long, 28 feet wide and 18 feet high. The one on the north is 264 feet long, 28 feet wide and 25 feet high. The eastern one is 158 feet long, 35 feet wide and 22 feet high and the western one 173 feet long, 35 feet wide and 20 feet high. These buildings contained 76 rooms all facing an open court 214 by 258 feet. The walls are massive, of solid rock and 9 feet thick, and the floors were cemented. The most attractive part of the whole building is the beautiful facades which cover 24,000 feet of surface and are pronounced the finest of native American art. The major trend of the facade is diamond lattice work, with the turtle, serpent and elephant’s trunk alternating. The terrace which supported this building contained 60,000 cubic yards of material. The walls were of massive masonry, and the sculpture is truly artistic, and yet these people knew not the use of metallic tools.

Here was enacted the greatest tragedy that history has ever recorded. At these altars unnumbered priests waved their censers in the worship of Quetzacoatl, the nature god of the Mayas, and now their cities are overgrown by a tropical forest and are lost to the world, which knows neither their name nor location, and it was by the merest accident that we know of their very existence. Nepenthe rules here supreme. A tropical forest has overgrown their pyramids and trees nine feet in diameter now close the entrance to their temples, and nine feet of vegetable mold now cover the altars where sacerdotal processions performed their mysterious rites probably while Cheops was building.

CHAPTER XXIII.
AZTEC COSMOGONY AND THEOGONY.

“By midnight moons o’er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade.”
Philip Freneau.

FROM the foregoing chapter we see that the ancient Aztec civilization had nothing in common with the red Indian. Buildings, customs and religion linked him to a higher civilization, or else prove that he possessed the germs of self-evolution, enabled him to cope with the great unknown, and single-handed to civilize himself. The latter process will be hard to believe, the former will be hard to prove; but for argument we will take a hasty glance at other nations whose history corresponds most closely with the ancient inhabitants of Mexico.

The Chaldeans, according to Berosus, held that the world is periodically destroyed by deluges and conflagrations. They believed that the deluges were caused by the conjunction of the planets in Capricorn, and the conflagrations by conjunction in Cancer. The Chaldean philosophers had also their Annus Magnus or great year, at the end of which the present terrestrial and cosmical order would terminate by fire and afterwards be renewed.

The ancient Scythians believed that the world undergoes revolution both by fire and by water. The Egyptians believed that the earth would flourish through the interval expressed by the Annus Magnus or great year, a cycle, as with the Chaldeans, composed of revolutions of the sun and moon, and terminating when they returned together to the same sign whence they set out. At the end of each cycle the earth was supposed to be destroyed by fire or water, and to be renovated for the abode of man. The Hindoo cosmogony taught the doctrine of secular catastrophes and renovations. Water is then introduced, over which moves Brahma, the creator. Brahma then causes dry land to appear and vivifies the earth in succession with plants, animals and man, then he sleeps 4320 millions of years—a day for Brahma, and then the earth is destroyed by fire. The fire is finally quenched by rain which falls a hundred years and inundates heaven and earth. The breath of Vishnu next becomes a strong wind by which the clouds are dispersed, and Deity in the form of Brahma awakes from his serpent couch on the deep and renews the world, and sleeps again another day. The power of Brahma is thus outlined by Emerson:

“If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

“Far or forgot, to me is near,
Shadow and sunshine are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

“They reckon ill who leave me out.
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings.

“The strong god pines for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good,
Find me and turn thy back on heaven.”

The Jews also hold a prophecy that the world was to endure 2000 years before the flood, 2000 under the law and 2000 under the Messiah, and then to be destroyed by water, and a large part of the Christian world accepts the same today.

Orpheus and Menander, early Greek poets who lived in the twilight of Greek civilization, reproduce the myth of the Annus Magnus, and teach that the earth is to be destroyed at the completion of the cycle. In the Sybilline books, 1300 years before our era, this faith is shadowed and the world is destined to endure ten ages, the first of which is the Golden Age. After a renovation by fire the Golden Age will return, when, according to Virgil, the serpent will perish; the earth will produce her crops spontaneously; the kid will no longer fear the lion; the grape will be borne upon the thorn-bush, and scarlet and yellow and royal purple will become the native colors of the woolly fleece:

“Ipsæ lacte domum referent distenta capellæ
Ubera; nec magnos netuent armenta leones.
Ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores;
Occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni
Occidet; Assyrium vulgo nascetur amomum.
* * * * *
Molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,
Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva,
Et duræ quercus sudabunt roscida mella.”

According to Winchell, the Stoics got the same doctrine from the Phoenicians, and in speaking of the restoration after the conflagration, use the same term we find in the Scriptures, though written many hundred years earlier. Chrysippus calls it “Apocatastasis”—restitution—as St. Peter does in the Acts. Marcus Antoninus several times calls it “Palingenesia”—regeneration—as our Savior does in Matthew, and Paul in his epistle to Titus. The Pythagoreans, who taught the transmigration of souls, had the same ideas regarding the revolutions as had the Stoics. Plato taught the same, and Aristotle alone of all the ancient philosophers, taught the immortality of the soul and a continuance of the present order of things.

Among the Arabians, the story of the Phœnix is an allegory of the earth. This bird of fable no sooner crumbles to ashes than she rises again in more than pristine beauty. They have a similar story of the eagle which goes to the sun to renew its strength, and David alludes to the myth in the Psalms where he says: “Thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s,”—a passage which in the Chaldee language reads: “Thou shalt renew thy youth like the eagle in the world to come.” The Persians represent their god, Fire, as the final avenger of the earth. The Aztecs, according to Humboldt, felt the curiosity common to man in every stage of civilization, to lift the veil which covers the mysterious past and the awful future. They sought relief like the nations of the old world, from the oppressive idea of eternity, by breaking it up into distinct periods or cycles of time, each of several thousand years. There were four of these cycles, and at the end of each, by the agency of one of the elements, the human family was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted from the heavens, to be rekindled again by sacred fire.

The great feast of the “renewal of fire” began on the last day of the Sothic period of fifty-two years, when the last fragment of time lost by leap year had been made up. In the evening the fire was extinguished throughout the valley, and all the earthen vessels were broken in preparation for the end of the world. At this time every one was in terrible suspense, fearing he had seen the sun for the last time. The whole empire was a prey to anxiety, and the people stood on the temples watching the mountain tops, where bonfires would be lighted if the gods showed themselves merciful. Then processions of priests marched to the mountain so as to arrive at midnight, when they solemnly awaited the turn of the night which would assure them that the sun would rise once more and continue fifty-two years to the end of the next cycle. When the critical hour had passed, a priest with two sticks and a rotary motion of the hands produced the sacred fire. Then a funeral pyre was raised and the victims sacrificed. Then an extraordinary activity followed the despondency, and every one lighted his torch from the funeral pile and hastened to his dwelling, and couriers with the sacred fire spread through all the empire and the new blaze was kindled in every hearth and on every temple top, and they were happy for they had fifty-two years more to live. The thirteen days complementary to the cycle—intended to make the solar and civil years agree—were spent in whitewashing and renewing their furniture for the new cycle.

The Aztecs believed in the periodical destruction of the world and had a tradition of the flood, and their idea of the re-peopling of the earth very nearly coincides with Jewish scriptures. The following is a translation of the Popol Vuh, or National Book of the Quiches of Guatemala; “There was not yet a single man; not an animal; neither birds, nor fishes, nor crabs, nor wood, nor stones, nor ravines, nor forests; only the sky existed. The face of the land was not seen; there was only the silent sea and the sky. There was not yet a body, naught to attach itself to another; naught that balanced itself; naught that made a sound in the sky. There was nothing that stood upright; naught there was but the peaceful sea—the sea, silent and solitary in its limits; for there was nothing that was. * * * Those who fecundated, those who give life, are upon the waters like a growing light. * * * While they consulted, the day broke, and at the moment of dawn, man appeared. While they consulted, the earth grew. Thus verily, took place the creation as the earth came into being.$1‘Earth’ said they; and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud, was the formation; as huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains; and in a moment the high mountains existed.”

This is the account of the first creation, and what follows, refers to the fourth and last creation.—“Hear, now, when it was first thought of man, and of what man should be formed. At that time spake he who gives life, and he who gives form, the Maker and Moulder, named Tepen, Gucumatz;$1‘The day draws near; the work is done; the supporter, the servant is ennobled; he is the sun of light, the child of whiteness; man is honored; the race of man is upon the earth.’ So they spake.” * * * Immediately they began to speak of making our first mother and our father. Only of yellow corn and white corn were they flesh, and the substance of the arms end legs of man. They were called simply beings, formed and fashioned; they had neither mother nor father; we call them simply men.

Woman did not bring them forth, nor were they born of the Builder and Moulder, by Him who fecundates, and Him who gives being. “Thought was in them; they saw; they looked around; their vision took in all things; they perceived the world; they cast their eye from the sky to the earth.” “Then they were asked by the Builder and Moulder$1‘What think you of your being? See ye not? Understand ye not? Your language, your limbs, are they not good? Look around, beneath the heavens; see ye not the mountains and the plains?’

“Then they looked and saw all there was beneath the heavens. And they gave thanks to the Maker and the Moulder, saying;$1‘Truly, twice, and three times thanks! We have being; we have been given a mouth, a face; we speak, we understand, we think, we walk, we feel, and we know that which is far and that which is near. All great things and small on the earth and in the sky do we see. Thanks to thee, O Maker, O Moulder, that we have been created, that we have our being, O our Grandmother, O our Grandfather!’”[A]

Is there anything more noble in any language than these sentiments of untutored beings, striving to lift the veil and peer into the beyond? No philosopher in any land ever gave tongue to more lofty sentiments, nor approached nearer the real truth of divination, and we must remember, these sentiments were not borrowed from the Spaniards, but were recorded in the native writing of Guatemala, ages before the coming of Los Conquestadors. The Aztec worshipped many gods, but he also believed in one Great God, the “Causer of Causes.” To him was never an image made. He was reverenced under the name of Teotl, but being invisible and infinite, they never attempted to make a likeness of him, either in idols or in painting. They made sacrifice of human beings, but not to Teotl.

I herewith present a prayer, translated from the Aztec language by Lucien Biart, and addressed to the Unseen God:—“Mighty God, thou who givest me life, and whose slave I am, grant me the supreme grace of giving me meat and drink; grant me the enjoyment of thy clemency, that it may support me in my labors and in my wants. Have pity on me who live sad, poor and abandoned, and since I serve thee by sweeping thy temple, open to me the hand of thy mercy.”

What this lacks of being the Lord’s Prayer, is hardly worth mentioning.

All the other ancient nations we have mentioned, had intercourse with one another. The Greeks studied in Egypt, and had dealings with the Phœnicians. The Jews were taken captives to the east and the Hindoos spread to the west, so it is not strange that they should all have an almost identical cosmogony, but here is a people separated by an ocean, having the same belief, a knowledge of the art of building, of sculpture and of writing. Then how shall we account for all this unless we suppose that they had known contact with each other in some past age? Alfred Wallace, the great English scientist, says that none but the unscientific ever resurrect the Atlantis theory, but with the risk of being declared unscientific, I wish to present some facts of scientific value, and leave the verdict with the reader.

CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LOST ATLANTIS.

“Man’s steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields
Are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth’s destruction, thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send him, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dash him again to earth—there let him lie.”

“THE Story of Atlantis,” recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, as communicated to Solon by the Egyptian priests, has, in the light of modern geography, been generally regarded as a myth, but within a few years has been revived, and there are not wanting investigators of profound learning who regard it as authentic. The following is the translation from the Greek of Plato: “Among the great deeds of Athens, of which the recollection is preserved in our books, there is one which should be placed above all others. Our books tell that the Athenians destroyed an army which came across the Atlantic Sea, and insolently invaded Europe and Asia; for this sea was then navigable, and beyond the strait where you place the Pillars of Hercules, there was an island larger than Asia (Minor) and Lybya combined. From this island one could pass easily to other islands, and from these to the continent which lies around the Interior Sea.

“The sea on this side the strait (Gibraltar) of which we speak, resembles an harbor with a narrow entrance; but there is a genuine sea, and the land which surrounds it is a veritable continent. In the Island of Atlantis lived three kings with great and marvelous power. They had under their dominion the whole of Atlantis, several other islands and some parts of the continent.

“At one time their power extended into Lybya, and into Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Italy), and uniting their whole force, they sought to destroy our whole country at a blow; but their defeat stopped the invasion and gave entire independence to all the countries this side the Pillars of Hercules. Afterwards, in one day and one fatal night, there came earthquakes and inundations which engulfed the warlike people.

“Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea, and then that sea became inaccessible so that navigation on it ceased on account of the quantity of mud the engulfed island left in its place.”

Plutarch, in his life of Solon, relates that when the law-giver was in Egypt “he conferred with the priests and learned the story of Atlantis.”

Diodorus Siculus states that: “Over against Africa lies a very great island, in the vast ocean many days’ sail from Lybya westward. The soil there is very fruitful, a great part whereof is mountainous, but much likewise champaign, which is the most sweet and pleasant part, for it is watered by several navigable streams, and beautiful with many gardens of pleasure, planted by divers sorts of trees and an abundance of orchards. The towns are adorned with stately buildings and banqueting houses, pleasantly situated in the gardens and orchards.”

Theopompus who wrote in the fourth century B. C. tells substantially the same story, which was given by Silenus to the ancient King Midas, recorded by Aristotle.[B] The Gauls possessed traditions on the subject, which were collected by the Roman historian Timagenes, who lived in the first century, B. C. This record states that three distinct people dwelt in Gaul (France). 1, The Aborigines; 2, The invaders from a distant island, (Atlantis); 8, The Aryan Gauls. Marcellus also, in a book on the Ethiopians speaks of several islands lying on the Atlantic ocean near Europe, which we may undoubtedly identify as the Canaries; but he adds: “The inhabitants of these islands preserve the memory of a much greater island, Atlantis, which had for a long time exercised dominion over the smaller ones.”

Now, all these writers most positively state that an island did exist west of Africa, and was destroyed by a cataclysm. This island could not have been very far from the shores of America, for the tribes of Central America, in Mexico, in Venezuela and in British and Dutch Guiana, distinctly describe these cataclysms, one by water, one by fire and a third by winds.

Catlin, in his “Lifted and Subsided Rocks in America,” describes the traditions of such a cataclysm. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, in his “Quatre Lettres sur La Mexique,” and his “Sources de l’Histoire Primitive du Mexique,” has translated the “Teo Amoxtli,” which is the Toltecan mythological history of the cataclysm of the Antilles. Catlin found the tradition of such a cataclysm among the Indians of North America. The Indians farther south state that the water was seen coming in waves like mountains from the east, and of the tens of thousands who ran for the high ground of the west, only one man, by one authority, and two by another, and seven by another, succeeded in reaching high ground, and from them sprang the present race of Indians. The tribes near the coast distinctly describe three cataclysms, water, fire, and winds, while those inland were sensible only of the flood of waters which ran to the base of the mountains.[C]

“From amidst the thunder and flames which came out of the sea, whilst mountains were sinking and rising, the terror-stricken inhabitants sought every expedient of safety. Some fled to the mountains, and some launched their rafts and canoes upon the turbulent waters, trusting that a favorable current might land them upon a hospitable shore, and thus in the elemental strife the ancient civilized people became widely dispersed.”[D]

“The festival of$1‘Izcalli’ was instituted to commemorate this terrible calamity, in which princes and people humbled themselves before the Divinity and besought Him not to renew the frightful convulsions.”

It is claimed that by this catastrophe, an area larger than the Kingdom of France became engulfed, including the Lesser Antilles, the extensive banks at their eastern base, which at that date were vast fertile plains, the peninsula of Yucatan, Honduras and Guatemala and the great estuaries of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. With the peninsula of Yucatan went down the splendid cities of Palenque, whose sites are now in the ocean bed as well as the bones of the inhabitants, and the continent has since risen sufficiently to restore the sites of a number of the ancient cities, but the people were blotted from the face of the earth. There is nothing more remarkable than the truthfulness of the traditions of North American Indians. For hundreds of years tradition has said that the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico had been once inhabited, and during the present year, an expedition from the Smithsonian Institution explored the Mesa and verified the tradition.

In proof of the Cataclysm and submergence of Central America, our modern geographies tell us that Old Guatemala was destroyed by a water volcano in the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth by an earthquake. The sea shells on both sides the Isthmus of Panama are alike, and according to the law of the geographical distribution of animals, this could only have come about by the Isthmus having at one time been submerged, and remaining so long enough for the intermingling of species and being raised again, and the fossils on both sides support the hypothesis. The situation of Atlantis, west of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, would be so near to Central America that any disturbance, like the one described by Plato, would be compelled to affect Central America in the manner described by the traditions of the natives.

The nearest lands west of Africa, where Plato locates Atlantis, are the Canary Islands, the nearest being fifty miles from Africa, and the whole group extending three hundred miles, and are separated from the mainland by a channel more than five thousand feet deep. Of all the oceanic islands (not continental) discovered by Europeans, the Canaries alone were inhabited, Here they found the Guanches, now extinct, who at the time of their discovery were not aware that a continent existed in their neighborhood, for, on being asked by the missionaries how they came to this archipelago, they answered: “God placed us on these islands, and then forsook and forgot us.”

Now who were the Guanches? Their islands had never been connected with Africa, because the channel between them is a mile deep, and Wallace in his “Island Life” has proved that any island surrounded by water more than five thousand feet deep is of volcanic origin. If craniometry is a reliable science the Guanches were not savages, but superior to the Egyptians. According to Prof. Flower’s measurements, the skull of the English of low grade contains one thousand five hundred and forty-two cubic centimeters, the Guanches one thousand four hundred and ninety-eight, Japanese one thousand four hundred and eighty-six, Chinese one thousand four hundred and twenty-four, Italians one thousand four hundred and seventy-five, and the ancient Egyptians one thousand four hundred and sixty-four. That the remnant of a race found in mid-ocean should have a better developed brain than many continental nations, is significant, and if the Guanches were a part of the inhabitants of Atlantis, we can easily understand their ability to make war and subdue their neighbors as related by Plato.

The late Sir Anders Retzius, of Stockholm, the learned authority on craniometry says: “The Dolichocephali of America are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic population of Africa,—Moors, Turaricks, Copts, etc.—and the same kind of skull is found in the Canary Islands in front of the African Coast, and on the Islands in the Caribbean Sea on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The color of the skin in the population on both sides of the Atlantic is reddish brown, resembling tanned leather; the hair is the same; the features of the face and the build of the frame as I am led to believe, presenting the same analogy.”[E]

And now as to their dispersion. When Columbus set sail from Palos in 1492, he steered direct for the Canary Islands for repairs, and when he left the Canaries, without any effort of his own, the trade winds carried his vessels straight to the West Indies, and these winds blow in this direction all the time. In December 1731 a ship started from Teneriffe with a cargo of wine for one of the western Canaries, and having only six men on board the ship became unmanageable, and the trade winds carried them straight to Trinidad on the Island of Cuba. While Atlantis was sinking, some of the inhabitants likely escaped on rafts and boats, and being exactly in the location whence Columbus and the Teneriffe ship were, they had nothing to do but to wait, and the trade winds would take them to the West Indices and Yucatan and Central America. We can now easily see why the oldest civilization of America is in Central America. Some of the immigrants stopped in the West Indies, for the aborigines Columbus found there spoke the same language as the Mayas and Caribs of Yucatan speak today. Some stopped in South America, for Dr. Lund, the Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas Geraes, Brazil, human skulls identical with those of Mexico. This may possibly account for the superior civilization of Peru, where the ingrafted population would amalgamate with the native races and produce those wonderful paved roads the Spaniards found there.

Of course there will be objections to this hypothesis, and we will now proceed to answer the objections.

Dr. Waitz, in his “Anthropology of Primitive Peoples” says: “The first elements of civilization as far as history reaches, always appear as communicated from one people to another, and of no people can it be proved how, where and when they have become civilized by their own inherent power.”

If this be true, then the ancient Mexican must have learned civilization from some other people, and we know the red Indian had none to spare. Winchell in his genealogical charts, represents the entire peopling of the Pacific Slope from Alaska to Chili by Mongoloid branches. The world knows that Mongolian civilization has always been fossilized and the race is absolutely devoid of civilizing qualities. Their state is founded upon the worship of their ancestors, and their exalted egotism has for ages resisted every attempt to force advancement among them. To say that the Mongols crossed Behring Strait and gave origin to the Esquimaux is entirely compatible, for the Esquimaux are just about the calibre a Chinese colony of that date would produce. To say that Mongols are the source of Aztec civilization and Inca sun-worship is to propound an anthropological paradox. From Alaska to the ancient confines of Mexico, there is not one stone left to acknowledge the hundreds of years of Esquimo and Indian occupancy, so we cannot expect light from that source.

Separated from Africa by a channel only fifty miles wide, we may with justice assume that the civilization of the continent of Atlantis and that of Egypt was very similar. Egypt is the only land of the ancient world where pyramids are found, and on a direct line with the trade winds we find pyramids in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. In Egypt we find the temples emblazoned with hieroglyphics chiseled in the solid rock, describing one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In Uxmal, Mexico, Palenque and Copan are tablets, friezes, bas-reliefs, facades and hieroglyphics, though inferior to the Egyptian in mimetic art, still of the highest order, considering this to be the product of the neolithic age, and the length of time since the separation from the home roof-tree. The Egyptians were the only ones of the ancient people who embalmed their dead. According to the French Historian, Lucien Biart, the Zapotecs and Chicimecs of the Mexican Valley embalmed their chiefs, and if we may believe this same author, the caves of the Cordilleras are vast museums as full of interest us the catacombs of Rome. That the Americans mummified their dead is proved by mummies having been found in Peru and in the northwestern part of Patagonia. Dr. Aq. Ried, the discoverer, has deposited one in the museum of Ratisbon, Bavaria, and another was sent to the Smithsonian Institution.[F]

This mummy led to the remark of Professor Alexander Winchell in his “Pre-Adamites.” “The humid atmosphere, unlike that of Peru, leads to the inference that the mummification of the dead was practiced under some controlling motive which must have been inherited from ancestors dwelling in a more propitious clime, and which even the dripping meteorology of Patagonia was insufficient to eradicate.”

The Egyptians were accurate astrologers and astronomers. They accurately calculated the eclipses and the reappearance of stars whose journey would require over a thousand years, and the pyramids are set to the cardinal points in Egypt and in Mexico. In the City of Mexico is the great calendar stone of solid porphyry weighing fifty tons. It was brought many leagues across a broken country, without beasts of burden, and Bustamente states that a thousand men were employed in its transportation. From it we learn that the Aztecs or Toltecs were astronomers and astrologers and calculated eclipses and knew the solstices of the sun. They divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and, like the Egyptians, had five complementary days to make out the three hundred and sixty-five, and every fifty-two years they added thirteen (twelve and a half) days for a leap year to make the solar and civil years agree. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of fifty-two years or “An Age,” was represented by a serpent, so prominent in mythology. Their astrological year was divided into months of thirteen days each, and there were thirteen years in their indications, which contained each, three hundred and sixty-five periods of thirteen days.

It is also worthy of note that their number of lunar months of thirteen days was contained in a cycle of fifty-two years, with the intercalation of thirteen days (twelve and a half,) should correspond exactly with the number of years in a great Sothic Period of the Egyptians, viz. 1461. Is it reasonable to suppose that this strange affinity with Egyptian civilization was accidental, or that a Turanian people independently evolved itself into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers? The stone is not modern; it is not written in Aztec characters but in Toltec, a people whom the Aztecs supplanted, and they claimed that the knowledge was not original with them, but acquired from the Mayas who had preceded them in Yucatan. The ideographic paintings of the Aztecs preserve traditions of the creation of the world, a universal flood, the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of man; and that a single man and woman saved themselves in a boat which landed at Mount Colhuacan, and that all their children were born deaf and remained so until a dove, one day, from the top of a tree, taught them each in a different tongue.

All Aztec traditions, without exception, insist that they came from a far-off island called “Azatlan” (probably Atlantis.) Dr. Lapham, in his “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” claims that the Aztecs were identical with the Mound-builders, and locates Azatlan in Wisconsin, on account of the large number of effigy mounds there; and Dr. Foster in his “Prehistoric Races” pictures these mounds called Azatlan; but the Aztec painting published by Gemelle Carera in his Giro del Mondo, has hieroglyphics representing their departure from Azatlan in canoes and on rafts, after their confusion of tongues, and a teocalli, or temple by the side of a palm tree, of which neither condition can be true of Wisconsin.

Max Muller, the greatest authority on philology, says that of all indices to the mysteries of the ancient world, language is the most satisfactory, and the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historic periods. If we class the languages of the world into groups according to cognation, we find the Aryan languages comprising the Indian, Persian (Sanskrit), Hellenic, Latin group (Italian, Wallacian, Provencal, French, Portugese and Spanish), Slavonic (Russian), Teutonic (English), and the Keltic or Welsh, of which the oldest is the Sanskrit and Zend. The Semitic group comprises the Hebrew, Phœnician, Assyrian and Arabic, while the Babylonian and Chinese stand alone. The Aryan and Semitic form a class known as the inflectional, and are the only languages of the world that are adapted to and possess a literature, and that have advanced the progress of the world in religion, arts or sciences. Though springing from a common center, they have grammatical structures that prevent the one being derived from the other. The Semitic branched southward and westward, and was the language of the Chaldee, Arab, Hebrew and Egyptian, the latter sometimes classed as Hamitic. The Chinese is an organic language, monosyllabic, and destitute of all grammar. The nouns have no number, declension or cases, and the verbs are without conjugation through moods, tenses and persons. All Mongoloid that reached America must have done so by Behring Strait, and all such races, or descendants of such races, would undoubtedly have kept a trace of their parental language. If the Aztecs were derived from Mongoloids, we should expect a monosyllabic language, but on the contrary, the Aztec language has more diminutives and augmentatives than the Italian, and its substantives and verbs are more numerous than in any other language.

Another proof of its wealth is, that when missionaries first went among them, they found no trouble in expressing abstract ideas like religion, virtue, etc. The consonants most used are l, t, x, z; next the sound of tl and tz. L is of most frequent occurrence, but is never found at the beginning of a word. The Aztec language, sweet and harmonious to the ear, has no sharp or nasal sounds; the penultimate of most of its words is long. The language is rich, exact and expressive, as is proven in the “Natural History” by Dr. Hernandez, who describes twelve hundred plants, two hundred birds, many quadrupeds, reptiles, insects, metals, etc., and was able to call each by a separate name, given by the Indians. Poets and orators there were by the hundred, and their written inaugurals make as interesting reading as we hear from many of our legislators, many of which were translated by the French scholar, Lucien Biart, who died since these pages were begun.

If Max Muller is correct, then there can be no kinship between the Mongols and Aztecs, and if they ever had communication with other people, it must have been from the east. The Sanskrit word for God, is Devan; the Latin, Deus; the Greek, Oeoo; and the Aztec, Teotl. This similarity of sound and spelling might be purely accidental, and on the other hand, it might have something of a long kinship to identify it. The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls was a ruling passion with the Aztec. This may have been the fruition of all polytheistic religions, or it might have been the retention of primordial culture, for we know the Egyptian embalmed his dead, lest the dissolution of the body would destroy the soul also.

The greatest desecration that could befall the ancient Greeks and Romans was the refusal of burial, because the soul of him thus uncared for wandered thenceforth as a disembodied ghost.

We read in Homer’s Iliad how the dead Patroclus comes to the sleeping Achilles, and tries in vain to grasp him with loving arms, but the soul, like smoke, flits away below earth. How Hermotimos the seer used to go out of his body, till at last, the soul, coming back from a spirit journey, found that his wife had burnt his body on a funeral pile, and that he had become a bodyless ghost. How Odysseus visits the bloodless ghosts in Hades, and the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondered to see the body of Dante there, which stopped the sunlight and cast a shadow.

How, in Virgil’s Æneid, the love-maddened Queen Dido could wish no greater curse to befall Æneas, than that his body should lie unburied on the plain, and even the old boatman, Charon, in Hades, refused to ferry across the River Styx the shades of any who lacked burial while on earth.

This idea of the phantom life of souls as shades and shadows, constitutes the higher philosophy of the transcendental metaphysics of the ancient Greeks, whose exponent was Pythagoras. Religious fervor was strong in the Aztec, and from his devotion to formality, Atlantis must have been the home of ceremonial religion. The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. These are not Greek and cannot be referred to any European language, but in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language we find the radical a, atl, which signifies water, man and top of the head. From these come a series of words, such as atlan, on the border of, or amid the water, from which comes the adjective Atlantic. Therefore the Atlantic Ocean must have received its name from the continent Atlantis before the cataclysm. We have also Atlaca, to combat, to be in agony. It also means to hurl, to dart from the water, and in the preterit makes Atlaz. From the island of Atlantis, the Atlas mountain in northern Africa would seem to the inhabitants to be hurled out of the water, hence its name was probably given by these same people, as the word occurs in no other language.

On the map of Mexico today are more than a hundred towns with the same combination of letters of atl or lan which shows that the combination is an essential part of the Aztec language. There are many traditions that are receiving light from the nineteenth century that crystalizes them into accepted history. For twenty-six centuries has the siege of Troy stood out in profile as the model epic of the world, but, on account of its antiquity, of doubted veracity. Now Dr. Schlieman’s excavations seem destined yet to find the funeral pyre of Patroclus, surrounded by the remains of Trojan captives. And even later, the French archaeologist M. Marcel Dieulafay has brought to light the ancient city of Susa, and we may even now behold the Palace of Artaxerxes Mnemon, whose foundations were laid by Xerxes I. 485 B. C.; and now after twenty-three centuries, the student may take his Bible in his hand, turn to the Book of Esther and read, while the guide in the ancient capital of Persia points to the spot where Mordecai sat, to that corner where Haman was hanged, and to this court where the lovely Esther was crowned queen, and whence the sorrowing Vashti departed, as the unfortunate Hebe, cup-bearer of Jove, before the victorious Ganymede.

Plato records the sad fate of Atlantis nearly five hundred years B. C., and Solom had recorded it in a poem two hundred years earlier. Plato says the expedition against Egypt took place during the reign of the Athenian Kings, Cecrops and Erectheus, and, according to the “Marble of Paros,” these Kings ruled 1582 B. C. and 1409 B. C., which is not a great deal earlier than the siege of Troy. Though this is very ancient history, we have as much right to believe Plato’s history as Homer’s, if it can be well established.

The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg is the greatest authority on the translation of Aztec literature, and he maintains that the oldest certain date in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language reaches back to 955 B. C., and as the Toltecs dwelt some time in the country of Zibalba before they dispossessed the Colhuas, their migration must have begun more than a thousand years B. C. The Colhuas were the remnant of those who had escaped the terrible calamity of Atlantis. To those who reject the theory here offered, I would say the field is large and inviting to any whose insight into the past can help solve the problems of the origin of the ancient Mexicans.

CHAPTER XXV
CONCLUSION.

“And thy request think now fulfilled, that asked
How first this world and face of things began,
And what before thy memory was done
From the beginning.”

THE existence of the Continent of Atlantis is an hypothesis, but so was the existence of Lemuria, and there are scientists today of international repute who firmly believe that a continent once existed in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and India, and the proof is not wanting.

On the island of Madagascar are found thirty-three species of monkeys called Lemurs, which are not found in Africa, nor in any other part of the globe except Ceylon, India, and the Malay Archipelago. Because these Lemurs are found only in that region, Sclater, the English Zoologist, has called the sunken continent “Lemuria.” Between Madagascar and India are a number of submerged banks of less than a thousand fathoms deep, which a slight elevation would make comparatively easy stages of communication between Madagascar and India for all animals. An elevation of three hundred feet would unite Java, Sumatra and Borneo, into one great peninsula of the Asiatic continent.

The island of Madagascar is two hundred and fifty miles wide and a thousand miles long, and is separated from Africa by the Mozambique channel, only two hundred and fifty miles wide. Africa has monkeys, apes and baboons; also lions, leopards, hyenas, zebras, rhinoceri, elephants, buffalo, giraffes, and many species of deer and antelope; but strange to say, not one of these is found in Madagascar, or anything like unto them, and yet Madagascar is only two hundred and fifty miles away. There are in Madagascar, according to Wallace’s “Island Life,” and Dr. Hartlaub’s “Birds of Madagascar,” one hundred species of land birds, and only four or five have any kindred in Africa; but in Malaysia and India we find identical species, and on the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, Bourbon and the Seychelles group, we find so many curious birds without wings with kindred in Madagascar, we know that the islands at some time have been connected, else how could birds without wings get from one to the other? There are five species of lizards which are found in Mauritius, Bourbon, Rodriguez and Ceylon, and even to the Philippine Islands.

The Mascarine group contains a thousand and fifty-eight species of plants, of which sixty-six are found in Africa but not in Asia, and eighty-six are found in Asia but not in Africa, showing a closer relationship to Asia than to Africa. Milne-Edwards has even surmised a Mascarine continent, to include all the outlaying islands around Madagascar. Beccari, in his work on the distribution of palms, after noting the difficulty of the dispersion of the fruits, reaches the conclusion that, when we find two congeneric species of palms on widely separated lands, it is reasonable to infer that the lands have once been united. On the Mascarine Islands, in Ceylon, the Nicobars, at Singapore, on the Malaccas, New Guinea, in Australia and Polynesia, occur various species of Phycosperma, all very difficult of dissemination, and hence could only have reached their present habitat by being connected by intervening lands now in the ocean bed.

Winchell in his “Pre-Adamites” states among his principles: 1. The doctrine of Pre-Adamites is entirely consonant with the fundamental principles of Biblical christianity; 2. A chain of profound relationship runs through the constitution of all races, and they may be genealogically connected; 3. The initial point of the genealogical line may be located in Lemuria. Peschell in his “Races of Man,” says: “This continent which would correspond with the Indian Ethiopia of Claudius Ptolemaus, is required by anthropology, for we can then conceive how the inferior populations of Australia and India, the Papuans of the East Indian Islands, and lastly, the Negroes, would thus be enabled to reach their present abode by dry land. The selection of this spot is far more orthodox than it might at first glance appear, for we here find ourselves in the neighborhood of the four enigmatical rivers of the Scriptural Eden,—in the vicinity of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Indus. By the gradual submergence of Lemuria, the expulsion from Paradise would also be inexorably accomplished.” To this he adds the argument of such ecclesiastical writers as Lactautius, the venerable Bede, Hrabanus Maurus, Cosmos Indiclopleustes, and the anonymous geographer of Ravenna.

I go thus into detail to show that men believe in the submerged continent of Lemuria, though they have never seen it, but cannot explain the presence of plants and animals on widely separated islands except by supposing they were once connected. If we could establish a similar relationship with Atlantis, the matter would explain itself. From the presence of rock salt, sand and sea-shells on the desert of Sahara, we know that it was once the bottom of the ocean, and the cause of its rising might have been the submergence of Lemuria, or vice versa, and the submergence of Atlantis may have had a counter result elsewhere. Charles Martins says that: “By the rules of hydrography and botany, the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira are the remains of a great continent which formerly united Europe to North America.”[G]

However, Atlantis does not have to stand altogether on theory. The governments of the world have gone about it in a practical manner, which is worthy of notice.

In 1873, Her Majesty’s ship Challenge made soundings in the Atlantic off the north coast of Africa, and in 1874 the German frigate, Gazelle, made further soundings in the same regions, and in 1877 Commodore Gorringe of the U. S. sloop Gettysburg, discovered, about a hundred miles from the Strait of Gibraltar, an immense bed of pink coral in thirty-two fathoms of water. Corals never work in water deeper than two hundred feet, so at last here is proof positive that there are sunken islands there. These various soundings, when located on a map, indicate the existence of an extended bank of comparatively shallow water, in the midst of which the Canaries and the Madeiras rise to the surface.

The location of the newly discovered mountains in the Atlantic, lies within the fifteen thousand fathom line, and here is probably the stump of the ancient Atlantis.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Histoire des nations civilises du Mexique et de l’Amerique centrale, durant les siecles antericurs a Christophe Colomb, ecrite surs des documents originaux et entierement mediis, purises aux anciennes archives des indigenes, par M. l’Abbe Brasseuer de Bourbourg. 4 forts. vol. in-3 raisin avec carte et figures.

[B] Aristotle Consolatio ad Appollonium § 27, P. 137.

[C] Catlin P. 145.

[D] Foster, Prehistoric Races of the U. S.

[E] Present State of Ethnology in Relation to the Form of the skull. Smithsonian Report 1860 P. 264 et seq.

[F] Vid. Aq. Ried, Smithsonian Annual Report, 1862, pp. 87, 426.

[G] “Revue des Deux Mondes.” March, 1867.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Nuesta Senora=> Nuestra Señora {pg 20}
little peubla=> little puebla {pg 30}
a los pasajeroes=> a los pasajeros {pg 58}
Si Senor=> Sí Señor {pg 60}
him a stack or=> him a stack of {pg 69}
suffered martydom=> suffered martyrdom {pg 76}
narrow-guage road=> narrow-gauge road {pg 82}
road to Tlacotalpam=> road to Tlacotalpan {pg 99}
altar of the war god=> altar of the war-god {pg 100}
dug up the the roots=> dug up the roots {pg 105}
El Segario Metripolitano=> El Sagrario Metropolitano {pg 110}
Viva Hildalgo!=> Viva Hidalgo! {pg 116}
was soon superceded=> was soon superseded {pg 126}
Biano P.=> Bianco P. {pg 126}
Sacret Heart of San Cosme=> Sacred Heart of San Cosme {pg 128}
Gaudalupe Hidalgo is=> Guadalupe Hidalgo is {pg 130}
the pedestrains, dressed=> the pedestrians, dressed {pg 158}
sport as our base ball=> sport as our base-ball {pg 167}
senoritas=> señoritas{pg 168}
Nous avous change tout=> Nous avons change tout {pg 175}
For desert a few banana=> For dessert a few banana {pg 177}
old ecclesiastial building=> old ecclesiastical building {pg 177}
senoras=> señoras {pg 181}
an as they pass=> and as they pass {pg 207}
get our quoto of=> get our quota of {pg 208}
Viva Idependencia!=> Viva Independencia! {pg 212}
gusanas de la maguey=> gusanos de la maguey {pg 227}
pulque neuva=> pulque nueva {pg 230}
believe that the X ray=> believe that the X-ray {pg 234}
northeast of the the plaza=> northeast of the plaza {pg 245}
La Cindad de los=> La Ciudad de los {pg 261}
appointed a commision=> appointed a commission {pg 262}
Bert Harte may come=> Bret Harte may come {pg 267}
San Jose de Analco=> San José de Analco {pg 277}
road to Tlacotalpam=> road to Tlacotalpan {pg 279}
It somewhat resemble a marmoset=> It somewhat resembles a marmoset {pg 282}
Flowers grows so luxuriously=> Flowers grow so luxuriously {pg 286}
prepartions of salt=> preparations of salt {pg 287}
one of the fedual days=> one of the feudal days {pg 296}
I have met these priest=> I have met these priests {pg 299}
The frijolas are cooked=> The frijoles are cooked {pg 301}
ancient philosopers=> ancient philosophers {pg 325}
Phillipine Islands=> Philippine Islands {pg 349}
Senora=> Señora {4x}
Senor=> Señor {9x}
senor=> señor {9x}
senora=> señora {4x}
senorita=> señorita {2x}

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