For a few seconds the step resounded under the dark vault of the corridor; then it was silenced. The travellers were alone, and the hacendero determined to investigate the chambers prepared for them.
[CHAPTER IV.]
SUPERFICIAL REMARKS.
The haciendas of Spanish America were never feudal tenures, whatever certain badly informed authors may assert, but simply large agricultural holdings, as their name clearly indicates.
These haciendas, scattered over Mexico at great distances from each other, and surrounded by vast stretches of country, for the greater part uninhabited, are generally situated on the top of abruptly rising hills, in positions easy of defence.
As the hacienda, properly so called,—i.e. the habitation of the proprietor of the estate,—forms the nucleus of the colony, and, in addition to the barns and stables, contains also the out houses, the lodgings of the peones, and, above all, the chapel, its walls are high, massive, and surrounded by a ditch, so as to put it out of danger from a coup-de-main.
These numerous haciendas frequently maintain from six to seven hundred individuals of all trades, the lands belonging to a farm of this description being often of greater extent than a whole province in France.
They are the wholesale breeding places of the wild horses and cattle that graze at freedom in the prairies, watched over at a distance by peones vaqueros as untamed as themselves.