There were perhaps a thousand prisoners in the place, two men to one woman. Their crimes were—one-third, drunken disturbance and vagrancy; another third, robberies of various kinds; a fourth, wounding and homicides, mostly arising out of quarrels; leaving a small residue for all other crimes.

Our idea was confirmed by many foreigners who had lived long in the country and had been brought into personal contact with the people. Every Mexican, they said, has a thief and a murderer in him, which the slightest provocation will bring out. This of course is an exaggeration, but there is a great deal of truth in it. The crimes in the prison-calendar belong as characteristics to the population in general. Highway-robbery, cutting and wounding in drunken brawls, and deliberate assassination, are offences which prevail among the half-white Mexicans; while stealing is common to them and the pure Indian population. We noticed several instances of bigamy, a crime which Mexican law is very severe upon. As far as we could judge by the amount of punishment inflicted, it is a greater crime to marry two women than to kill two men. In one gallery are the cells for criminals condemned to death, but the occupants were allowed to mix freely with the rest of the prisoners, and they seemed comfortable enough.

Everybody knows how much in England the condition of a prisoner depends on the disposition of the governor in office and the system in vogue for the moment. The mere words of his sentence do not indicate at all what his fate will be. He comes in—under Sir John—to light labour, much schoolmaster and chaplain, and the expectation of a ticket-of-leave when a fraction of his time is expired. All at once Sir James supersedes Sir John, and with him comes in a regime of hard work, short rations, and the black hole. If he had been "in" a month sooner, he would have been "out" now with those more fortunate criminals, his late companions.

Things ought not to be so in England, but we need hardly wonder at their being still worse in Mexico in this respect as in all others. There have been twenty changes of government in ten years, and sometimes extreme severity has been the rule, which may change at a day's notice into the extreme of mildness. In Santa Ana's time the utmost rigour of the law prevailed. Our friends in the Calle Seminario, as they came back from their morning's ride in the Paseo, had to pass through the great square; and used to see there, day after day, pairs of garotted malefactors sitting bolt upright in the high wooden chairs they had just been executed in, with a frightful calm look on their dead faces.

For the last year or so all this had ceased, and there had scarcely been an execution. It seems that one principal reason of this lenity is that the government is too weak to support its judges; and that the ministers of justice are actually intimidated by threats mysteriously conveyed to witnesses and authorities, that, if such or such a criminal is executed, his friends have sworn to avenge his death, and are on the look-out, every man with his knife ready. To political offences the same mercy is extended. In the early times of the war of independence, and for years afterwards, when one leader caught an officer on the other side, he had him tried by a drum-head court-martial, and shot. Since then it has come to be better understood that civil war is waged for the benefit of individuals who wish for their turn of power and their pull at the public purse; and the successful leader spares his opponent, not caring to establish a precedent which might prove so very inconvenient to himself.

We were taken to see the garotte by the President, who took it out of its little mahogany case, into which it was fitted like any other surgical instrument. We noticed that it was rusty, and indeed it had not been used for many months. It is not worth while to describe it.

Mexican law well administered is bad enough, not essentially unjust, but hampered with endless quibbles and technicalities, quite justifying the Spanish proverb, "Mas vale una mala composicion que un buen pleito,"—a bad compromise is better than a good lawsuit. As things stand now, the law of any case is the least item in the account, there are so many ways of working upon judges and witnesses. Bribery first and foremost; and—if that fails—personal intimidation, political influence, private friendship, and the compadrazgo. Naturally, if you have a lawsuit or are tried for a crime, you should lay a good foundation. This is done by working upon the Juez de primera instancia, who corresponds in some degree to the Juge d'instruction in France. This functionary is wretchedly paid, so that a small sum is acceptable to him; and, moreover, the records of the case, as tried by him, form the basis of all future litigation, so that it is very bad economy not to get him into proper order. If you do not, it will cost you three times as much afterwards. If your suit is with a soldier or a priest, the ordinary tribunals will not help you. These two classes—the most influential in the community—have their fuero, their special jurisdiction; and woe to the unfortunate civilian who attacks them in their own courts!

Don Miguel Lerdo do Tejada, whose sense of humour occasionally peeps out from among his statistics, remarks gravely that "the clergy has its special legislation, which consists of the Sacred Volumes, the decision of General and Provincial Councils, the Pontifical Decretals, and doctrines of the Holy Fathers." Of what sort of justice is dealt out in that court, one may form some faint idea.

One of our friends in Mexico had a house which was too large for him, and in a moment of weakness he let part of it to a priest. Two years afterwards, when we made his acquaintance, he was hard at work trying, not to get his rent, he had given up that idea long before, but to get the priest out. I believe that, eventually, he gave him something handsome to take his departure.

I have often quoted Don Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, and shall do so again. His statistics of the country for 1856 are given in a broad sheet, and seem to be generally reliable. The annual balance-sheet of the country he sums up in three lines—

Annual Expenditure . . . . . . 25,000,000 dollars. Annual Revenue . . . . . . . . 15,000,000 dollars. ————— Annual Deficit . . . . . . . . 10,000,000 dollars.

The President of the Ayuntamiento was a pleasant person to know, among the dishonest, intriguing Mexican officials. He received but little pay in return for a great deal of hard work; but he liked to be in office for the opportunities it afforded him of improving the condition of the poor of the city. It was a sight to see the prisoners crowd round him as he entered the court. They all knew him, and it was quite evident they all considered him as a friend. In what little can be done for the ignorant and destitute under the unfavourable circumstances of the country, Don Miguel has had a large share; but until an orderly government, that is, a foreign one, succeeds to the present anarchy, not very much can be done.

I mentioned the word "compadrazgo" a little way back. The thing itself is curious, and quite novel to an Englishman of the present day. The godfathers and godmothers of a child become, by their participation in the ceremony, relations to one another and to the priest who baptizes the child, and call one another ever afterwards compadre and comadre. Just such a relationship was once expressed by the word "gossip," "God-sib," that is "akin in God." Gossip has quite degenerated from its old meaning, and even "sib," though good English in Chaucer's time, is now only to be found in provincial dialects; but in German "sipp" still means "kin."

In Mexico this connexion obliges the compadres and comadres to hospitality and honesty and all sorts of good offices towards one another; and it is wonderful how conscientiously this obligation is kept to, even by people who have no conscience at all for the rest of the world. A man who will cheat his own father or his own son will keep faith with his compadre. To such an extent does this influence become mixed up with all sorts of affairs, and so important is it, that it is necessary to count it among the things that tend to alter the course of justice in the country.

The French have the words compere and commere; and it is curious to observe that the name of compere is given to the confederate of the juggler, who stands among the crowd, and slyly helps in the performance of the trick.

We went one day to the Hospital of San Lazaro. I have mentioned the word "lepero" as applied to the poor and idle class of half-caste Mexicans. It is only a term of reproach, exactly corresponding to the "lazzarone" of Naples, who resembles the Mexican lepers in his social condition, and whose name implies the same thing; for, of course, Saint Lazarus is the patron saint of lepers and foul beggars. There are some few real lepers in Mexico, who are obliged by law to be shut up in this hospital. We rather expected to see something like what one reads of the treatment of lepers which prevailed in Europe until a few years ago—shutting them up in dismal dens cut off from communication with other human beings. We were agreeably disappointed. They were confined, it is true, but in a spacious building, with court-yard and garden; their nurses and attendants appeared to be very kind to them; and it seems that many charitable people come to visit the inmates, and bring them cigars and other small luxuries, to relieve the monotony of their dismal lives. Some had their faces horribly distorted by the falling of the corners of the eyes and mouth, and the disappearance of the cartilage of the nose; and a few, in whom the disease had terminated in a sort of gangrene, were frightful objects, with their features scarcely distinguishable; but in the majority of cases the leprosy had caused a gradual disappearance of the ends of the fingers and toes, and even of the whole hands and feet. The limbs thus mutilated looked as though the parts which were wanting had been amputated, and the wound had quite healed over, but it is caused by a gradual absorption without wound and without pain. As every one knows, leprosy of these kinds was held until quite lately to be dangerously contagious; but, fortunately for the poor creatures themselves, this is quite clearly proved to be false, and the lepers are only shut up that they may have no children, for the affection appears to be hereditary.

It was early one morning, when we were going out to breakfast at Tisapan, that Don Juan recounted to us his experience of garrotted malefactors sitting dead in their chairs in the great square across which we were riding. "It was really almost enough to spoil a fellow's breakfast," he added pathetically. Though an Englishman, and only arrived in the country a few years before, Don Juan was as clever with the lazo as most Mexicans, and could colear a bull in great style. Indeed, we had started early that morning in order to have time enough to look at the bulls in the potreros—the great grass-meadows—that lie for miles outside the city, and which are made immensely fertile by flooding from time to time. Wherever we saw a bull in the distance, Don Juan and his grand little horse Pancho plunged over a bank and through a gap, and we after him. No one ever leaps anything in this country, indeed the form of the saddle puts it out of the question. One or two bulls looked up as we entered the enclosure, and bolted into other fields, pushing in among the thorns of the aloes which formed close hedges of fixed bayonets round the meadows. At last Don Juan cut off the retreat of an old bull, and galloping after him like mad, flung the running loop of the lazo over his horns, at the same time winding the other end round the pummel of his saddle. The bull was still standing on all four legs, pulling with all its might against Pancho. Galloping after him, so as to slacken the end of the lazo, we contrived to transfer it from Don Juan's saddle to mine. Now my own horse happened to be a little lame, and I was riding a poor little black beast whose bones really seemed to rattle in his skin. Our acquaintances in the Paseo had been quite facetious about him, recommending us to be careful and not to smoke up against him, for fear we should blow him over, and otherwise whetting their wit upon him. He acquitted himself very creditably, however, and when the bull began to pull against him, he leant over on the other side, as if he had been galloping round a circus; and the bull could not move him an inch. It was quite evident that it was not his first experiment. In the mean time Don Juan had dropped the noose of my lazo just before the bull's nose, and presently that animal incautiously put his foot into it, when Don Juan whipped it up round his leg and went off at full gallop. My little black horse knew perfectly well what had happened, though his head was exactly in the opposite direction; and he tugged with all his might, and leant over more than ever. The two lazos tightened with a twang, as though they had been guitar-strings; and in a moment the unfortunate bull was rolling with all his legs in the air, in the midst of a whirlwind of dust. Having thus humiliated him we let him go, and off he went at full speed. All this time the proprietor of the field was tranquilly standing on a bank, looking on. Far from raging at us for treating his property in this free and easy manner, he returned our salutation when we rode up to him, and, addressing our sporting countryman, said, "Well done, old fellow, come another day and try again."

Our whole ride to Tisapan was enlivened by a series of Don Juan's exploits. He raced after bulls, got hold of their tails, and coleared them over into the dust. He lazo'd everything in the road, from milestones and trunks of trees upwards; and I shall never forget our meeting with a great mule which was trotting along the road without a burden,—just as he passed us, our companion slipped the noose round his hind leg, and the beast went down as if he had been shot, the muleteers pulling up on purpose to have a good open-mouthed laugh at the incident.

We seemed to be in rather a sporting line that day, for, after our return from Tisapan, Don Juan and I went to see a cockfight. In Mexico, as in Cuba and all Spanish America, this is the favourite sport of the people. In Cuba, the principal shopkeeper in every village keeps the cockpit—the "plaza de gallos." The people from the whole district round about come in on Sunday to the village, with a triple object; first, to hear mass; secondly, to buy their supplies for the ensuing week; and thirdly, to spend the afternoon in cockfighting, at which amusement it is easy to win or lose two or three hundred pounds in an afternoon. The custom that the cockpit brings to the shop more than repays the proprietor for the expense and trouble of keeping it. In Cuba, the spurs of the cock are artificially pointed by paring with a penknife, but the Mexican way of arming them is even more abominable.



Each bird has a sharp steel knife three or four inches long, just like a little scythe-blade, fastened over the natural spur before the fight commences. A leather sheath covers the weapon while the cocks are being put into the ring, and held with their beaks almost touching till they are furious. Then they are drawn back to opposite sides of the ring, the sheaths are taken off, and they fly at one another, giving desperate cuts with the steel blades.

The cockpit was a small round wooden shed, with the ring in the middle, and circular benches round it, rising one above another. The place was full of people, mostly Mexicans of the lower orders, smoking, betting, and talking sporting-slang. The betting was surprising, when one compared its amount with the appearance of the spectators, among whom there was hardly a decent coat to be seen. Every now and then, a dirty scoundrel in a shabby leather jacket would walk round the ring with a handful of gold, offering the odds—ten to five, ten to seven, ten to nine, or whatever they might be, in gold ounces, which coins are worth above three pounds apiece.

Cockfighting is such a passion here that we thought it as well to see it for once. Santa Ana, now he has retired from politics, spends his time at Carthagena pretty much entirely in this his favourite sport, which forms one of the great items among the pleasures and excitements of a Mexican life. We saw a couple of mains fought, in which the victorious birds were dreadfully mangled, while the vanquished were literally cut to pieces; as much money changed hands as we should have thought sufficient to buy up the whole of the people present, cockpit and all. Then, being both agreed that it was a disgusting sight, we went away.

Before we left Mexico we were taken by our man Antonio to a cutler's shop, where the principal trade seemed to be the making of these cuchillos to arm the cocks with. We bought a couple of pairs of them, and had them carefully fitted up. The old cutler was quite delighted, and remarked that foreigners must acknowledge that there were some things which were done better in Mexico than anywhere else. I fear we left him under the pleasing impression that we were taking home the blades to introduce as models in our own benighted country.

The Mexican is a great gambler. Bad fortune he bears with the greatest equanimity. You never hear of his committing suicide after being ruined at play; he just goes away, and sets to work to earn enough for a fresh stake. The government have tried to put down gambling in the State of Mexico, but not with much success. For three days in the year, however, at the festival of San Agustin de las Cuevas, public gambling-tables are tolerated, though soldiers and officials are strictly forbidden to play, an injunction which they carefully set at nought. Oddly enough, the government, while doing all it could to keep its own functionaries away from the monte table, did not scruple to send a military escort to convoy the bankers with their bags of gold from Mexico to San Agustin. On one of the three days, Mr. Christy and I went there. There was a great crowd, this time mostly a well-dressed one, and the cockpit was on a large scale. But of course the great attraction was the monte, which was being played everywhere, the stakes in some places being coppers, in others silver, while more aristocratic establishments would allow no stake under a gold ounce. Dead silence prevailed in these places, and the players seemed to pride themselves upon not showing the slightest change in their countenances, whether they won or lost. The game itself is very simple, and has some points of resemblance to that of lansquenet, known in Europe. The first two cards in the pack, say a four and a king, are laid down, face up, on the table, and the gamblers put down their money against one or the other. Then the croupier deals the cards out slowly and solemnly one after another, calling out their names as they fall, until he comes—say to a king; when those who have betted on the king have their stakes doubled, and the others lose theirs. The banker has a great advantage to compensate him for his expense and risk. If the first card which is thrown out be one of the two numbers on the table, the banker withholds a quarter of the stake he would otherwise have lost, paying only a stake and three-quarters, instead of two stakes. Now, as there are forty cards in a Spanish pack, two of which have been already thrown out, the chances for a throw favourable to the banker are about one in six, so that he may reckon on an average profit of about two per cent, on all the money staked.

As for the players, they sat round the table, carefully noticing the course of the games, and regulating their play accordingly, as they do at Baden-Baden and Hombourg. I suppose that now and then these scientific calculators must be told that their whole theory of chances is the most baseless delusion, but they certainly do not believe it; and at any rate this curious pseudo-science of winning by skill at games of pure chance will last our time, if not longer.

On some tables there were as much as three or four thousand gold ounces. This struck us the more because we had often tried to get gold coin for our own use, instead of the silver dollars, the general currency of the country, of which twenty pounds' worth to carry home on a hot day was enough to break one's heart. We often tried to get gold, but the answer was always that what little there was in the country was in the hands of the gamblers, whose operations could not be worked on a large scale without it.

The prevalence of mining, as a means of getting wealth, has contributed greatly to make the love of gambling an important part of the national character. Silver-mining in the old times was a most hazardous speculation, and people engaged in it used to make and lose great fortunes a dozen times in their lives. The miners worked not on fixed wages, but for a share of the produce, and so every man became a gambler on his own account. To a great extent the same evils prevail now, but two things have tended to lessen them. Poor ores are now worked profitably which used to be neglected by the miners; and, as these ores occur in almost inexhaustible masses, their mining is a much less speculative affair than the old system of mining for rich veins. Moreover, the men are, in some of the largest mines, paid by the day, so that their life has become more regular. In many places, however, the work is still done on shares by the miners, who pass their lives in alternations of excessive riches and all kinds of extravagance, succeeded by times of extreme poverty.

An acquaintance of ours was telling us one day about the lives of these men. One week, a party of three miners had come upon a very rich bit of ore, and went away from the raya, each man with a handkerchief full of dollars. This was on Saturday evening. On Monday morning our informant went out for a ride, and on the road he met three dirty haggard-looking men, dressed in some old rags; one of the three came forward, taking off the sort of apology for a hat which he had on, and said, "Good morning, Senor Doctor, would you mind doing us the favour of lending us half a dollar to get something to eat?" They were the three successful miners; and when, a few days afterwards, the man who had asked for the money came back to return it, the Doctor inquired what had happened.

It seemed that the three, as soon as they had received their money on Saturday, got a lift to the nearest town, and there rigged themselves out with new clothes, silver buttons, five-pound serapes, and a horse for each, with magnificent silver mountings to the saddle and spurs. Here they have dinner, and lots of pulque, and swagger about outside the door, smoking cigarettes. There, quite by chance, an acquaintance meets them, and admires the horses, but would like to see their paces tried a little outside the town. So they pace and gallop along for half a mile or so; when, also quite accidentally, they find two men sitting outside a rancho, playing at cards. The two men—strangely enough—are old acquaintances of the curious friend, and they produce a bowl of cool pulque from within, which our miners find quite refreshing after the ride. Thereupon they sit down to have a little game at monte, then more pulque, then more cards; and when they awake the next morning, they find themselves possessed of a suit of old rags, with no money in the pockets. They had dim recollections of losing—first money, then horses, and lastly clothes, the night before; but—as they were informed by the old woman, who was the only occupant of the place besides themselves—their friends had been obliged to go away on urgent business, and could not be so impolite as to disturb them. So they walked back to the mines, ragged and hungry, and borrowed the doctor's half-dollar.



CHAPTER X.



TEZCUCO. MIRAFLORES. POPOCATEPETL. CHOLULA.



The wet season was fast coming on when we left Mexico for the last time. We had to pass through Vera Cruz, where the rain and the yellow fever generally set in together; so that to stay longer would have been too great a risk.

Our first stage was to Tezcuco, across the lake in a canoe, just as we had been before. We noticed on our way to the canoes, a church, apparently from one to two centuries old, with the following doggerel inscription in huge letters over the portico, which shows that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is by no means a recent institution in Mexico:

Antes de entrar afirma con tu vida, S. Maria fue sin pecado concebida:

Which may be translated into verse of equal quality,

Confess on thy life before coming in, That blessed Saint Mary was conceived without sin.

Nothing particular happened on our journey, except that a well-dressed Mexican turned up at the landing-place, wanting a passage, and as we had taken a canoe for ourselves, we offered to let him come with us. He was a well-bred young man, speaking one or two languages besides his own; and he presently informed us that he was going on a visit to a rich old lady at Tezcuco, whose name was Dona Maria Lopez, or something of the kind. When we drove away from the other end of the lake, towards Tezcuco, we took him as far as the road leading to the old lady's house; when he rather astonished us by hinting that he should like to go on with us to the Casa Grande, and could walk back. At the same time, it struck us that the youth, though so well dressed, had no luggage; and we began to understand the queer expression of the coachman's face when he saw him get into the carriage with us. So we stopped at the corner of the road, and the young gentleman had to get out.

At the Casa Grande, our friends laughed at us immensely when we told them of the incident, and offered us twenty to one that he would come to ask for money within twenty-four hours. He came the same evening, and brought a wonderful story about his passport not being en regle, and that unless we could lend him ten dollars to bribe the police, he should be in a dreadful scrape. We referred him to the master of the house, who said something to him which caused him to depart precipitately, and we never saw him again; but we heard afterwards that he had been to the other foreigners in the neighbourhood with various histories. We made more enquiries about him in the town, and it appeared that his expedition to Tezcuco was improvised when he saw us going down to the boat, and of course the visit to the rich old lady was purely imaginary. Now this youth was not more than eighteen, and looked and spoke like a gentleman. They say that the class he belonged to is to be counted rather by thousands than by hundreds in Mexico. They are the children of white Creoles, or nearly white mestizos; they get a superficial education and the art of dressing, and with this slender capital go out into the world to live by their wits, until they get a government appointment or set up as political adventurers, and so have a chance of helping themselves out of the public purse, which is naturally easier and more profitable than mere sponging upon individuals. One gets to understand the course of Mexican affairs much better by knowing what sort of raw material the politicians are recruited from.

We saw some good things in a small collection of antiquities, on this second visit to Tezcuco. Among them was a nude female figure in alabaster, four or five feet high, and—comparatively speaking—of high artistic merit. Such figures are not common in Mexico, and they are supposed to represent the Aztec Venus, who was called Tlazolteocihua, "Goddess of Pleasure." A figure, laboriously cut in hard stone, representing a man wearing a jackal's head as a mask, was supposed to be a figurative representation of the celebrated king of Tezcuco, Nezahualcoyotl, "hungry jackal," of whom Mexican history relates that he walked about the streets of his capital in disguise, after the manner of the Caliph in the Arabian Nights. The explanation is plausible, but I think not correct. The coyote or jackal was a sacred animal among the Aztecs, as the Anubis-jackal was among the Egyptians. Humboldt found in Mexico the tomb of a coyote, which had been carefully interred with an earthen vase, and a number of the little cast-bronze bells which I noticed in the last chapter. The Mexicans used actually to make a kind of fetish—or charm—of a jackal's skin, prepared in a peculiar way, and called by the same name, nezahualcoyotl, and very likely they do so still. From this fetish the king's name was, no doubt, borrowed; and it is not improbable that the whole story of the king's walking in disguise may have grown up out of his name being the same as that of the figure we saw, muffled up in a jackal's skin.

It is curious that the jackal, or the human figure in a jackal-mask, should have been an object of superstitious veneration both in Mexico and in Egypt. This, the extraordinary serpent-crown of Xochicalco, and the pyramids, are the three most striking resemblances to be found between the two countries; all probably accidental, but not the less noteworthy on that account.

The collection contained a number of spherical beads in green jade, highly polished, and some as large as pigeon's eggs. They were found in an alabaster box, of such elaborate and beautiful workmanship that the owner deemed it worthy to be presented as a sort of peace-offering to the wife of President Santa Ana.

The word coyotl in the name of the Tezcucan king is the present word coyote—a jackal. Though unknown in English, it has passed, with several Spanish words, into what we may call the American dialect of our language. Prairie-hunters and Californians have introduced several other words in this way, such as ranch, gulch, corral, &c.

The word lariat one is constantly meeting with in books about American prairies. A horse-rope, or a lazo, is called in Spanish reata; and, by absorbing the article, la reata is made into lariat, just as such words as alligator, alcove, and pyramid were formed. The flexible leather riding-whip or cuarta is apparently the quirt that some American politicians use in arguing with their opponents.

Our last day at Tezcuco was spent in packing up antiquities to be sent to England, the express orders of the Government against such exportation to the contrary notwithstanding. Next morning we rode off to Miraflores, passing on our way the curious stratum of alluvial soil containing pottery, &c., which I have described already. Miraflores is a cotton-factory, in the opening of a picturesque gorge just at the edge of the plain of Mexico. The machinery is American, for the mill dates from the time when it was considered expedient to prohibit the exportation of cotton-mill machinery from England; and having begun with American work, it naturally suits them to go on with it. It is driven by a great Barker's mill, which works in a sort of well, having an outlet into the valley, and roars as though it would tear the place down. It is not common to see this kind of machine working on a large scale; but here, with a great fall of water, it does very well. Otherwise the place was like an ordinary cotton-factory, and one cannot be surprised at people thinking that such establishments are a source of prosperity to the country. They see a population hard at work and getting good wages, masters making great profits, and no end of bales going off to town; and do not consider that half the price of the cloth is wasted, and that the protection-duty sets the people to work which they cannot do to advantage, while it takes them away from occupations which their country is fit for.

Next morning took us to Amecameca, a town in a little plain at the foot of Popocatepetl, whose snow-covered top towers high up in the clouds, like Mont Blanc over Sallanches. We had at one time cherished hopes of getting to the top of this grand volcano, but had heard such frightful reports of difficulties and dangers that we had concluded not to do more than look at it from a distance, the more especially as there had been a heavy fall of snow upon it a day or two before. We presented our letter to the Spaniard who kept the great shop at Amecameca, and asked him, casually, about the mountain. He assured us that the surface of the snow would be frozen over, and that instead of being a disadvantage the fall of snow was in our favour, for it was easier to climb over frozen snow than up a loose heap of volcanic ashes. So we sent for the guide, a big man, who used to manage the sulphur-workings in the crater until that undertaking was given up. He set to work to get things ready for the expedition, and we strolled out for a walk.

Close by the town is a "sacred mount," with little stations, and on one day in the year numbers of pilgrims come to visit the place. Near the top, the Indian lad who came with us showed us the mouth of a cavern, which leads by subterranean passages under the sea to Rome—as caverns not unfrequently do in Roman Catholic countries! What was more worth noticing was that here there was a cypress-tree, covered with votive offerings, like the great ahuchuete in the valley above Chalma; so that it is likely that the place was sacred long before chapels and stations were built upon it. Our guide told us that whenever a man touched the tree, all feeling of weariness left him. How characteristic this superstition is of a nation of carriers of burdens!

In the afternoon we started—ourselves, our guide, and an Indian to carry cloaks, &c. up the mountain. We soon left the cultivated region, and entered upon the pine-forest, which we never left during our afternoon journey. One of the first showers of the rainy season came down upon us as we rode through the forest. It only lasted half an hour, but it was a deluge. In a shower of the same kind at Tezcuco, a day or two before, rain to the amount of 1-1/10 inches fell in the hour. By dusk we reached the highest habitation in North America, the place where the sulphur used to be sublimed from the pumice brought down from the crater. This place was shut up, for the undertaking has been abandoned; but in a rancho close by we found some Indian women and children, and there we took up our quarters. The rancho was a circular hut, built and thatched with reeds, though in the midst of a pine-forest; and presently a smart shower began, which came in upon us as though the roof had been a sieve.

The Indian women were kneeling all the evening round the wood-fire in the centre of the hut, baking tortillas and boiling beans and coffee in earthen pots. The wood was green, and the place was full of suffocating smoke, except within eighteen inches of the ground, where lay a stratum of purer air. We were obliged to lie down at once, upon mats and serapes, for we could not exist in the smoke; and as often as we raised ourselves into a sitting posture, we had to dive down again, half suffocated. The line of demarcation was so accurately drawn that it was like the Grotto del Cane, only reversed.

After a primitive supper in earthen bowls, we lay round the fire, listening to the talk of our men and the Indian women. It was mostly about adventures with wolves, and about the sulphur-workings, now discontinued. The weather had cleared, and as we lay we could see the stars shining in through the roof. About three in the morning I awoke, feeling bruised all over, as was natural after sleeping on a mat on the ground. Moreover, the fire had gone out, and it was horribly cold, as well it might be at 13,000 feet above the sea. I shook some one up to make up the fire, and went out into the open air. It was nearly full moon; but the moonlight was very different from what we can see in England, even on the clearest nights. On the plateau of Mexico, the rarity and dryness of the air are such that distant objects are seen far more distinctly than at the level of the sea, and the European traveller's measurements of distance by the eye are always too small. The sunlight and moonlight, for the same reason, are more intense than at lower levels. Here, at about the same elevation as the top of the Jungfrau, the effect was far more striking, and I shall never forget the brilliant flood of light that illuminated that grand scene. Far down below I could see the plain, with houses and fields dimly visible. At the bottom of the slope began the dark pine-forest, which enveloped the mountains up to the level at which I stood, and there broke into an uneven line, with straggling patches running up a few hundred feet higher in sheltered crevices. Above the forest came a region of bare volcanic sand, and then began the snow. The highest peak no longer looked steep and pointed as from below, but seemed to rise from the darker line of sand in a gentle swelling curve up into the sky. There did not seem to be a speck or a wrinkle on this smooth snowy dome, the brilliant whiteness of which contrasted so wonderfully with the dark pine-forest below.

About seven in the morning we started on horseback, rode up across the sandy district, and entered upon the snow. After we left the pines, small bushes and tufts of coarse Alpine grass succeeded. Where rocks of basaltic lava stood out from the heaps of crumbling ashes, after the grass had ceased, lichens—the occupants of the highest zone—were still to be seen. Before we reached the snow, we were in the midst of utter desolation, where no sign of life was visible. From this point we sent back the horses, and started for the ascent of the cone. On our yesterday's ride we had cut young pine-trees in the forest, for alpenstocks; and we tied silk handkerchiefs completely over our faces, to keep off the glare of the sun. Our guide did the same; but the Indian, who had been many times before up to the crater to get sulphur, had brought no protection for his face. We marched in a line, the guide first, sounding the depth of the snow with his pole, and keeping as nearly as he could along ridges just covered with snow, where we did not sink far. It was from the lower part of the snow that we began to understand the magnificent proportions of Iztaccihuatl—the "White Woman," the twin mountain which is connected with Popocatepetl by an immense col, which stretches across below the snow-line. This mountain is not conical like Popocatepetl, but its shoulders are broader, and break into grand peaks, like some of the Dents of Switzerland, and it has no crater.[22] Indeed, the two mountains, joined together like Siamese twins, look as though they had been set up, side by side, to illustrate the two contending theories of the formation of volcanos. Von Buch and Humboldt might have made Iztaccihuatl on the "upheaval theory," by a force pushing up from below, without breaking through the crust to form a crater; while Poulett Scrope was building Popocatepetl on the "accumulation theory," by throwing up lava and volcanic ashes out of an open vent, until he had formed a conical heap some five thousand feet high, with a great crater at the top.

As we toiled slowly up the snow, we took off our veils from time to time, to look more clearly about us. The glare of the sun upon the snow was dazzling, and its intense whiteness contrasted wonderfully with the cloudless dark indigo-blue of the sky. Between twelve and one we reached the edge of the crater, 17,884 feet above the sea. The ridge upon which we stood was only a few feet wide, and covered with snow; but it seemed that there was still heat enough to keep the crater itself clear, for none lay on the bottom, or in clefts on the steep sides.

The crater was oval, full a mile in its longest diameter, and perhaps 700 to 800 feet in depth; and its almost perpendicular walls of basaltic lava are covered with red and yellow patches of sublimed sulphur. We climbed a little way down into it to get protection from the wind, but to descend further unassisted was not possible, so we sat there, with our legs dangling down into the abyss. Part of the malacate, or winder, used by the Indians in descending, was still there; but it was not complete, and even if it had been, so many months had elapsed since it was last used that we should not have cared to try it. It consisted of a rope of hide, descending into the bottom of the crater in a slanting direction; and the sulphur-collectors were lowered and drawn up it by a windlass, in a basket to which another rope was attached. A few years back, the volcano used to send up showers of ashes, and even large stones; but now it has sunk to the condition of a mere solfatara, sending out, from two crevices in the floor, great volumes of sulphurous acid and steam, with a loud roaring noise. The sulphur-working merely consisted in looking for places where the pumice-stone was fully impregnated with sulphur, and breaking out pieces, which were hauled up in the basket. The chief risk which the labourers ran was from the terrific snow-storms, which come on suddenly and without the slightest notice. Men at work collecting sulphur have once or twice been caught by such storms in parts of the crater at a distance from the rope, and buried in the snow.

The appearance of the "White Woman," but little lower than the point where we stood, was very grand, but all other objects looked small. The two great plains of Mexico and Puebla, with their lakes and towns, were laid out like a map; and the ranges of mountains which hem them in made them look like Roman encampments surrounded by earthworks. Even now that the lakes have shrunk to a fraction of their former size, we could see the fitness of the name given in old times to the Valley of Mexico, Anahuac, that is, "By the Water-side." The peaks of Orizaba and Perote were conspicuous to the east; to the north lay the silver-mountains of Pachuca; and to the south-west a darker shade of green indicated the forests and plantations of the tierra caliente, below Cuernavaca.

It was a novel sensation to be at an altitude where the barometer stands at 15-1/2 inches, so that the pressure on our lungs was hardly more than one-half what we are accustomed to in England; but we did not experience much inconvenience from it. The last thousand feet or so had been very hard work, and we were obliged to stop every few steps, but on the comparatively level edge of the crater we felt no difficulty in moving about.

Popocatepetl means "Smoking Mountain." The Indians naturally enough considered it to be the abode of evil spirits, and told Cortes and his companions that they could never reach the top. One of the Spaniards, Diego Ordaz, tried to climb to the summit, and got as far as the snow; whereupon he returned, and got permission to put a burning mountain in his coat of arms, in commemoration of the exploit! If, as he declared, a high wind was blowing, and showers of ashes falling, his turning back was excusable, though his bragging was not. He seems to have afterwards told Bernal Diaz that he got to the top, which we know, by Cortes' letters to Spain, was not true. A few years later, Francesco Montano went up, and was lowered into the crater to get sulphur. When Humboldt relates the story, in his New Spain, he seems incredulous about this; but since the Essai Politique was written the same thing has been regularly done by the Indians, as the merest matter of business, until the crater has been fairly worked out.

We took our last look at Mexico from the ridge of the crater, and, descending twenty feet at a stride, soon reached the bottom of the cone. As far as we could see, the substance of the hill seemed to be of basaltic lava, which was mostly covered with the lapilli which I have spoken of before as ashes and volcanic sand. Even before we reached the pine-forest there was evidence of the action of water, which had covered the slope of the mountain with beds of thick compact tufa, composed of these lapilli mixed with fragments of lava. The water-courses had cut deep channels through these beds, and down into the rock below; so that the streams from the melted snow rushed down between walls of lava, in which traces of columnar structure were observable.

The snow we had travelled over was sometimes dry and powdery, and sometimes hard and compact. There were no glaciers, and no glacier-ice, properly so called. It never rains at this elevation; and, though evaporation goes on rapidly with half the pressure taken off the air, and a great increase in the intensity of the sun's rays, the snow either passes directly into vapour, or carries the water off instantaneously, as it is formed. Only so much water seems to be produced and re-frozen as suffices to make the snow hard, and in some favourable places near the rocks to form lumps of ice, and some of those great icicles which the Spaniards brought down from the mountain on their first expedition, so greatly astonishing their companions.

When we reached the rancho we thought of passing another night there; but the Indians who had gone down to the valley for corn had not returned, and everything was eaten up except beans, which are all very well as accessories to dinner, but our English digestions could not stand living upon them; so we started at once for San Nicolas de los Ranchos. Our ride was down a deep ravine, by the side of a mountain-torrent coming down from the snows of Popocatepetl; and, when we stopped now and then to look behind us, we had one of the grandest views which I have ever witnessed. The elements of the picture were simple enough. A deep gorge at our feet, with a fierce torrent rushing down it, dark pine-trees all round us, and above us—on either side—a snow-covered mountain towering up into the sky. We were just in the track of the Spanish invaders, who crossed most likely by this very road between the two volcanos; and they record the amazement which they felt that in the tropics snow should be unmelted upon the mountains.

A few hours riding down the steep descent, and we were in the flat plain of Puebla. There were our two mountains behind us, but now they looked as we had so often seen them before from a distance. The power of realizing their size was gone, and with it most of their grandeur and beauty. Nothing was left us but a vivid recollection of the wonderful scenes that were before us a few hours ago, impressions not likely to be ever effaced from our minds, where the picture of the great snowy cone seen in the bright moonlight, and the descent between the mountains, remain indelibly impressed as the types of all that is most grand and impressive in the scenery of lofty mountains.

We slept at San Nicolas de los Ranches, "St. Nicholas of the huts," where the shopkeeper, to whom we had a letter, insisted upon turning out of his own room for us, and treated us like princes. The reason of our often being provided with letters to the shopkeepers in small places, was, that they are the only people who have houses fit for entertaining travellers. Many of them are very rich, and in the United States they would call themselves merchants. Next morning our Indian carrier, who had ascended the mountain without a veil, was brought in by our guide, a pitiful object. All the skin of his face was peeling off, and his eyes were frightfully inflamed, so that he was all but blind, and had to be led about. Fortunately, this blindness only lasts for a time, and no doubt he got well in a few days.

We rode through the plain to Cholula. Our number was now four; for, besides Antonio, we had engaged another servant a few days before. We wanted some one who knew this district well; and when a friend of ours mentioned that there was a young man to be had who had a good horse and was a smuggler by profession, we engaged him directly, and he proved a great acquisition. Of course, from the nature of his trade, he knew every bypath between Mexico and the tobacco-districts towards which we were going; he was always ready with an expedient whenever there was a difficulty, he was never tired and never out of temper. As for the morality of his peculiar profession, it probably does harm to the honesty of the people; but, considering it as a question of abstract justice, we must remember that almost the whole of the taxes which the Mexicans are compelled to pay to the general government are utterly wasted upon paying officials who do nothing but intrigue, and keeping up armies which—far from being a protection to life and property—are a permanent and most destructive nuisance. The contract between government and subject ought to be a two-sided one; and when the government so entirely misuses the taxes paid by the people, I am quite inclined to sympathize with the subjects who will not pay them if they can help it.

We scarcely entered the town of Cholula, which is a poor place now, though it was a great city at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The Spanish city of Puebla, only a few miles off, quite ruined it.

We went straight to the great pyramid, which lies close to the town, and which had been rising before us like a hill during the last miles of our journey. This extraordinary structure is perhaps the oldest ruin in Mexico, and certainly the largest. A close examination of its structure in places where the outline is still to some extent preserved, and a comparison of it with better preserved structures of the same kind, make it quite clear that it was a terraced teocalli, resembling the drawing called the "Pyramid of Cholula," in Humboldt's Vues des Cordilleres. But let no one imagine that the well-defined and symmetrical structure represented in that drawing is in the least like what we saw, and from which Humboldt made the rough sketch, which he and his artist afterwards "idealized" for his great work. At the present day, the appearance of the structure is that of a shapeless tree-grown hill; and until the traveller comes quite close to it he may be excused for not believing that it is an artificial mound at all.

The pyramid is built of rows of bricks baked in the sun, and cemented together with mortar in which had been stuck quantities of small stones, fragments of pottery, and bits of obsidian knives and weapons. Between rows of bricks are alternate layers of clay. It was built in four terraces, of which traces are still to be distinguished; and is about 200 feet high. Upon the platform at the top stand some trees and a church. The sides front the four cardinal points, and the base line is of immense length, over thirteen hundred feet, so that the ascent is very gradual.

When we reached Cholula we sent the two men to enquire in the neighbourhood for antiquities, of which numbers are to be found in every ploughed field round. At the top of the pyramid we held a market, and got some curious things, all of small size however. Among them was a mould for making little jackal-heads in the clay, ready for baking; the little earthen heads which are found in such quantities in the country being evidently made by wholesale in moulds of this kind, not modelled separately. We got also several terra-cotta stamps, used in old times for stamping coloured patterns upon the native cloth, and perhaps also for ornamenting vases and other articles of earthenware. Cholula used to be a famous place for making pottery, and its red-and-black ware was famous at the time of the Conquest, but the trade now seems to have left it. We were struck by observing that, though there was plenty of coloured pottery to be found in the neighbourhood of the pyramid, the pyramid itself had only fragments of uncoloured ware imbedded in its structure; which seems to prove that it was built before the art of colouring pottery was invented.

They have cut a road through one corner of the pyramid, and this cutting exposed a chamber within. Humboldt describes this chamber as roofed with blocks, each overlapping the one before, till they can be made to meet by a block of ordinary size. This is the false arch so common in Egypt and Peru, and in the ruined cities of Central America. Every child who builds houses with a box of bricks discovers it for himself. The bridge at Tezcuco, already described, is much more remarkable in its structure. Whether our inspection was careless, or whether the chamber has fallen in since Humboldt's time, I cannot say, but we missed this peculiar roof.

There are several legends about the Pyramid of Cholula. That recorded by Humboldt on the authority of a certain Dominican friar, Pedro de los Rios, I mention—not because of its intrinsic value, which is very slight, but because it will enable us to see the way in which legends grew up under the hands of the early missionaries, who were delighted to find fragments of Scripture-history among the traditions of the Ancient Mexicans, and who seem to have taken down from the lips of their converts, as native traditions, the very Bible-stories that they had been teaching them, mixed however with other details, of which it is hard to say whether they were imagined on purpose to fill up gaps in the story, or whether they were really of native traditional origin.

Pedro de los Rios' story tells us that the land of Anahuac was inhabited by giants; that there was a great deluge, which devastated the earth; that all the inhabitants were turned into fishes, except seven who took refuge in a cave (apparently with their wives). Years after the waters had subsided, and the earth had been re-peopled by these seven men, their leader began to build a vast pyramid, whose top should reach to heaven. He built it of bricks baked in the sun, which were brought from a great distance, passing them from hand to hand by a file of men. The gods were enraged at the presumption of these men, and they sent down fire from heaven upon the pyramid, which caused its building to be discontinued. It is stated that at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the inhabitants of Cholula preserved with great veneration a large aerolite, which they said was the thunderbolt that fell upon the top of the pyramid when the fire struck it.

The history of the confusion of tongues seems also to have existed in the country, not long after the Conquest, having very probably been learnt from the missionaries; but it does not seem to have been connected with the Tower-of-Babel legend of Cholula. Something like it at least appears in the Gemelli table of Mexican migrations, reproduced in Humboldt, where a bird in a tree is sending down a number of tongues to a crowd of men standing below.

I think we need not hesitate in condemning the legend of Cholula, which I have just related, as not genuine, or at least as partly of late fabrication. But we fortunately possess another version of it, which shows the legend to have developed itself farther than was quite discreet. A MS. history, written by Duran in 1579, and quoted by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, relates that people built the pyramid to reach heaven, finding clay or mud ("terre glaise") and a very sticky bitumen ("bitume fort gluant"), with which they began at once to build, &c. This is evidently the slime or bitumen of the Book of Genesis; but I believe I may safely assert that the Mexicans never used bitumen for any such purpose, and that it is not found anywhere near Cholula.

The Aztec historians ascribe the building of the Pyramid of Cholula to the prophet Quetzalcoatl. The legends which relate to this celebrated personage are to be found in writers on Mexican history, and, more fully than elsewhere, in the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg's work.

I am inclined to consider Quetzalcoatl a real personage, and not a mythical one. He is said to have been a white, bearded man, to have come from the East, to have reigned in Tollan, and to have been driven out from thence by the votaries of human sacrifices, which he opposed. He took refuge in Cholollan, now called Cholula (which means the "place of the fugitive"), and taught the inhabitants to work in metals, to observe various fasts and festivals, to use the Toltec calendar of days and years, and to perform penance to appease the gods.

A relic of the father of Quetzalcoatl is said to have been kept until after the Spanish Conquest, when it was opened, and found to contain a quantity of fair human hair. The prophet himself departed from Cholula, and put to sea in a canoe, promising to return. So strong was the belief in the tradition of these events among the Aztecs, that when the Spaniards appeared on the coast, they were supposed to be of the race of the prophet, and the strange conduct of Montezuma to Cortes is to be ascribed to the influence of this belief.

There is a singular legend, mentioned by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, of a white man, with a hooded robe and white beard, bearing a cross in his hand, who lands at Tehuantepec (on the Pacific coast of Mexico), and introduces among the Indians auricular confession, penance, and vows of chastity.

The coming of white, bearded men from the East, centuries before the Spanish invasion in the 16th century, and the introduction of new arts and rites by them in Mexico, is as certain as most historical events of which we have only legendary knowledge. As to who they were I cannot offer an opinion. There are, however, one or two points connected with the presence of the Irish and Northmen in America in the 9th and following centuries—a period not very far from that ascribed to Quetzalcoatl—which are worthy of notice.

The Scandinavian antiquarians make the "white-man's land" (Hvitramannaland) extend down as far as Florida, on the very Gulf of Mexico. It is curious to notice the coincidence between the remark of Bernal Diaz, that the Mexicans called their priests papa (more properly papahua), and that in the old Norse Chronicle, which tells of the first colonization of Iceland by the Northmen, and relates that they found living there "Christian men whom the Northmen call Papa." These latter are shown by the context to have been Irish priests. The Aztec root teo (teo-tl, God) comes nearer to the Greek and Latin, but is not unlike the Irish dia, and the Norse ty-r. The Aztec root col (charcoal) is exactly the Norse kol (our word coat), but not so near to the Irish gual. It is desirable to notice such coincidences, even when they are too slight to ground an argument upon.

This seems to be the proper place to mention the many Christian analogies to be found in the customs of the ancient Aztecs.

Children were sprinkled with water when their names were given to them. This is certainly true, though the statement that they believed that the process purified them from original sin is probably a monkish fiction. Water was consecrated by the priests, and was supposed thus to acquire magical qualities. In the coronation of kings, anointing was part of the ceremony, as well as the use of holy water. The festival of All Souls' Day reminds us of the Aztec feasts of the Dead in the autumn of each year; and in Mexico the Indians still keep up some of their old rites on that day. There was a singular rite observed by the Aztecs, which they called the teoqualo, that is, "the eating of the god." A figure of one of their gods was made in dough, and after certain ceremonies they made a pretence of killing it, and divided it into morsels, which were eaten by the votaries as a kind of sacred food.

We may add to the list the habitual use of incense in the ceremonies: the existence of monasteries and nunneries, in which the monks wore long hair, but the nuns had their hair cut off: and the use of the cross as a religious emblem in Mexico and Central America.

Less certain is the recorded use of knotted scourges in performing penance, and the existence of a peculiar kind of auricular confession.

It is difficult to ascribe this mass of coincidences to mere chance, and not to see in them traces of connexion, more or less remote, with Christians. Perhaps these peculiar rites came, with the Mexican system of astronomy, from Asia; or perhaps the white, bearded men from the East may have brought them. It is true that such a supposition runs quite counter to the argument founded on the ignorance of the Mexicans of common arts known in Europe and Asia. We should have expected Christian missionaries to have brought with them the knowledge of the use of iron, and the alphabet. Perhaps our increasing knowledge of the ancient Mexicans may some day allow us to adopt a theory which shall at least have the merit of being consistent with itself; but at present this seems impossible.



CHAPTER XI.



PUEBLA. NOPALUCAN. ORIZABA. POTRERO.



We reached Puebla in the afternoon, and found it a fine Spanish city, with straight streets of handsome stone houses, and paved with flag-stones. We rather wondered at the pasadizos, a kind of arched stone-pavement across the streets at short intervals, very much impeding the progress of the carriages, which had to go up and down them upon inclined planes. In the evening we saw the use of them however, for a shower of rain came down which turned every street into a furious river within five minutes after the first drop fell. For half an hour the pasadizos did their duty, letting the water pass through underneath, while passengers could get across the streets dryshod. At last, the flood swept clear along, over bridges and all; but this only lasted a few minutes, and then the way was practicable again. The moveable iron bridges on wheels, which are to be seen standing in the streets of Sicilian cities, ready to be wheeled across them for the benefit of foot-passengers whenever the carriage-way is flooded, are on the whole a better arrangement.

We should never have thought, from looking at Puebla, that it had just been undergoing a siege; for, beyond a few patches of whitewash in the great square, where the cannon-balls had knocked the houses about, there were no traces of it.

We made many enquiries about the siege, and found nothing to invalidate our former estimate of twenty-five killed,—one per cent of the number stated in the government manifestos. Among the casualties we heard of an Englishman who went out to see the fun, and was wounded in a particularly ignominious manner as he was going back to his house.

Revolutions and sieges form curious episodes in the life of the foreign merchants in the Republic. Their trade is flourishing, perhaps,—plenty of buyers and good prices; and hundreds of mules are on the road, bringing up their wares from the coast. All at once there is a pronunciamiento. The street-walls are covered with proclamations. Half the army takes one side, half the other; and crowds of volunteers and self-made officers join them, in the hope of present pillage or future emolument. Barricades appear in the streets; and at intervals there is to be heard the roaring of cannon, and desultory firing of musketry from the flat roofs, killing a peaceable citizen now and then, but doing little execution on the enemy.

Trade comes to a dead stop. Our merchant gets his house well furnished with provisions, shuts the outer shutters, locks up the great gates, and retires into seclusion for a week or a fortnight, or a month or two, as may be. At the time we were there he used to run no great risk, for neither party was hostile to him; and if a stray cannon-ball did hit his house, or the insurgents shot his cook going out on an expedition in search of fresh beef, it was only by accident.

Having no business to do, the counting-house would probably take stock, and balance the books; but when this is finished there is little to be done but to practice pistol-shooting and hold tournaments in the court-yard, and to teach the horses to rayar; while the head of the house sits moodily smoking in his arm-chair, reckoning up how many of his debtors would be ruined, and wondering whether the loaded mules with his goods had got into shelter, or had been seized by one party or the other.

At last the revolution is over. The new president is inaugurated with pompous speeches. The newspapers announce that now the glorious reign of justice, order, and prosperity has begun at last. If the millennium had come, they could not make much more talk about it. Our unfortunate friend, coming out of his den only to hear dismal news of runaway debtors and confiscated bales, has to illuminate his house, and set to getting his affairs into something like order again.

Since we left the country things have got even worse. Formerly, all that the foreign merchants had to suffer were the incidental miseries of a state of civil war. Now, the revolutionary leaders put them in prison; and, if threats are not sufficient, they get forced loans out of them, much as King John did out of his Jews.

Even in times of peace, foreign goods must be dear in Mexico. In a country where they have to be carried nearly three hundred miles on mules' backs, and where credit is so long that the merchant can never hope to see his money again in less than two years, he cannot be expected to sell very cheaply. But the continual revolutions and the insecurity of property make things far worse, and one almost wonders how foreign trade can go on at all.

One of our friends in Mexico had three or four hundred mules coming up the country laden with American cotton for his mill, just when Haro's revolution began. He got off much better than most people, however; for, greatly to the disgust of the legitimate authorities, he went down into the enemy's camp, and gave the revolutionary chief a dollar a bale to let them go.

As may be supposed, commercial transactions have often very curious features here. Strange things happen in the eastern states; but people there say that they are nothing to the doings on the Pacific coast, where the merchants get up a revolution when their ships appear in the offing, and turn out the Custom-house officers, who do not enter upon their functions again until the rich cargos have started for the interior.

One little incident, which happened—-I think—at Vera Cruz, rather amused us. When the Government is hard-up, a favourite way of raising ready money is to sell—of course at a very low price—orders upon the Custom-house, to pass certain quantities of goods, duty-free. Such a transaction as this was concluded between the Minister of Finance and a merchant's house who gave hard dollars in exchange for an order to pass so many hundred bales of cotton, free of duty. When the ship arrived at port, however, the Yankee captain brought in his manifest with a broad grin upon his face. The inspectors went down to the ship, and stood aghast. There were the bales of cotton, but such bales! They had to be shoved and coaxed to get them up through the hatchways at all. The Customhouse officials protested in vain. The order was for so many bales of cotton, and these overgrown monsters were bales of cotton, and the merchants sent them up to Mexico in triumph.

To us, Puebla was not an interesting city. It was built by the Spaniards, and called Puebla de los Angeles, because angels assisted in building the cathedral, which does no great credit to their good taste. Its costly ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, and variegated marbles, are most extraordinary. One does not know which to wonder at most, the value and beauty of the materials, or the unmitigated ugliness of the designs.

We saw the festival of Corpus Christi while we were in Puebla; but were to a certain extent disappointed in the display of plate and jewelled vestments for the clergy, whose attempt to overthrow Comonfort's government had only resulted in themselves being heavily fined, and who were in consequence keeping their wealth in the background, and making as little display as possible. The most interesting part of the ceremonial to us was to see the processions of Indians from the surrounding villages, walking crowned with flowers, and carrying Madonnas in bowers of green branches and blossoms.

At the head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, tap, tap, tap, without a vestige of time. The other processions with stoles and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough.

Neither during this ceremonial, nor at Easter in the Capital were any miracles exhibited, like the performances of the Madonna at Palermo, which the coachmen of the city carry about at Easter, weeping real tears into a cambric pocket-handkerchief; nor is anything done in the country like the lighting of the Greek fire, or the melting of the blood of St. Januarius.

Puebla pretty much belongs to the clergy, who are paramount there. A population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of them very large. It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy political state of the country. As is usual in cathedral-towns, the morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere. I have said already that the revenues of the Mexican Church are very large. Tejada estimates the income at twenty millions of dollars yearly, more than the whole revenue of the State; but this calculation far exceeds that given by any other authority. He remarks that the Church has always tried as much as possible to conceal its riches, and probably he makes a very large allowance for this. At any rate, I think we may reasonably estimate the annual income of the Church at $10,000,000, or L2,000,000, two-thirds of the income of the State.

There is nothing extraordinary in the Church having become very rich by the accumulations of three centuries in a Spanish colony, where the manners and customs remained in the 18th century to a great extent as they were in the 16th, and the practice of giving and leaving great properties to the Church was in full vigour—long after it had declined in Europe. It is considered that half the city of Mexico belongs to the Church. This seems an extraordinary statement; but, if we remember that in Philip the Second's time half the freehold property of Spain belonged to the Church, we shall cease to wonder at this. The extraordinary feature of the case is that, counting both secular and regular clergy, there are only 4600 ecclesiastics in the country. The number has been steadily decreasing for years. In 1826 it was 6,000; in 1844 it had fallen to 5,200, in 1856 to 4,600, giving, on the lowest reckoning, an average of over L200 a year for each priest and monk. A great part of this income is probably left to accumulate; but, when we remember that the pay of the country curas is very small, often not more than L30 to L50, there must be fine incomes left for the church-dignitaries and the monks. Now any one would suppose that a profession with such prizes to give away would become more and more crowded. Why it is not so I cannot tell. It is true that the lives of the ecclesiastics are anything but respectable, and that the profession is in such bad odour that many fathers of families, though good Catholics, will not let a priest enter their houses; but we do not generally find Mexicans deterred by a little bad reputation from occupations where much money and influence are to be had for very little work.

The ill conduct of the Mexican clergy, especially of the monks, is matter of common notoriety, and every writer on Mexico mentions it, from the time of Father Gage—the English friar—who travelled with a number of Spanish monks through Mexico in 1625, and described the clergy and the people as he saw them. He was disgusted with their ways, and, going back to England, turned Protestant, and died Vicar of Deal.

To show what monastic discipline is in Mexico, I will tell one story, and only one. An English acquaintance of mine was coming down the Calle San Francisco late one night, and saw a man who had been stabbed in the street close to the convent-gate. People sent into the convent to fetch a confessor for the dying man, but none was to be had. There was only one monk in the place, and he was bed-ridden. The rest were enjoying themselves in the city, or fast asleep at their lodgings in the bosom of their families.

In condemning the Mexican clergy, some exception must be made. There are many of the country curas who lead most exemplary lives, and do much good. So do the priests of the order of St. Vincent de Paule, and the Sisters of Charity with whom they are associated; but then, few of these, either priests or sisters, are Mexicans.

Among the curious odds and ends which we came upon in Puebla, in the shop of a dealer in old iron and things in general, were two or three very curious old scourges, made of light iron chains with projecting points on the links—terrific instruments, once in very general use. Up to the present time, there are certain nights when penitents assemble in churches, in total darkness, and kneeling on the pavement, scourge themselves, while a monk in the pulpit screams out fierce exhortations to strike harder. The description carries us back at once to the Egyptian origin of this strange custom; and we think of the annual festival of Isis, where the multitudes scourged themselves in memory of the sufferings of Osiris. A story is told of a sceptical individual who got admission to this ceremony by making great professions of devotion, and did terrific execution on the backs of his kneeling fellow-penitents. Before he began, the place was resounding with doleful cries and groans; but he noticed that the cry which arose when he struck was not like these other sounds, but had quite a different accent. The practice of devotional scourging is still kept up in Rome, but in a very mild form, as it appears that the penitents keep their coats on, and only use a kind of miniature cat-o'-nine-tails of thin cord, with a morsel of lead at the end of each tail, and not such bloodthirsty implements as those we found at Puebla.

It seemed to us that the great influence of the priests in Mexico was among the women of all classes, the Indians, and the poorer and less educated half-castes. The men of the higher classes, especially the younger ones, did not appear to have much respect for the priests or for religion, and, indeed, seemed to be sceptical, after the manner of the French school of freethinking. It was quite curious to see the young dandies, dressed in their finest clothes, at the doors of the fashionable churches on Sunday morning. None of them seemed to go to mass, but they simply went to stare at the ladies, who, as they came out, had to run the gauntlet through a double line of these critical young gentlemen. As far as we could see, however, they did not mind being looked at. The poorer mestizos and Indians, on the other hand, are still zealous churchmen, and spend their time and money on masses and religious duties so perseveringly that one wishes they had a religion which was of some use to them. As it is, I cannot ascertain that Christianity has produced any improvement in the Mexican people. They no longer sacrifice and eat their enemies, it is true, but against this we must debit them with a great increase of dishonesty and general immorality, which will pretty well square the account.

Practically, there is not much difference between the old heathenism and the new Christianity. We may put the dogmas out of the question. They hear them and believe in them devoutly, and do not understand them in the least. They had just received the Immaculate Conception, as they had received many mysteries before it; and were not a little delighted to have a new occasion for decorating themselves and their churches with flowers, marching in procession, dancing, beating drums, and letting off rockets by daylight, as their manner is. The real essence of both religions is the same to them. They had gods, to whom they built temples, and in whose honour they gave offerings, maintained priests, danced and walked in processions—much as they do now, that their divinities might be favourable to them, and give them good crops and success in their enterprises. This is pretty much what their present Christianity consists of. As a moral influence, working upon the character of the people, it seems scarcely to have had the slightest effect, except, as I said, in causing them to leave off human sacrifices, which were probably not an original feature of their worship, but were introduced comparatively at a late time, and had already been almost abolished by one king.

The Indians still show the greatest veneration for a priest; and Heller well illustrates this feeling when he tells us how he happened to ride through the country in a long black cloak, and the Indians he met on the road used to fall on their knees as he passed, and ask for his blessing, regardless of the deep mud and their white trousers. However, this was ten years before we were in the country, and I doubt whether the cloak would get so much veneration now. The best measure of the influence of the Church is the fact that when Mexico adopted a republican constitution, in imitation of that of the United States, it was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble. It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the authority of the Roman Catholic religion, it considerably reduced the church-revenues, by making the payment of tithes a matter of mere option. The Church—of course—diligently preaches the necessity of paying tithes, putting their obligation in the catechism, between the ten commandments and the seven sacraments, and they still get a good deal in this way.

We sent our horses to the bath at Pueblo. This is usually done once a week in the cities of Mexico. We went once to see the process while we were in the capital, and were very much amused. The horses had been to the place before, and turned in of their own accord through a gateway in a shabby back street; and when they got into the courtyard, began to dance about in such a frantic manner that the mozos could hardly hold them in while their saddles and bridles were being taken off. Then they put their heads down, and bolted into a large shed, with a sort of floor of dust several inches deep, in which six or eight other horses were rushing about, kicking, prancing, plunging, and literally screaming with delight. I will not positively assert that I saw an old white horse stand upon his head in a corner and kick with all his four legs at once, but he certainly did something very much like it. Presently the old mozo walked into the shed, with his lazo over his arm, and carelessly flung the noose across. Of course it fell over the right horse's neck, when the animal was quiet in a moment, and walked out after the old man in quite a subdued frame of mind. One horse came out after another in the same way, took his swim obediently across a great tank of water, was rubbed down, and went off home in high spirits.

Though slavery has long been abolished in the Republic, there still exists a curious "domestic institution" which is nearly akin to it. It is not peculiar to the plains of Puebla, but flourishes there more than elsewhere. It is called "peonaje," and its operation is in this wise. If a debtor owes money and cannot pay it, his creditor is allowed by law to make a slave or peon of him until the debt is liquidated. Though the name is Spanish, I believe the origin of the custom is to be found in an Aztec usage which prevailed before the Conquest.

A peon means a man on foot, that is, a labourer, journeyman, or foot-soldier. We have the word in English as "pioneer" and as the "pawn" among chessmen; but I think not with any meaning like that it has come to bear in Mexico.

On the great haciendas in the neighbourhood of Puebla, the Indian labourers are very generally in this condition. They owe money to their masters, and are slaves; nominally till they can work off the sum they owe, but practically for their whole lives. Even should they earn enough to be able to pay their debt, the contract cannot be cancelled so easily. A particular day is fixed for striking a balance, generally, I believe, Easter Monday, just after a season when the custom of centuries has made it incumbent upon the Indians to spend all that they have and all that they can borrow upon church-fees, wax-candles, and rockets, for the religious ceremonies of the season, and the drunken debauches which form an essential part of the festival. The masters, or at least the administradors, are accused of mystifying the annual statement of accounts between the labourer and the estate, and it is certain that the Indian's feeble knowledge of arithmetic leaves him quite helpless in the hands of the bookkeeper; but whether this is mere slander or not, we never had any means of ascertaining.

Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the minds of these Indians. Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.

There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these peons to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the opinions of waiters who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius, however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must take the only security they can get. He says, and truly enough, that the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers. Any one who knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their master's service may form some faint idea of the way in which this Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the people.

But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case. It is not the money which the masters lend the peons to help them in distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery. It is the money spent in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and marriages. These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary. The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent. If they preferred that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep the peons in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the system upon them.

I have spoken of the peons as Indians, and so they are for the most part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,—not merely brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.

Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting, often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has a share of the profits, and when there is a "good thing" going, he is on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to manage them; and discounting merchants' bills is a lucrative business. But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road, is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some. They are of blue steel inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel, from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. (See page 220.) They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting him than by their incessant jingling, which is increased by bits of steel put on for the purpose. Monstrous as the spurs now used are, they are small in comparison with those of a century or two ago. One reads of spurs, of gold and silver, with rowels in the shape of five-pointed stars six inches in diameter. These have quite gone out now, and seem to have been melted up, for they are hardly ever to be seen; but we bought at the baratillo of Mexico spurs of steel quite as large as this.

My companion sent to the Art-exhibition at Manchester a couple of pairs of the ordinary spurs of the country, such as we ourselves and everybody else wore. They were put among the mediaeval armour, and excited great admiration in that capacity!

We slept at Nopalucan that night, and rode on next day to San Antonio de Abajo, a little out-of-the-way village at the foot of the mountain of Orizaba. Our principal adventure in the day's ride was that, finding that our road made a detour of a mile or so round a beautiful piece of green turf, we boldly struck across it, and nearly lamed our horses thereby; for the ground was completely undermined by moles, and at every third step the horses' feet went into a deep hole. We had to get off and lead them back to the road.

Orizaba is the great feature in the scenery of this district of Mexico. It is one point in the line of volcanos which stretches across the continent from east to west. It is a conical mountain, like Popocatepetl, and about the same height; measurements vary from twenty feet higher to sixty feet lower. The crater has fallen in on one side, leaving a deep notch clearly visible from below. At present, as we hear from travellers who have ascended it, the crater, like that of Popocatepetl, is in the condition of a solfatara, sending out jets of steam and sulphurous acid gas. About three centuries ago its eruptions were frequent; and its Mexican name, Citlaltepetl, "Mountain of the Star," carries us back to the time when it showed in the darkness a star-like light from its crater, like that of Stromboli at the present time, when one sees it from a distance.

San Antonio de Abajo is a quaint little village, frequented by muleteers and smugglers. Tobacco, the principal contraband article, is grown in the plains just below; and, once carried up into the paths among the mountains, it is hard for any custom-house officer to catch sight of it.

When there was a government, there used sometimes to be fighting between the revenue-officers and the smugglers; but now, if there is a meeting, a few dollars will settle the disputed question to the satisfaction of both parties, so that the contraband trade, though profitable, is by no means so exciting as it used to be.

On the road towards San Antonio we saw ancient remains in the banks by the road-side, but had no time for a regular examination. We slept on damp mattresses in a room of the inn, where the fowls roosted on the rafters above our heads, and walked over our faces in the early morning in an unpleasant manner. We started before daybreak, and a descent down a winding road, through a forest of pines and oaks, brought us by seven in the morning from the region of pines and barley down to the district where tobacco and the sugar-cane flourish, at the level of 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea.

We met a jaunty-looking party in the valley, two women and five or six men, all on good horses, and dressed in the extreme of fashion which the Mexican ranchero affects—broad-brimmed hats with costly gold and silver serpents for hat-bands, and clothes and saddles glittering with silver. Martin rode up to us as they passed, and said he knew them well for the boldest highwaymen in Mexico. Had we started an hour or two later we should have met them in the forest, and have had an adventure to tell of. As it was, the descent of three thousand feet had brought us from a land of thieves to a region where highway robbery is never known, unless when a party from the high lands come down on a marauding expedition. It is an unquestionable fact that the Mexican robbers, whose exploits have become a matter of world-wide notoriety, all belong to the cold region of the plateaus, the tierra fria. Once down in the tierra templada, or the tierra caliente, the temperate or the hot regions, you hear no more of them; or at least this is the case in the parts of Mexico we visited. The reason is clear; it is only on the plateaus that the whites, preferring a region where the climate was not unlike that of Castile, settled in large numbers; so that it is there that Creoles and mestizos predominate, and they are the robbers.

We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road, we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party excited no curiosity,—talk of robbers still less. At every house the question was, "?De donde vienen, Senores?" "Where are you from, gentlemen?"—and when we told them, "?Y estaban alli las langostas?" "And were the locusts there?" The whole country was being devastated by them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately, they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.