CHAPTER XVII.
LAS TIERRAS CALIENTAS.
TO the “Hot Lands,” we leave Puebla by the Inter-Oceanic railroad and make the wild ride to the city of Vera Cruz. The first part of the journey is across the mesa of burning sand and bare rocks. Soon after leaving the city we pass the mount of Malinche, which supplies the city with water. Malinche is the name given to Cortez soon after he reached Mexico, For miles and miles not a tree graces the landscape. Now and then a brilliant cluster of morning glories appear, but they are shrubs and not vines. The geranium also appears, and no longer a shrub, but almost a tree twenty feet high. Flocks of discouraged sheep and very earnest cattle seem to be devoting all their attention to eating sand and rocks. Of course it is contrary to custom for these animals to make a steady diet off this kind of fodder, but with my most earnest investigation it was all I saw for them to eat. A sparrow could be seen anywhere on any given acre of ground.
A few shepherds wrapped in serapes were constantly on the watch to keep the gaunt and restless wanderers within their imaginary boundaries, for it was contrary to custom to allow one flock to eat the sand that belongs to another. The miserable huts of the natives are measured by the length of the discarded cross-ties of the railroad. A quadrangle of these stuck a foot in the ground and thatched with maguey leaves and the citizen is “at home.” So is the donkey or whatever other animal he possesses. Sometimes he has several razorback pigs tethered by a foot to the end of a rope and they root in the ground and hone their backs against the cross-tie that answers for a door-post and are happy. As the train approaches a station, scores of women and girls press around the car windows beseeching the passengers to buy fruits at the first class cars, and cooked provisions at the second and third. The most of the first class passengers are Americans, and as a rule they do not invest heavily in Mexican provisions. They say it requires too much faith to eat them.
And pulque. How could we get along without the fragrant pulque? With a large earthen jar in her left hand, and a small one without handle in her right, she anxiously seeks purchasers. When a purchaser is found, down goes that right hand, fingers and all to the bottom of the jar, and as it comes up full, the white, ropy fluid frescoes with its sticky streamers everything in reach. In their anxiety to out-sell each other, the anxious eyes are scanning every window for engagements while the right hand mechanically is immersed to the wrist in the larger vessel. At one cent a drink, and often as many vendors as purchasers, two or three cents is the average revenue these people make from a train that passes only twice a day. It is sad to see the hungry pleading eyes of these half-naked women as they in vain offer their scanty wares to people who do not buy. I have bought food from one of these beggars and given it to another just to see them eat, and no starved beast could have shown greater hunger and zeal with which they picked up every crumb from the ground.
In the cities beggars are kept scarce by the police, but on these plateaux they swarm, and grown men and women will crowd around the train, and their clothing would not average two yards to the person. Only twice did I see beggars attempting to offer an equivalent for the alms they begged—at La Barca on the Mexican Central Road where two blind beggars with cracked voices and rheumatic guitars inflicted the painful combination upon the unoffending passengers. I think the grimaces were given without charge, and only the music was expected to be paid for, but I am sure my coppers were given for the heroic efforts of that face to reach the sublimity of the music. The face was always about three and a half flat keys below the instrument, and the much abused instrument made no attempt to catch up with that wonderful voice, but plodded along with her “reglar steady” for all pieces. Those three organizations covered the whole baseball diamond in their progress, but they all got together at the home base, and while the worthy Mrs. Beggar collected the pennies, the crowd cheered the first warbler and called for the second. Each one had the pitch that belonged to the other fellow’s songs, but the crowd got it all anyway so what was the difference? Anyway they were the only beggars that offered a quid pro quo and the crowd forgave them much, even as they had sinned much against the musical profession in traveling on the high C’s without any chart.
Out of pure charity I took one of the Mrs. Beggar aside and very softly asked her if she did not think an ordinary three-cornered file would help her husband’s voice and also his throat. The word “throat” was my Waterloo. Lifting her coal black eyes to mine she looked the thanks she uttered as she said: “Lord, señor, a thousand thanks, that is the very thing, he has not had a square meal today.” When will people learn that everything intended for the throat is not to be eaten? Such gross ignorance discourages my good Samaritan impulse and seriously interferes with my work as a reformer. The same thing happened at a restaurant where the same dish of butter had kept guard on the table so long that it was being consumed by its own inactivity, and was making itself felt further and further from its base of operations. Out of pure charity for my fellow boarders, I heroically made a martyr of myself and relieved the old guard which “died but never surrendered,” so the other fellows might have a fresh dish, and what was the result? Bismillah! that eagle-eyed waiter reported that I just actually made my living off that brand of butter, and next meal the old guard had been replaced by a whole pound of the same vintage but more vigorous and loud. Such ignorance leads people to misinterpret my noble motives. Now, here I was trying to make good music for coming generations, by offering that old lady a file to rasp down the nightingale’s fog horn, and she thinks I am so entranced with the unearthly music that I want to show my appreciation by giving them a cubic meal. Alas this thankless world! It was ever thus.
I said they were the only beggars that paid for their alms, but I make one exception. Between Guadalajara and San Pedro a beggar has a gold mine. Not what you would call a gold mine, but it is one for him. He has a fortune in his knees, which got on the wrong side of his legs, and as the street-car stops to change mules he painfully hobbles on crutches to the car, makes his exhibit, collects the coppers and hobbles back to his seat to wait for the next car, and he never utters a word. He has what ordinary people call “a sure thing.” He always made me think of the tramp and the dog. The dog found the tramp in the hay-mow and growled. The tramp said: “Good doggie, good doggie,” and the dog wagged his tail but kept growling. The tramp said: “It may be all right, but I don’t know which end to believe.” So every time my beggar friend turned his face away from the car, his knees and feet seemed to try to come back, and I did not know which end to believe. This beggar question is too large and has made me wander away from my subject. I was talking about the women sousing their dirty hands into the pulque, but small matters like that do not count. The old saw is still in vogue, that we must all eat our peck of dirt before we die, and so we in Mexico just eat our peck and get the dreaded duty from our minds.
There are many more miles of desert and pastures where the cattle still feed upon sand, and then we come to the fortress of San Juan de Los Llanos. In the midst of the desert where it never rains, and where there is no green thing in sight, lies this huge fortress of St. John of the Plains. For four hundred years this has been the King’s highway from the gulf to the capital, and all the treasures of gold and silver to Europe, and of merchandise from Europe have had to pass along here in caravans of pack-animals and armed escorts. This road was a veritable Captain Kidd’s treasure-house to the hundreds of bandits that have swarmed through this country, so it is no more of a policy than necessity that the soldiers are here.
We are now nearing the rim of the plateau and pass through miles of rich mining country until we leave the state of Puebla and enter the state of Vera Cruz. We are a hundred miles from the sea and eight thousand feet above it on the backbone of the Cordilleras. Around us is white frost, and in four hours we shall be in perpetual summer. We are above the clouds and everything is invisible. The clouds envelop the train like a pall, and we are conscious of only one thing; we are plunging down the mountain with breaks down, and with the descent of one hundred and thirty-three feet to the mile. A rift in the clouds discloses a semi-tropical forest, and upon every tree are myriads of beautiful orchids of blue, red, scarlet, orange—every color and in the greatest profusion. A thousand feet below is a little town we are trying to reach. The train approaches it first on this side and then on that, and winds down the mountain in a kind of spiral, and at last stops at the station. Above us is the track we have just left, and if a rock was loosed from it, it would fall upon the roof of the train at the station. There is one place on the road where a stone dropped from a car window would hit the track at two separate levels. It is a journey one never wants to take twice by daylight. If you pass the dangers at night you save the nervous speculation as to what would happen if a wheel should break on the brink of a chasm a thousand feet deep, and a floating cloud conceals the nature of the rocks you would land upon in the awful depths below.
Every few hundred yards by the track are wooden crosses and stone cairns. I ask my neighbor: “Porque las cruces?” He devotedly crosses himself and mentions them as unfortunate meeting places of travelers and bandits, and after the meeting the traveler still remained. Every one who passes considers it his duty to add a stone to the cairn.
At the stations the half-clad natives, shivering in the chill mountain air, offer food and beautiful flowers for sale. Orange blossoms from the valley and a dozen other rare blossoms the foreigner has never seen, and the beautiful orchids with the roots done up in leaves are offered for a real, (12½ cents) which would cost five or six dollars at an American florist’s.
Down, down we go, through dark canons and over spider bridges and below the clouds. Now our wraps are uncomfortably warm and we lay them aside and open the windows. From every where comes the odors of rare tropical flowers and the iridescent rays of beautiful butterflies, and we are half down the mountain at Jalapa (Halapa). Jalapa is a city of fifteen thousand population, and was once the capital of Vera Cruz and has much to endear it to the tourist. As the train stops you enter a street-car drawn by six mules which will carry you to town on the hillside of Meniltepec. When you wish to come back to the train, the brakes are set and the car will bring you back itself, and the mules will be down after a while to draw it back. It is a regular toboggan affair, and you feel as if you were shooting the chutes, were it not for the heavy bumpers that would stop you were the brakes to give way. I think the Mexican style of carrying the babies slung over the back must have originated in Jalapa. If a nurse should undertake to roll a baby carriage, and while talking to a policeman should let the buggy get a start down any street, it would shoot the chute for Vera Cruz on an incline of thirty degrees.
Before the Inter-Oceanic Rail Road was completed the street-cars ran to Vera Cruz, seventy miles away, and all the company had to do was to mass their mules in Vera Cruz and their cars in Jalapa and start the cars on schedule time with enough brakemen to prevent a hot box. The streets are not quite as crooked as a corkscrew, and not quite as straight as a cow-trail when she is grazing, and starting from the top, each first floor window looks out upon its neighbor’s house-top. It rains here about eight days in the week. The town is four thousand feet above sea level, and just behind it is the Copre de Perote peak, thirteen thousand four hundred and three feet high, and plenty high to catch the rain clouds from the gulf. When they strike the jagged edge of this toboggan slide which holds Jalapa, they simply disgorge and go back for another load. They seem to be a very faithful, conscientious set of clouds that put in a good day’s work and never grumble about working over-time or the agitation of an eight hour system. I got tired carrying my umbrella. It would rain half an hour and sunshine half an hour till the next cloud got snagged on that mountain, and so between them there was no rest for my umbrella. I am always full of good motives and advice, and the same work a lawyer wants ten dollars for, I distribute with a lavish ha—mouth. Armed with my good intentions and my dripping umbrella, I called upon a member of the city council and suggested the idea of filing off the rough edges of the mountain so it would not snag the clouds and drench the people so often, but my words and good intentions were all wasted. Those citizens have been sliding down hill so long and been drawn up again by mules, they have no energy whatever, and would never climb that mountain till they got street-cars up there. And besides, if the cloud system was altered they would have to establish a different sewer-system, and that means work, and of course they would not.
These clouds have done one thing though, they have banished the thatch roof, and every house is built of stone and roofed with half-cylindrical brick tiles which project a full yard over the eaves. This constant drizzle has killed the usefulness of the old and tried friend—the almanac. You don’t have to ask when it will rain for you know it will rain in half an hour. Then it is no pleasure looking in the almanac to see when the first frost will fall so we can gather chestnuts or pecans, because frost never comes, and fall never comes, and winter never comes, but it just stays one eternal spring. The trees are always green and if a leaf falls another grows in its place, and if you pluck an orange another blossom springs out immediately, and if you cut a bunch of bananas, a new shoot starts up for another stem, and as fast as you pick the coffee berry, a perfect shower of snow white blossoms appear.
There is absolutely no season. Four crops of corn can be grown, allowing ninety days to each crop. Sugar and coffee and tobacco are the main crops. The state of Vera Cruz borders the gulf for five hundred miles with an average width of seventy-five, and in all that territory, the soil does nothing but push things out. The Indian takes a sharp stick and makes a hole in the ground and drops a grain of corn, covering it with his foot, and ninety days afterwards he gathers his crop, and that is absolutely all he does in the way of labor. A banana stem will spring up eight or ten inches in diameter with several bunches of bananas and eighty to the bunch. He gathers them and knocks the stalk down and presto! another springs from the roots, and this he does perpetually.
The coffee plant is the most beautiful plant in this region, and bears till the slender branches touch the ground. The fruit is like our cherries or plums, and the natives eat it as we do cherries, and only the seed is sold for drinking. All around Jalapa in the forest grows the vanilla vine so dear to the cake and ice-cream fraternity. The vine grows all over the forest like grape vines, and is not cultivated. The flowers are greenish yellow with spots of white, and the pods grow in pairs like snap-beans, six inches long and as large as your finger. They are first green and then yellow, and when fully ripe are brown. The pods are dried in the sun and then touched up with palm oil to make them shine. The Indians make a good living by gathering the pods and selling them in Jalapa, which is the chief market for vanilla. They also gather from these woods sarsaparilla, which has its home here. All druggists keep on their shelves a drug called Jalap, which grows here and gets its name from the old town of Jalapa. With pine-apples and plantains and limes and apricots and pomegranates and bread fruit and sugar and coffee and tobacco all growing at their doors, what wonder is it that the people all say, “Jalapa is a bit of heaven dropped down to earth.” All they need is a tree to grow hammocks ready-made and swinging, and the millennium has come. It is situated near the foot of the volcano of Orizaba, the second highest mountain in America outside of Alaska, and the rich hills and valleys are covered with vast heaps of volcanic tufa and ashes which are natural fertilizers.
The American army on its march from Vera Cruz stopped here to shoot the chutes—and the natives—and exchange hospitality with them. The natives have a very vivid recollection of that visit, and on the principal street stands a tall granite monument with this inscription:
“SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE NATION’S HEROES
WHO DIED IN DEFENSE OF THEIR COUNTRY
AGAINST THE AMERICAN INVASION IN 1847.”
The thing is so absolutely true and incisive that most Americans who read it like to quietly slip off to another street where there is no grim accuser. Every time he looks dispassionately back at that war he feels like the big bully who slugged the little boy in the street just because the boy had spunk enough to fight back, and then took all his apples. California, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona must always feel like blood money to the American people, as they were taken from Mexico to extend slave territory.
Santa Anna was born in this town, and the reckless traveling up and down these toboggan streets must have given him his dare-devil spirit which marked every stage of his eventful life.
Jalapa is the summer resort of the moneyed people of Vera Cruz. Every May when the Yellow Fever awakes from his sleep in Vera Cruz, the brave citizens in a body back up the hill to Jalapa and shake their fists at him and dare him to cross the line, and the fever does not dare. They would simply pull a plug out of one of their special clouds and flood him back to the sea. There must have always been a city here: behind the present city are stone pyramids fifty feet high, and countless foundations of stone walls laid in cement. There are oak trees four feet in diameter growing through pavements laid in hewn stone and cement. The architecture is different from that of the Aztec, and there is neither language nor tradition as to who built these ancient ruins. They lie towards the coast between Jalapa and Orizaba.
Tell it not in Gath, but they do say that the most beautiful women in Mexico live in Jalapa. “Bewitching, alluring are the women of Jalapa,” is what the natives mean when they say: “Las Jalapenas son halaguenas.” Perhaps this accounts for the saying that Jalapa is a part of paradise let down to earth. The prevailing type of beauty here is the blonde with blue eyes and brown hair, while elsewhere it is the brunette with black eyes and hair. After one has seen las Jalapenas halaguenas, the old churches and the musty paintings lose their interest. The old town shows its age probably more than any other in Mexico, and if these old stones could speak they might tell us of the building of Cholula. Whatever is old in Mexico is still older in Jalapa. Excursions to Coatepec and Jelotepec, about six miles away, may be made on horse-cars through tropical forests and coffee groves, and then we continue our tobogganing to Vera Cruz. On the down slide we pass Cerro Gordo, where General Scott defeated Santa Anna, April 18, 1847. He must have defeated the town too, for it is not there. A few mud huts are patriotic enough to remain and continue the name, for which they deserve much credit. Perhaps they are guarding the place to preserve Santa Anna’s wooden leg which was lost here in battle. They have not yet learned that it is in Washington City.
We finally stow away our thermometer to prevent its melting and running away. They say that straight down in the ground underneath Vera Cruz to an indefinite depth it is really hotter than Vera Cruz. Perhaps. Vera Cruz is a good place to stay away from. From May to October it is the summer residence of his majesty El Vomito Negro, a black vomit, familiarly known as Yellow Fever. This is not only his summer residence, but his permanent home, but during the winter months he is “not at home;” but May 1st., on house-cleaning day, his residence is open to all comers, be they light-weight, middle-class or sluggers. He gives all odds and guarantees a knockout in the first round or forfeit the championship.
During 1868-4 the French army planted four thousand soldiers in a little cemetery which they facetiously called “Le Jardin d’Acclimation.” The Mexicans call it “La Ciudad de los Muertos,” the City of the Dead. The population of Vera Cruz in 1869 was 13,492 and the number of deaths for the ten years ending in 1879 was 12,219. The average duration of life by these figures was eleven years! The annual deathrate is ninety per thousand population, while in the United States it is 22.28 per thousand. The safest way to see the city in the summer is to go in on the train, go out to the old castle of San Juan d’Ulloa about a mile out in the harbor, climb to the light house and take a good look, then get on the same train and get up and out, or rather out and up. The town covers about sixty acres and has no suburbs but sand and water. An avenue of palms on the main street is the principal feature. If you stay till night you will see the raven hair of the Mexican ladies sparkling with gems, but they are only fireflies or “lighting bugs.” Three or four of these tropical fireflies placed under a tumbler will give light enough to read by. They have a natural hook on their bodies, so they are fastened in the hair by this hook without pain to themselves. Our American cities are troubled about their street-cleaning department; but Vera Cruz has a street-cleaning commission that is a commission. Here they work without salary and only ask bed and board. The only other bonus they ask is that the city fine any person five dollars for killing any member of the commission; which seemed only reasonable, so the city gladly consented, and now the agreement is entirely satisfactory to employer and employee.
The city council, on the city records, calls these commissioners Zopilotes, but ordinary people just call them turkey-buzzards.$1‘Their contract calls for bed and board—or tree. They find their board in the garbage piles and refuse heaps of the streets, and their bed on the church steeples and on the city hall and on your gate post or any other soft place where it is comfortable to rest after a hard day’s work. The city has not yet appointed a commission to clean up behind the commissioners, and if I should suggest the thing to them they would misunderstand my ideas of reform, so I will leave them to their fate and the heavy death roll which they will still charge to El Vomito and exonerate the Zopilotes. Owing to an oversight in drawing up the contract, no mention was made of nesting-places for the commissioners, and so they had to make other arrangements elsewhere, but where it is the deponent sayeth not.
Their day’s work was done and we saw that all the resorters had resorted to their resorts, so we resorted to the train, unpacked our thermometer and hied us away. Vera Cruz has had a monopoly of the shipping business, but has a rival now in Tampico. When you go to Tampico, you must tar and grease your hands, face and neck, then wear a pair of leather gloves and muzzle your face with wire netting. You may keep the insects off but you will smell like a barrel of train oil. The entomologists must have got tired classifying insects and dumped all the remnants at Tampico. One sociable little fellow has a habit of crawling under your toe-nail while you sleep and digging a hole till he is out of sight and then going to sleep. He has no special reason for this except to make you cut off your toe to get him out or to make you sleep in your boots. The monkeys and parrots are very sociable too, but familiarity breeds contempt. If I must associate with monkeys I prefer those with two legs so when I abuse them they can understand my wrath.
For description of Tampico see Encyclopædia Britannica. Besides the Inter-Oceanic, there is another railroad entering Vera Cruz, the British road that was thirty-five years in building and cost forty million dollars. This road leaves the plateau at Boca del Monte (mouth of the mountain) eight thousand feet above the sea, and falls four thousand feet in passing over the first twenty-five miles of circuitous track, and it falls twenty-five hundred perpendicular feet in the first twelve miles, or two hundred and eighty feet to the mile. That tired, sinking feeling is very, very present when you start down. A double engine called the “Farlie,” having two sets of driving machinery and the boiler in the center, pulls this train, and when it starts up hill it has to stop every ten miles to rest. The Britishers who built that road had faith and plenty of it. Below Orizaba, the road crosses a gorge a thousand feet deep, and was blasted from the solid rock. To do so, workmen were suspended by ropes over the cliff, and worked for hours with hammer and chisel. One piece of track clinging to the wall is not over ten rods long and required seven years to build. So costly was this road that when it was first opened in 1873 first class freight rates from Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, two hundred and sixty-three miles away, were $76 a ton on freight trains and $97.77 on passenger trains.
Since Tampico is now a rival port freight is only $45 a ton and still the road hardly pays for its outlay. We soon enter the beautiful valley of La Joya (the Gem) and down, down below the clouds we pass through evergreen foliage of ferns and flowers that surpass anything in beauty ever attempted by brush and canvas; mammoth ferns and tangled vanilla vines and other parasitic vines that coil around the giant trees and strangle them to death, and then feed upon the remains. Tropical birds of all colors and migratory birds from other lands are here without number. It is here the Indian hunter pursues his vocation of killing to make the wonderful featherwork, so salable in the capital, and just here we enter the beautiful city of Orizaba, the capital of Vera Cruz.
Behind the city is the snow-capped volcano of Orizaba, eighteen thousand three hundred and fourteen feet above the sea, three miles and a half high. Violent eruptions took place here in 1545-6 but it has been on a strike ever since. Being the second highest mountain in North America, perhaps it is putting on airs. At any rate it is chilly enough now and the melting snows form innumerable cascades and waterfalls; and so the Chicmec Indians called the volcano “Ahauializapan” or “Joy in the waters,” but the Spaniards had neglected their pronunciation in their early youth and this was their Shibboleth, so they called it Orizaba and let it go at that. Earthquakes have always been a specialty with Orizaba, and the largest church has had its steeples thrown down three times, and many others have a rakish, corkscrew perpendicular, which gives the impression that they have been on a jag or are trying to imitate the leaning tower of Pisa. A river runs through the town, and runs cotton and sugar and flour mills. Orizaba is exactly of the same altitude as Jalapa and what was said of the richness and fertility of that burg is true of Orizaba. Volcanic ash is the fertilizer which needs only moisture, which is abundant. The streets are paved with lava, and there are three schools for girls and two for boys. If you like mountain climbing, plenty of blankets, two days’ provisions—and some silver—will take you to the crater of Orizaba, if your lungs can stand the rarified air.
I also ascended Orizaba, and my proxy said he could almost see into the land of the almighty dollar, the vision was so grand. I felt happy. Delightful excursions through the pretty gardens to Yngenio, the lakes and mills of Nogales, to the innumerable cascades of Rincon Grande, Tuxpango, El Bario Nuevo and Santa Ana. On the way to these, the orchids and other floral beauties just beg of you to pluck them and thus make room for their companions. Down the mountain we glide with brakes set and enter the steel laces of the spider bridge across the Metlac and hold our breath to lighten our weight to the other side. We feel much better after we are over, and just beyond in the tropical vale of Seco is Cordova, on the border of the tierra caliente and tierra templada. We are in the same belt as Jalapa and Orizaba, therefore in the heart of the coffee plantations. The principal food of the lower-class is bananas. The banana is an annual that grows about ten feet high and about a foot in diameter before the bud appears, and then from the top springs a purple bud eight or nine inches long, shaped like a large acorn. This cone hangs from a long stem upon which a leaf unfolds, displaying a large cluster of young fruit. As soon as these have set, the leaf drops off and another unfolds, exposing another young brood of buds. When these set, the process is repeated until there are nine or ten circles of young bananas, and when complete the bunch has nearly a hundred bananas, and the stalk never has to be replanted. It requires less attention and produces more than any plant known.
If the coffee plant was allowed to grow with its own sweet will, it would become a tree thirty feet high, but then the berry would be hard to gather, so it is topped and pruned so as to spread laterally. The leaf is a shining evergreen, the flower is a snowy white star with the odor of jassamines, and the fruit is a bright red, turning to purple when ripe. The fruit looks much like a cherry and tastes as well, but this is not for what it is cultivated. Within the berry are two kernels or seeds with their flat sides adjoining, and enclosed in a thin pericarp. The fruit is spread in the sun to dry, and the outer surface is shriveled to a pulp, when it is removed by the hand. The pericarp or thin husk still remains, and this is removed by being broken between rollers and winnowed, and the coffee berry is ready for market. It must be shipped alone as it will absorb any and all odors with which it comes in contact, and a cup of coffee with a Limburger aroma is not a desired innovation. The Mexican prides himself on the superiority of his coffee bean, and all travelers praise the article as drunk a la Mexicana.
A president of France once visited a village hostelry, and asked the woman in charge to bring him all the chicory she had in the house. After she had proudly delivered all her chicory to him he said: “And now madam, I will thank you for a cup of good coffee.” The Mexican is not above deception, however. Parrots grow here by the million and paroquets by the billion, and in nearly all colors of the rainbow, but only the ones with the yellow head will ever learn to talk, and no color of paroquets will do more than chatter. But what is that small thing to a Mexican? He simply gets a number of parrots and a pot of yellow ochre, and in three shakes of a sheep’s tail he has a cage full of yellow-head parrots worth five dollars each before they learn to talk. They next spot the American “greenies” with money to burn, and the rest, is it not written in the book of a retributive Nemesis who recorded those blue streaks of profanity when that parrot got its first bath? Yea, verily.
“In ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.”
Bret Harte may come down here with his mandolin and pick that same tune in Spanish and he will receive an encore.
The Mexican will sell you “antiquias” from a pyramid that he made last month, and he will sell you a coffee-wood walking stick that was made from an old railroad crosstie and loaded with lead, and he will sell you a blanket he stole from you last night, but when you call for coffee you get the real article, and it is not prepared in either iron or tinned vessels, but unglazed pottery. They fill your cup half full of coffee and half full of milk and pass you the sugar, and when you have done, like Oliver Twist, you call for more.
CATHEDRAL GUADALAJARA.