Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/408

 buying a packet of "nougat." I have forgotten the name of that village in Old Spain where fifty women always fly at you and force you to buy embroidered garters. A similar assault, though a silent one, is made on you at Amosoque.

But our mules are hackled to, again, and the mayoral has filled his jacket pocket with a fresh supply of pebbles to fling at their ears if they are lazy. Bump, bump, thud, thud, up the middle and down again. We are again travelling on the hard road. This kind of thing has been going on for many days; and this kind of village we have halted at over and over again. Ojo de Agua was very like Nopaluca; Nopaluca was very like Acagete; and all these were very like Amosoque. We are out of the dark defiles of the Cumbres—horrifying mountain passes, grey, jagged, arid, cataractless; no sierra caliente has greeted our eyesight since we left Orizaba. The open has been mainly desert, intolerable dust and caked baked clod producing nothing but the nopal and the maguey, the prickly pear and the cactus. The former is picturesque enough, and, besides, it yields the juice, which, fermented, the Indians and half castes call pulque, and on which they get swinishly intoxicated. An adult maguey is very stately to look upon; but goodness keep all nervous ladies and people given to dreaming dreams, and young children, from the sight of the Mexican prickly pear. The plant assumes the most hideously grotesque forms. It is twisted, and bent, and gnarled like metal scroll work which some mad giant has crumpled up in his fingers, in a rage. It is a tangle of knotty zigzags interspersed with the prickly fruit, which can be compared to nothing buy the flattened faces of so many demon dwarfs, green with bile and thickly sown with bristles. The prickly pear, to me, is Bogey.

Let me see, where was it, between Orizaba and this evil place of Amosoque, bristling with spurs and scoundrels, that we picked up the Canonigo. Ah! I remember, it was at Sant' Augustin del Palmar. We reached Sant' Augustin at about two o'clock in the afternoon, just as the diligencia from Mexico had drawn up at the door of the principal fonda, and precisely in time for the diligence dinner. Now I would have you to understand that the chief dish at the coach dinner in all regions Iberian, both on the hither and thither side of the Atlantic, and even beyond the Isthmus and under the southern cross, is the : print it in capitals, for it is a grand dish; and that the puchero is the only thing in Old or New Spain concerning which tolerable punctuality is observed. You have heard, no doubt, of the olla-podrida as the "national" dish of Spain; but, so far as my experience goes, it is a culinary preparation which, like the rich uncle in a comedy, is more talked about than seen. While I was in Mexico city my eye lighted one day on a placard in the window of a "bodegon" or eating-house, in the Calle del Espiritu Santo, setting forth that on the ensuing Thursday at noon "una arrogante olla" would be ready for the consumption of cavaliers. I saw this announcement on Monday morning, and for three days I remained on tenter hooks expecting to partake of this arrogant olla-podrida. I concealed my intention from my hospitable host. I was determined to do something independent. I had travelled long in search of beef; there might be, in the arrogant olla, a bovine element; and the efforts of long years might be crowned at last with success. I went on Thursday; but the vinegar of disappointment came to dash my oil. "Hoy, no," said the keeper of the bodegon, "mañana se abra." There was to be no arrogant olla that day, there would be the next. Mañana means to-morrow; and to-morrow to a Spaniard means the Greek Kalends. I have never tasted an olla, arrogant or submissive.

But of the puchero I preserve the pleasantest remembrances. There is beef in it; boiled beef: the French bouilli, in fact. There is bacon. There are garbanzos (broad beans), and charming little black-puddings, and cabbage, and delicate morsels of fried banana. It is very wholesome and very filling; and there is no use in your complaining that an odour of garlic pervades it, because the room and the tablecloth and your next neighbour are all equally redolent of the omnipresent "ajo." The puchero (poured from its pipkin) is in a very big platter, and what you have to do is to watch carefully for the platter as it is passed from hand to hand, to take care that it is not diverted from