Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/309

 Rh not a table of any sort to serve two travellers a supper upon?"

"Pos bien," said the illiterate host, both pleased and flustered, scratching his head. "Tables? Yes, tables, now, be sure. All that you say is very true, but there is a great scarcity of carpenters in this part of the country. Si, escasen muncho (Yes, they are mighty scarce), I can tell you."

Two days after this we came down to Acapulco. It is a town for the most part of straggling huts, with a straggling thirty-five hundred of people. It has no vestiges of its antiquity but an old Spanish fort, after the order of Morro Castle, dismantled by Maximilian's French on their abandonment of the place.

Near the fort lay a couple of rusted rails in position on a bit of washed-out embankment, the beginning of a rail-road inaugurated here with a flourish on the 5th of May, 1881. Having passed over the line, one would judge that it might be much more than dread of American aggressions which would prevent its speedy completion.

There was no small pleasure in discovering at last, like another Balboa, the Pacific Ocean, in boarding the fine steamer of the Pacific Mail Company, the City of Grenada, which had come her long jaunt from Panama northward, and re-establishing connection with the outer world.

With this, too, began an acquaintance with the western ports of Mexico. One of the semi-monthly steamers, rightly chosen, each month puts into them all. An idea of the country can thus be got which would not be possible otherwise without much greater fatigue and expense, but it is not at all as favorable as that presented by the interior.