Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/534

 514 envy him with a sort of retrospective jealousy in looking on at his happier lot. Without taking into account the through line at all, but only going by sea as formerly, you can contrive, by a few simple connections, to cover in a brief time and at a small expense what would once have meant a costly journey of months. Leaving the city of Mexico by the National—fancy passing by railway little Rio Hondo and San Bartolito and San Francisquito, to which we so painfully wended with our guards and our mule-loads of silver, telling robber stories by the way!—leaving by the National you reach Toluca, Acambaro, Morelia, and Patzcuaro, in fertile, smiling Michoacan. At Patzcuaro you take a turn on the lovely lake in a new American steamboat. Return to Acambaro, turn north to Celaya, connect there with the Mexican Central, and return to town through Queretaro, San Juan del Rio, Tula, with its Toltec ruins, and Huehuetoca, with the great drainage cut of Nochistongo. Take the short excursions around the Capital, the longer ones to Amecameca, and down into Tierra Caliente at Cnautla, and again to charming Cuernavaca by diligencia, for an example of that kind of travelling. With all this, and the usual sights to be seen along the line from Vera Cruz, you have had variety of climates, races, costumes; you have had agriculture, mines, aboriginal antiquities, volcanoes, Spanish architecture, everything, in short, most interesting and characteristic in Mexico.

In the same way there are the jaunts to be made downward from our southern frontier. How easily may a tourist on the Southern Pacific road run down to Guaymas, or a day or two on the National, from Laredo, or on the Central, from El Paso, or joining the two latter, by stage-coach from Saltillo, with its bold and lovely scenery and historic associations of the Mexican War, make the