Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/545

 Rh rapid spread of the monastic orders which founded them. He gives us many of their quaint traditions and humors. His touch in all these matters is sympathetic and literary; indeed, it often seems a pity that such work should have had to take the merely guide-book form.

A variety of small books on the country have been issued in the mean time, Mexico being now in about the condition of Europe at the date of the first steamers, when every voyager felt called upon to give his impressions in print. It can hardly be truthfully said that any of these travellers has gone further or fared much better or worse than myself. Brocklehurst's "Mexico To-Day," elaborately illustrated with colored plates, is the most costly volume, and has had much vogue in England. I saw a great deal of this work in its incipiency, the amiable author and I being very much in company in our journeys.

Mr. Warner complained, the other day, on first reaching Mexico, that the volcanoes did not dominate the city as he had expected. Brocklehurst and I drew this scene together, and he lifted his volcanoes several thousand feet above their true height, to be the more imposing. It was a standing rule he had received from his drawing-master, he said, with a laugh of gay good-humor, always to do that with mountains. "You must make all those things as they ought to be, not as they are," he concluded; and if Mr. Warner had seen the imposing sugar-loaf peaks in Brocklehurst's plate, this conclusion may have accounted for his disappointment.

The magazines are devoting an attention to the subject, of which Mrs. Foote's articles in the Century, with her faithful drawings, giving a very attractive picture of Michoacan, are perhaps the best example. The St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston papers contain much intelligent opinion on the country, owing, no doubt, to the large increase