Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/100

98 standing in a shallow pool, rested like a fine statue-like figure against the sky; the drooping scarlet flowers of a wilderness of pepper-trees stretched away on either side; and far on the hill-side, a silent village, its pale clay walls shining behind adobe hedges, lifted its ruined church-tower amid a sombre grove of cypress. Enormous heaps of corn-stalks for fodder, and grain gathered into piles as large as a New-England barn, showed how the resources of the country are being husbanded to prevent a repetition of the famine which devasted its homes a few years ago. Still farther on begins the winding, limpid river, which runs between its high clay banks, down the different terraces of table-lands in this lovely region, and makes the valley of Toluca, with its two or three crops a year, one of the most fertile and valuable in all Mexico.

At Flor de Maria, on the shady side of the station platform, we found the most primitive form of industry we had yet encountered. Indian women were spinning yarn from the wool of the black sheep of that region, by means of a short wooden rod like a thick knitting-needle, with a little button slipped above the tip to keep the thread