Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/40

38 ready to call to prayer from the gallery of the mosque, and the wandering venders crying through the narrow lanes, "First blush of the hillsides, oh, strawberries!" Out on the haciendas the laborers draw water from shallow wells by means of a long pole balanced across two high-forked sticks, and furnished with a bucket at one end. Poured into the narrow furrows which divide all the land into garden-beds, the water flows at will wherever irrigation is required. The farmer ploughs with a primitive implement that is little more than a sharply pointed stick, fastened to the horns of his oxen by an equally primitive arrangement of ropes. The great lumbering wagons, whether made of wood or of closely joined stems of cactus, roll on solid, cumbrous wheels made from a single round of a tree-trunk, and fashioned into shape by hard labor. The bronze-skinned, bare-legged beggar dozing against some crumbling corner of a white adobe wall; the mule-teams with jingling bells, clattering harness, and shouting driver; the horsemen dashing across the glaring plains, swarth and picturesque in their brilliant riding-scarfs, — what is there to remind us of the staid, sober American life, as ugly as it is comfortable?