Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/46

44 We shall remember Irapuato with love and delight, when the memory of perhaps better places has faded, because there, one hot, dusty midsummer afternoon of March, we bought Indian baskets of woven grass full of luscious strawberries, and reached refreshment and coolness through the base medium of dos reales, vulgarly known as a quarter. The state of business enterprise in the country may be gauged from the fact, that while the little town and its surrounding district overflow with this delicious fruit, and are within ten or twelve hours' distance of Mexico, it never has entered any original mind to establish connection between the two points, and bring the country product into the city market. So that while strawberries go begging for customers at Irapuato, customers go begging for strawberries in the capital, and neither finds what it wants. The guide-books speak of Queretaro as having forty-six churches. If you should chance to be there on Sunday morning, you will think it has at least a hundred and forty-six; that every church has three towers, every tower three bells, and that every bell is cracked. It would be beyond human endurance elsewhere, but the lighter air of this